Upheavals

Understanding the five threats

Here’s some great insights for anyone involved in change programmes of any kind. According to this article in Reuters, the key to successfully transforming organisations lies in better understanding what people feel threatened by.

A key insight from a guy called David Rock is that “People are not rational, they are social”. According to him, what we’re told is not the fundamental driver for acceptance. The key issue is that we are intuitively programmed to respond positively to social rewards, and are instinctually committed to minimising social threats.

Perceived threats to any or all of five key areas will cause us to act defensively towards an event or an idea. Those areas are: status; certainty; autonomy; relatedness; and fairness. Threats in any of these areas cause us to close off the energy being passed through our prefrontal cortex, the home of conscious thinking in the bank. Productivity falls, and so does job satisfaction.

Which is pretty radical when you think about it, because most change programmes I’ve been involved with actively attack all five of those concerns almost without thinking.

And that’s just the point. People haven’t thought about it. So - if you’re driving through a change programme right now, what can you do to make sure that the messages you’re circulating address those five key areas of concern positively? Or at least as positively as possible.

That’s not a reason to just spin yarns. They won’t help at all. But it’s five very good reasons to behave with sensitivity and grace.

POSTED: Wednesday, 4 November 2009

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