I have seen lots of interesting blogs in the last two weeks; top five things to contemplate for the coming year, ways to develop and improve, self-care and so on. The umbrella that unites many of these things for me is ‘change.’ It made me consider how we think about organisational change and I wanted to do some quick myth-busting with the intention it might bring some hope as you consider your change projects for the year.
In 1993 ‘Reengineering the Corporation.’ was published by Michael Hammer and James Champy, and it contained an unfortunate paragraph:
Our unscientific estimate is that as many as 50 percent to 70 percent of the organizations that undertake a re-engineering effort do not achieve the dramatic results they intended.
Regrettably, this fateful statement stuck and over the years it has embedded itself in the psyche of organisational change. Received wisdom has become that 70% of organisational change initiatives fail. If you’ve never come across this view before that’s probably a good thing and feel free to ignore it now!
I wanted to raise this at the beginning of 2021 as we all face yet more change on a variety of fronts, because it highlights our tendency to negativity bias. It’s a bit like the often repeated view that change is hard. If you link that to the view that most change efforts fail we might as well give up altogether! Don’t get me wrong change is hard work and can take huge amounts of effort but a negative outcome is not a given.
Various studies (Ito et al., 1998, Cacioppo et al., 2014, Rozin and Royzman, 2001) have found that we tend to believe failure is a more likely outcome than success. This is something I see regularly in teams who are used to talking about what goes wrong but struggle to stay on topic when asked what has worked well. However positively the discussion starts it tends to slip easily into the negative.
If we go into a change initiative with a mindset that failure is more likely than success, chances are that it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The slightest waiver off track will be seen as confirmatory evidence that failure looms.
- The next time you and/or your team are talking about change reflect on how it is being described. What words are used? What emotions are expressed? What previous experience is brought to bear?
- The next time someone says change is hard think about how you might you describe it differently.
The best thing to explain it, is to do it. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
I’ve known a great many problems in my life, and most of them never happened. Anonymous
References
CACIOPPO, J. T., CACIOPPO, S. & GOLLAN, J. K. 2014. The negativity bias: Conceptualization, quantification, and individual differences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37, 309-310.
ITO, T. A., LARSEN, J. T., SMITH, N. K. & CACIOPPO, J. T. 1998. Negative information weighs more heavily on the brain: The negativity bias in evaluative categorizations. Journal of personality and social psychology, 75, 887-900.
ROZIN, P. & ROYZMAN, E. B. 2001. Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion. Personality and social psychology review, 5, 296-320.