Pimp Your Work - Improving Your Work Day Efficiency

Change - Why it’s Tough

by Scot Herrick on October 4th, 2006

Half of publishing –and blogs — talk about Change. Did you notice that? This is a new model, this is how we’re going to change, and this is the Next Big Thing.

Did you also notice how hard it is to actually change? You know…execute the Next Big Thing so it really happens. The literature — and your own experience — tell you that most change doesn’t happen. The strategy isn’t executed and it fails.

There are reasons for that. Reasons I didn’t know about and that make some sense.

You see, I read far and wide. Some would say “far and weird” and I wouldn’t disagree with them.

Most of the literature out there is oriented at people with “C” in their title. Like CIO, for instance.

But with patience and perception, you can gain insights, in spite of the titles.

CIO Magazine points out that there should be no logical reason for resisting a change when everyone agrees with the change, but people resist anyway.

The reasons are scientific:

The logical area for change resides in the “prefrontal cortex” and the automatic pilot area that runs us after the change is final is in the “basal ganglia”.

The prefrontal cortex is like RAM and runs into limits of comprehension - it requires energy and thought to work out of this area of the brain.

The basal ganglia is the hard drive of the brain where if you need an action, you call up the answer and run with it.

The problem is that it takes forever to write new behavior to the brain’s hard drive. And change doesn’t take place until it does. A habit is a hard thing to incorporate - and the set up of the brain is the reason why.

The answer to the quickest path the brain’s hard drive is to let the brain figure things out for itself.

Dictums from on high don’t cut it. Coming to a conclusion by you thinking about the problem does.

And the approach to change now becomes totally different; one that provokes a manager to determine how to have their people figure something out on their own compared to management by memo.

Betcha you never thought you’d read about Prefrontal Cortex and Basal Ganglia on a PimpYourWork blog now, did you?

But now you know why it’s important.

How do you adapt to change?

Scot

Share This

Related Stories

• Influencing change through presentations
• How to Make Your Downward Dog Work for You
• Passion: The Obstacles
• Focus on the “To-be” process
• Good Things Take Time

POSTED IN: Cube life