This one is tempting because small changes are easier to assimilate than big ones. But one change after another is trouble. It’s better to introduce change in one coherent package.
Science has recently discovered, however, that the amygdala isn’t just about responding to danger—it also plays a vital role in building social connections. It works like this: When you receive a belonging cue, the amygdala switches roles and starts to use its immense unconscious neural horsepower to build and sustain your social bonds. It tracks members of your group, tunes in to their interactions, and sets the stage for meaningful engagement. In a heartbeat, it transforms from a growling guard dog into an energetic guide dog with a single-minded goal: to make sure you stay tightly connected with your people. On brain scans, this moment is vivid and unmistakable, as the amygdala lights up in an entirely different way. “The whole thing flips,” says Jay Van Bavel, social neuroscientist at New York University. “The moment you’re part of a group, the amygdala tunes in to who’s in that group and starts intensely tracking them. Because these people are valuable to you. They were strangers before, but they’re on your team now, and that changes the whole dynamic. It’s such a powerful switch—it’s a big top-down change, a total reconfiguration of the entire motivational and decision-making system.” All this helps reveal a paradox about the way belonging works. Belonging feels like it happens from the inside out, but in fact it happens from the outside in. Our social brains light up when they receive a steady accumulation of almost-invisible cues: We are close, we are safe, we share a future.
keep reminding yourself that it isn’t enough to change the situation. You also have to help people make the psychological reorientation that they must make if the change is to work.
Researchers discovered that one particular form of feedback boosted student effort and performance so immensely that they deemed it “magical feedback.” Students who received it chose to revise their papers far more often than students who did not, and their performance improved significantly. The feedback was not complicated. In fact, it consisted of one simple phrase. I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them. That’s it. Just nineteen words. None of these words contain any information on how to improve. Yet they are powerful because they deliver a burst of belonging cues. Actually, when you look more closely at the sentence, it contains three separate cues: 1. You are part of this group. 2. This group is special; we have high standards here. 3. I believe you can reach those standards. These signals provide a clear message that lights up the unconscious brain: Here is a safe place to give effort.
If, on the other hand, the change is already under way, you can find out about losses much more quickly. Simply ask people. “What’s different, now that we have a new X?” “When we did X, what did you have to give up?” “What do you miss since we changed X?”
Of course, threshold moments don’t only happen on day one; they happen every day. But the successful groups I visited paid attention to moments of arrival. They would pause, take time, and acknowledge the presence of the new person, marking the moment as special: We are together now.
Don’t argue with what you hear. In the first place, it will stop the conversation, and you won’t learn any more. In the second place, loss is a subjective experience, and your “objective” view (which is really just another subjective view) is irrelevant. Finally, you’ll just make your task more difficult by convincing people that you don’t understand them—or, worse yet, that you don’t care what they feel and think.
The female-specific concerns that men fail to factor in cover a wide variety of areas, but as you read you will notice that three themes crop up again and again: the female body, women’s unpaid care burden, and male violence against women.
“As humans, we are very good at reading cues; we are incredibly attentive to interpersonal phenomena,” says Amy Edmondson, who studies psychological safety at Harvard. “We have a place in our brain that’s always worried about what people think of us, especially higher-ups. As far as our brain is concerned, if our social system rejects us, we could die. Given that our sense of danger is so natural and automatic, organizations have to do some pretty special things to overcome that natural trigger.” The key to creating psychological safety, as Pentland and Edmondson emphasize, is to recognize how deeply obsessed our unconscious brains are with it. A mere hint of belonging is not enough; one or two signals are not enough. We are built to require lots of signaling, over and over. This is why a sense of belonging is easy to destroy and hard to build. The dynamic evokes the words of Texas politician Sam Rayburn: “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”
Skill 1—Build Safety—explores how signals of connection generate bonds of belonging and identity. Skill 2—Share Vulnerability—explains how habits of mutual risk drive trusting cooperation. Skill 3—Establish Purpose—tells how narratives create shared goals and values.
The funny thing is, when I visited leaders of successful creative cultures, I didn’t meet many artists. Instead, I met a different type, a type who spoke quietly and tended to spend a lot of time observing, who had an introverted vibe and liked to talk about systems. I started to think of this type of person as a Creative Engineer.
It’s not a bad idea to let people take away something from this celebration too, a memento of the transition process that is now behind them. The idea is not unlike giving people a piece of the past, as mentioned in Chapter 3. In this case it may be a T-shirt with “I Survived the Merger” across the front or a certificate of thanks for their participation in the Transition Monitoring Team. Serious or humorous, the memento further acknowledges and winds up a difficult time in the organization’s history and the person’s career.
The single biggest reason organizational changes fail is because no one has thought about endings or planned to manage their impact on people. Naturally concerned about the future, planners and implementers all too often forget that people have to let go of the present first. They forget that while the first task of change management is to understand the desired outcome and how to get there, the first task of transition management is to convince people to leave home. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief if you remember that.
Before 1066 and the advent of the Normans, Wales had been the domain of some of the earliest settlers of the British Isles – the Britons or Celts – who are generally thought to have migrated from Continental Europe some three centuries before the birth of Christ. Anglo-Saxon conquerors had pushed these communities westwards out of England from the fifth century AD onwards, and they became known as the ‘Wallenses’ (literally the ‘borderers’). Early medieval Wales consisted of a complex patchwork of determinedly independent, rival provinces and realms, with three major principalities – Gwynedd, Powys and Deheubarth – coming to prominence.
The task before you is therefore twofold: first, to get your people through this phase of transition in one piece; and second, to capitalize on all the confusion by encouraging them to be innovative.
People can deal with a lot of change if it is coherent and part of a larger whole. But adding unrelated and unexpected changes, even small ones, can push people to the breaking point.
