Managers do not need to be convinced that organizational change should be the first item on the agenda. However, we all know how difficult any change is. The MIF publishing house has published the book “Aversion to Change” from Harvard professors, which will help managers overcome “immunity to change” and take the company to a new level of development. Shall we begin?

What is “immunity to change”?

Organizations around the world spend billions of dollars and a lot of time implementing different assessment techniques to help their staff improve their performance. People boldly listen to criticism and recommendations addressed to them about what they need to change in themselves. They often agree and commit to making adjustments. They may even begin to invest a lot of emotional energy into their commitments. But then they usually realize that they have changed little.

Too often, vows of commitment to our commitments become similar to New Year's resolutions. After all, they are also sincere. When we make promises to ourselves on the eve of the beginning of the year, we consider those qualities of ourselves that we want to get rid of to be bad. And those that we want to develop seem good to us. But until we understand that those of our commitments that give rise to actions we don’t like are extremely effective, we will not be able to correctly formulate the problem.

In other words, a person is not able to achieve his goals while maintaining the same way of thinking.

Immunity to change, as this phrase itself tells us, is our self-defense system. And by changing our approach, we can overcome any difficulty.

Why is it not human nature to change?

Professor Ronald Heifetz distinguishes between two types of challenges associated with change: “technical” and “adaptive.”

Mastering the technique of removing appendicitis or landing an airplane with the nose landing gear stuck may be considered a technical problem, but the result is extremely important for a patient lying on the operating table, or fearful airplane passengers thinking about an imminent plane crash.

But most of the changes that need to be made today or tomorrow require more than just “building” new “technical” skills into the old way of thinking. These are “adaptive” difficulties, and their solution is possible only with a change in the way of thinking and a transition to a higher level of development of consciousness.

Heifetz believes that the main mistake managers make is when they try to respond to adaptive challenges using purely technical means. We are not always able to make the desired changes if we define our problems as technical, although in fact we are faced with an adaptive difficulty.

There is only one conclusion: you need to look for adaptive (non-technical) ways to ensure that you and others have the opportunity to cope with the relevant challenges.

Take some time

Transformation takes time. There is no express solution. The fact is that we are in the world of cultivating the human personality, and not of an engineering approach to man. We don't just flip a switch. We are talking about the evolution of consciousness and its complexity.

However, accepting the fact that consciousness takes time to develop does not mean just sitting back and waiting. A lot depends on our actions. Create conditions for safe change.

Focus on employee development

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is constantly being repainted. As soon as some work is completed, new ones begin immediately. The city considers maintaining the golden glow of the bridge a task of paramount importance. What does your organization want to focus on?

Continuous development of employees at work best serves the interests of the organization and the personal interests of each employee. An organization cannot provide better “encouragement” than investing in satisfying the hunger for self-development - the desire to look at the root (of the internal and external world), to work more productively, to be able to do more.

When we overcome our aversion to change, we stop engaging in unnecessary trading: our immune system frees us from worries, in return giving us the illusion that we are not capable of much. But we are capable!

Robert Keegan, Lisa Lahey

Rejection of change. How to overcome resistance to change and unlock the organization's potential

Robert Kegan

Lisa Laskow Lahey

Immunity to Change

How to Overcome it and Unlock Potential in Yourself and Your Organization

Scientific editor Evgeniy Pustoshkin

Published with permission from Harvard Business Review Press, a division of Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation (USA) and the literary agency of Alexander Korzhenevsky (Russia)

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright holders.

© 2009 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.

Published by arrangement with Harvard Business Review Press (USA) via Alexander Korzhenevsky Agency (Russia)

© Translation, publication in Russian, design. Mann, Ivanov and Ferber LLC, 2017

Bernard and Saralee Keegan

To my boys - Bill, Zach and Max Lahey

Preface to the Russian edition

I came across this book in 2012, when I was studying at Harvard Business School in the Leading Professional Service Firm course. The volume of literature that had to be read thoughtfully in preparation for the course exceeded my wildest ideas about human capabilities. And in this rich flow of knowledge, theories, and research, the book by Keegan and Lisa Laskow became a bright beacon, indicating not just the direction of the necessary changes, but also specific steps - simple, logical, clear. I read it in one sitting and very naturally accepted it as a guide to action.

