A Fatal Flaw

If you want to make change happen, don't confuse symptoms with causes.

I have a deep underlying psychological flaw - I greatly enjoy an argument, especially when I can pick holes in the logic. This flaw is so bad that I even took a degree in Logic and Metaphysics (and no, this was not at the most boring university in the world) and spent much of my life working for a consulting company that is the world's leading practitioner of the application of rigorous logic to troubleshooting business problems.

Most of the time, I can get by without this flaw coming to the surface and becoming such an immense social disability that I drive friends away and have to grovel with abject apologies the following day…

Sometimes, however, something sets it off.

The most recent trigger was when I was browsing JP Rangaswami's excellent blog, Confused of Calcutta, where in one entry he references a site illustrating how we can all be seduced by cognitive biases. (Strongly related to what used to be referred to as 'Perceptual Set' back when I was teaching Psychology). Fundamentally, the site lists a litany of cognitive biases to which we are all prone.

This is, of course, useful information. In many ways, it is a Get Out of Jail free card for any argument, especially if one is losing. Knowing about these things, one can say: "The only reason you can hold that position is because you have a cognitive bias about...." - which can't be gainsaid, as the bias is supposedly unconscious.

In a similar vein, I have a huge amount of time for Scott Adams. His books contain an immense amount of common-sense, leavened by a caustic cyncism and humour. One of his books (The Joy of Work) also contains a checklist that mounts a terrific assault on the flawed logic often encountered in the trenches of business, entitled "You are wrong because…" - you can find a copy of the list here.

It is an interesting experiment to apply this logic to the standard shibboleths of change management ("You must secure the buy-in of stakeholders for the change to succeed," for example, or "You can only introduce enduring change by changing the culture").

If you do, what seems like common sense often turns out to be flawed. In fact, in many cases our logic about change confuses symptoms with causes - such as thinking that resistance to change is what we need to fix, instead of fixing the workflow, feedback and perceived consequences which are the causes of such resistance. Or thinking that if people say that they accept the need for change then their behaviour will change as a result - and then being surprised and frustrated when this does not happen.

Such flawed logic means that the standard approaches to change management not only appear to be faulty, but in many cases will actively damage the success of your change effort.

Change is an emotional thing - but it is pointless if the rationale is faulty. Let's think differently.

Let's think better.

- Mike