Change is happening all around us, all the time. Whether it’s a change you have chosen or one being flung at you, change is hard. I have led change initiatives for years and even been called a “change agent” but every time Apple updates my iPhone I get grumpy having to learn a new way to do something I could do effortlessly yesterday. We are but human!
Understanding more about the psychology behind change has helped me lead teams through times of great change but has also helped me personally. Especially now in the midst of this transformation from corporate exec to student, I am trying to outsmart my brain’s natural proclivities to respond dramatically to change.
In this post I will share a helpful framework and some of my favorite change psychology.
Disclaimer: Having worked in marketing services, I am as far from an academic researcher as you can get. I am impatient, favor a PowerPoint slide over a paper, and love a quick summary with real-world examples. If you prefer properly cited research papers or going deeper on any of these topics, please ask your favorite LLM. I am going to summarize and eventually will post little videos for each. Choose your own adventure.
Bridges Transition Model
William Bridges was an organizational consulting practitioner with decades of experience who published his model in “Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes” in 1980. It is widely used in the change management field and the basic premises are:
“Change” and “Transition” are not the same thing
Change is the external and situational - Like me leaving my job as a Chief Transformation Officer or that iPhone update.
Transition is the internal and psychological - The process of letting go of the old and becoming proficient in the new.
Transition has three overlapping phases:
Ending - The loss of what was (i.e. identity, competence, the familiar) needs to be acknowledged in this phase. Once acknowledged it must be grieved before anything new has a chance of taking hold.
Neutral Zone - The messy middle. This uncomfortable limbo zone where the old way of doing something is gone but the new way is not yet clear, trusted or learned. This phase is when productivity dips, anxiety often rises, but this is also where genuine creativity and reinvention happen if it isn’t rushed.
New Beginning - The magical point where you have accepted the new process, acquired the needed competency or accepted a new reality and are functioning within it.
In my iPhone example the Ending is me grumpily noting, processing and accepting that I can no longer edit my photos the way I used to before the darn update. The Neutral zone is when I fumble around discovering the new way to achieve the same (or hopefully better) result and getting proficient. The New Beginning is when I am editing those photos like a pro again without having to think about it or get frustrated.
I like Bridges’ simple framework because it serves as a reminder that we need to first allow a proper ending before we speed toward the new. It’s also ok, in fact wonderful, to allow yourself some trial and error time in the Neutral Zone. Outsmarting my own impatience and anxiety by reframing this phase as “productive discovery” helps me remain more comfortable and patient.
Identity Threat
Let’s start with this as it’s normally the first to hit in the “Ending” phase. “Who am I if I am no longer____ (X title, the expert on Y, able to accomplish Z)__?”
Swann, Johnson and Bosson’s 2009 research on Identity Threat focuses on how people respond when their sense of self is validated or contradicted by social feedback and organizational contexts. People don’t just do X job, they see themselves as being that job. For example, at a dinner party when asked about myself I start with my job because that’s how (until recently) I spent the majority of my day. Because that role is such a part of my identity any change to it feels like a personal threat. When Apple updates my iPhone I know it’s not personal but I do catch myself sounding like my 80 year old father saying “Why do they keep doing this to me?”. We feel stupid not being able to do something that was simple yesterday. That feeling is very personal and a threat to how we see ourselves. If the change does not affirm our identity, resistance hardens.
Loss Aversion
This comes from Kahneman and Tversky’s 1979 work on Prospect Theory. They prove that people don’t evaluate outcomes objectively. They evaluate against a reference point, and weight losses more heavily than gains. So imagine that you are granted an extra vacation day. That’s great, you like vacation. But if instead your company takes away an existing vacation day people will mutiny. Either way its still one vacation day but losing something you already had feels far more dramatic (2x more intense). The Ending phase, the change itself, always comes with a loss. Even if it was your choice, or something positive like a job promotion you have been working toward. Change means letting go of something. The tip here is to simply remember that your brain will want to make this more dramatic, so don’t let it. Keep the loss in perspective. If you are leading a team through a change, be really clear about what they are loosing and gaining. You will not be able to fill the void because losses feel immediate and future gains feel too abstract. But clarity and clear communication will focus the drama and anxiety instead of letting it run amuck.
Threat Response
Blascovich & Tomaka’s Challenge/Threat Appraisal Model published in 1996 discovered that ambiguity about the future triggers anxiety and defensive behavior. The vast majority of people are super freaked out by change because our brains tell us that unknown, ambiguous things are scary and unsafe. So every change, even iPhone updates, create anxiety that is often disproportionate to the reality of the situation.
Here again, just knowing your brain’s programming can help you outsmart it. Remind yourself that you are fine, safe, have been through worse, and will be ok.
When leading a team through change, it’s the same advice as above, be specific about what is changing and what is coming next. Spell out as much of the future as you can, in as much detail as possible. You will be reducing the noise of the unknown and thus reducing threat perception.
Cognitive Dissonance
Leon Festinger’s 1957, “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance”, proposed that people hold multiple cognitions (beliefs, attitudes, knowledge) about their own behavior and are motivated to keep them consistent with one another. So when they conflict the person feels really uncomfortable and wants to quickly resolve the dissonance. The key finding was that people typically resolve dissonance via whichever route requires the least self-threat, which is usually rationalizing away the new information, discrediting its source, or minimizing its importance, rather than updating their self-concept or admitting the old way was flawed. Their brains are clinging to the idea they are most comfortable with, like someone ignoring evidence that their spouse is cheating because it conflicts with their belief in their happy marriage.
If you feel yourself getting defensive when receiving information, its a great signal to pause and fight the natural tendency to rationalize the feedback away. Allow yourself to critically examine it with an open mind.
From a team perspective, how you communicate the change is really important. For example, if you are automating a process, the team who was doing it manually will immediately assume your new solution could not possibly work. The dissonance is created when they think their experience is no longer needed and they will resist. But if you build it with them, utilizing their experience and knowledge of all the edge cases and scenarios, the solution will fit within their cognitions and you will get less resistance.
Self-Efficacy
Albert Bandura’s research in the late 1970s proposed that a person’s belief in their own ability/capability to achieve a specific goal is one of the strongest predictors of whether they initiate a behavior, how much effort they invest, and how long they persist when it gets hard. All of this is unrelated to their actual skill level. He identified four sources that build or erode self-efficacy:
Mastery Experiences - having actually succeeded at something similar before
Vicarious Experience - watching someone similar to you succeed
Verbal Persuasion - being cheered on by others
The person’s physiological or emotional state - how calm or anxious you feel as you start
This is why it is really hard to motivate someone who is convinced they will fail. To help yourselves and your teams through change you can remind everyone of a similar situation when they succeeded. Draw parallels. With a technology rollout, we always shine a spotlight on early adopters to create the vicarious experience. Show it can be done and cheer them on to try. Mitigating the psychological/emotional state is what I find hardest because it’s been non-stop change for years in most organizations and folks are worn out. This is the least important of the four but still needed. On a personal level, knowing you are approaching change, do your best to energize and recharge yourself and use tools like meditation, breath work and exercise to temper anxiety. A two minute breathing exercise can reset your physiology. Let me know if some examples would be helpful.
Awareness of these ways in which we are wired, and how to work with or mitigate them, can help you both personally and professionally navigate change with less anxiety, more control and comfort, and a lot more productivity.
Don’t just survive change, thrive through it!