Each of us, at some point in our lives, has felt a reluctance to change - from a slight “freeze” to resistance passionately supported by convincing arguments. Sometimes we notice missed opportunities, and sometimes delay can be fatal. In his book, Keegan gives the following example: only one out of seven patients is ready to change their lifestyle - quit smoking, move more, change their eating style - on the recommendation of their doctor. Even when the alternative is quick death. Now, when the speed of technological and social change is increasing exponentially, many companies behave like these patients: unable to decide to change, they are heading towards destruction. And economic difficulties can hardly serve as a valid justification, because under the same conditions other managers, on the contrary, are leading their companies to new heights, markets, and solutions. It's all about how their corporate leaders work with their immunity to change.

This book needs to be read with a notepad and pencil, making your own list of criteria, actions and steps that will ultimately allow you to experience life not as a difficult road with obstacles, but as a journey full of meaning, discovery and joy, transforming you and the world around you.

Preface

It took us our entire professional lives to write this book. It presents a new, but already proven in practice, approach to increasing the effectiveness of people and teams.

Yes, we followed the beaten path. The ideas and techniques described in this book were actively used in the railway network of one of the European countries, in a large transnational financial corporation, in one of the most famous American corporations in the field of high technology. They have been used by the leadership of the National Children's Health Agency, several school districts in the United States and the directors of their institutions, senior partners of a leading consulting company, and leaders of one of the fastest growing labor unions in the United States.

But the path was not straight. To be honest, we initially did not plan to deal with the problem for which we are now praised for solving. It's a problem of closing the gap between what people intend to do, and what they are capable. 25 years ago we could not be of much use to the mentioned organizations. We knew that our research was worth a lifetime, but we didn't know then that this work would allow us to meet leaders and their teams from public and private companies in the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa.

We started as academic psychologists, dealing with the development of mental activity and complexity of thinking in adults. One of us (Keegan) took on the theoretical aspects of our new concept, and the other (Leahy) took on the development of research methods, evaluating their effectiveness and “tuning”. In the 1980s, our work revealed something completely new to us, which aroused the interest of fellow scientists and practitioners around the world. We have proven the possibility of adult development. Many people believe (and there is even scientific evidence for this) that our minds, like our bodies, “don’t grow” after adulthood. But we found that some of our research participants developed sophisticated and effective ways of understanding the world.

The new ideas for increasing human capabilities that we developed were received coolly at the time, but our long-term research programs (certain parameters were assessed in the same people over many years) showed that people develop in a certain sequence. At each new level (“plateau”) of thinking, a person overcomes the limitations of the previous level. Further research has demonstrated that every qualitative “leap” forward enhances the abilities of not only see(inner and outer world), but also act more efficiently (see Chapter 1 for details).

But we have discovered that many, having left adolescence, no longer develop new levels of thinking, and if they move forward in this sense, they do not make much progress. At heart, we have always remained teachers (and built our careers not in higher schools of management, but in higher schools of pedagogy), so we wanted to find out whether a person himself could develop the breadth and complexity of his thinking. Or is success here a matter of chance that cannot be controlled? Or can people be helped in self-development? We explored these questions and made a second discovery in the 1990s.

Previously, we studied the development of thinking from the outside, objectivistically, trying to describe the structure of understanding the surrounding reality and trace changes in it. But in the 1990s, not yet fully consciously, we began to move into the inner world of a person in search of the main motive that determines our level of thinking. And then we discovered a phenomenon that we called "immune to change", or "aversion to change" This was, until then, an internal force hidden from scientists, which actively (and very effectively) prevents any changes, since it strives to preserve the perception of the world characteristic of a person.

We first introduced readers to the idea of ​​“change aversion” in our 2001 book How the Way We Communicate Can Change the Way We Work. There we introduced the public to a deceptively simple technique that has been developed over many years and thanks to which people can discover hidden motives and beliefs in themselves that are holding them back from changes in themselves - necessary and desirable (regardless of the goal - “to be bolder in relationships with people" or "lose weight").

Readers greeted the book with enthusiasm, since it outlined the results of our work with people (several thousand people a year) specifically in terms of changing “aversion to change” (we will give relevant recommendations in Chapter 9). Many were surprised: “I have never seen this before!” or “I read the book for three hours and learned more than I did in three years of talking to a psychoanalyst!” But to be honest, what people really want is for a new idea to have a powerful effect—and quickly. And we know well that there is a big difference between the idea itself and our ability to take active steps to implement it.

We realized that we had created an effective and practical technique, but we had not yet satisfied the true need of readers (they want not so much to learn, Why someone cannot delegate authority to subordinates or is not ready to criticize their superiors, and learn do this) and have not achieved their goals themselves (to be able not only to see the mechanisms of human thinking, but also to help people overcome their weaknesses and shortcomings).

Shortly after the publication of our first book, we spoke to large audiences of research and human resources executives from some of the largest Fortune 500 companies and major international non-profit organizations. They became acquainted with our ideas at the stage of their development and frankly gave their assessments. We did not repeat what our discovery was. We asked them to try out our ideas for themselves under our guidance. Everything took several hours.

Lisa Lahey

Robert Keegan

Modern leaders and their teams often face the challenge of implementing change in their organizations. People resist any change - even if they support it wholeheartedly. Research in this area shows that the problem of change is often not a problem of will. The main challenge becomes bridging the gap between what we want and what we are actually capable of. With more than 30 years of experience studying human development at Harvard, the authors of this book show in detail how you can overcome “immunity to change” and lead your company forward.

Published in Russian for the first time.

Robert Keegan, Lisa Lahey

Rejection of change. How to overcome resistance to change and unlock the organization's potential

Lisa Laskow Lahey

Immunity to Change

How to Overcome it and Unlock Potential in Yourself and Your Organization

Scientific editor Evgeniy Pustoshkin

Published with permission from Harvard Business Review Press, a division of Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation (USA) and the literary agency of Alexander Korzhenevsky (Russia)

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright holders.

© 2009 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.

Published by arrangement with Harvard Business Review Press (USA) via Alexander Korzhenevsky Agency (Russia)

© Translation, publication in Russian, design. Mann, Ivanov and Ferber LLC, 2017

Bernard and Saralee Keegan

To my boys - Bill, Zach and Max Lahey

Preface to the Russian edition

I came across this book in 2012, when I was studying at Harvard Business School in the Leading Professional Service Firm course. The volume of literature that had to be read thoughtfully in preparation for the course exceeded my wildest ideas about human capabilities. And in this rich flow of knowledge, theories, and research, the book by Keegan and Lisa Laskow became a bright beacon, indicating not just the direction of the necessary changes, but also specific steps - simple, logical, clear. I read it in one sitting and very naturally accepted it as a guide to action.

Each of us, at some point in our lives, has felt a reluctance to change - from a slight “freeze” to resistance passionately supported by convincing arguments. Sometimes we notice missed opportunities, and sometimes delay can be fatal. In his book, Keegan gives the following example: only one out of seven patients is ready to change their lifestyle - quit smoking, move more, change their eating style - on the recommendation of their doctor. Even when the alternative is quick death. Now, when the speed of technological and social change is increasing exponentially, many companies behave like these patients: unable to decide to change, they are heading towards destruction. And economic difficulties can hardly serve as a valid justification, because under the same conditions other managers, on the contrary, are leading their companies to new heights, markets, and solutions. It's all about how their corporate leaders work with their immunity to change.

This book needs to be read with a notepad and pencil, making your own list of criteria, actions and steps that will ultimately allow you to experience life not as a difficult road with obstacles, but as a journey full of meaning, discovery and joy, transforming you and the world around you.

Oksana Morsina,

Managing Partner, RosExpert (http://www.rosexpert.com/)

Preface

It took us our entire professional lives to write this book. It presents a new, but already proven in practice, approach to increasing the effectiveness of people and teams.

Yes, we followed the beaten path. The ideas and techniques described in this book were actively used in the railway network of one of the European countries, in a large transnational financial corporation, in one of the most famous American corporations in the field of high technology. They have been used by the leadership of the National Children's Health Agency, several school districts in the United States and the directors of their institutions, senior partners of a leading consulting company, and leaders of one of the fastest growing labor unions in the United States.

But the path was not straight. To be honest, we initially did not plan to deal with the problem for which we are now praised for solving. This is the problem of closing the gap between what people intend to do and what they are capable of doing. 25 years ago we could not be of much use to the mentioned organizations. We knew that our research was worth a lifetime, but we didn't know then that this work would allow us to meet leaders and their teams from public and private companies in the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa.

We started as academic psychologists, dealing with the development of mental activity and complexity of thinking in adults. One of us (Keegan) took on the theoretical aspects of our new concept, and the other (Leahy) took on the development of research methods, evaluating their effectiveness and “tuning”. In the 1980s, our work revealed something completely new to us, which aroused the interest of fellow scientists and practitioners around the world. We have proven the possibility of adult development. Many people believe (and there is even scientific evidence for this) that our minds, like our bodies, “don’t grow” after adulthood. But we found that some of our research participants developed sophisticated and effective ways of understanding the world.

The new ideas for increasing human capabilities that we developed were received coolly at the time, but our long-term research programs (certain parameters were assessed in the same people over many years) showed that people develop in a certain sequence. At each new level (“plateau”) of thinking, a person overcomes the limitations of the previous level. Further research has demonstrated that each qualitative “leap” forward strengthens the ability not only to see (the inner and outer world), but also to act more effectively (for more details, see Chapter 1 (#gl1)).

But we have discovered that many, having left adolescence, no longer develop new levels of thinking, and if they move forward in this sense, they do not make much progress. At heart, we have always remained teachers (and built our careers not in higher schools of management, but in higher schools of pedagogy), so we wanted to find out whether a person himself could develop the breadth and complexity of his thinking. Or is success here a matter of chance that cannot be controlled? Or can people be helped in self-development? We explored these questions and made a second discovery in the 1990s.

Previously, we studied the development of thinking from the outside, objectivistically, trying to describe the structure of understanding the surrounding reality and trace changes in it. But in the 1990s, not yet fully consciously, we began to move into the inner world of a person in search of the main motive that determines our level of thinking. And then we

Page 2 of 9

discovered a phenomenon called “immunity to change” or “aversion to change.” This was, until then, an internal force hidden from scientists, which actively (and very effectively) prevents any changes, since it strives to preserve the perception of the world characteristic of a person.

We first introduced readers to the idea of ​​“change aversion” in our 2001 book How the Way We Communicate Can Change the Way We Work. There we introduced the public to a deceptively simple technique that has been developed over many years and thanks to which people can discover hidden motives and beliefs in themselves that are holding them back from changes in themselves - necessary and desirable (regardless of the goal - “to be bolder in relationships with people" or "lose weight").

Readers greeted the book with enthusiasm, since it outlined the results of our work with people (several thousand people a year) precisely in terms of changing “aversion to change” (in Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo) we will give appropriate recommendations). Many were surprised: “I have never seen this before!” or “I read the book for three hours and learned more than I did in three years of talking to a psychoanalyst!” But to be honest, what people really want is for a new idea to have a powerful effect—and quickly. And we know well that there is a big difference between the idea itself and our ability to take active steps to implement it.

We understood that we had created an effective and practical methodology, but had not yet satisfied the true need of readers (they want not so much to find out why someone cannot delegate authority to subordinates or is not ready to criticize their superiors, but to learn how to do this) and we ourselves have not achieved our goals (to be able not only to see the mechanisms of human thinking, but also to help people overcome their weaknesses and shortcomings).

Shortly after the publication of our first book, we spoke to large audiences of research and human resources executives from some of the largest Fortune 500 companies and major international non-profit organizations. They became acquainted with our ideas at the stage of their development and frankly gave their assessments. We did not repeat what our discovery was. We asked them to try out our ideas for themselves under our guidance. Everything took several hours.

When our workshop was over, many participants expressed similar thoughts, but the head of the professional training department of one large company summed it up best: “I have good news and bad news for everyone. First, the good stuff: I’ve been working in the field of improving personnel efficiency for more than 20 years, and your methodology is the most effective I’ve seen so far. It's like conceiving a jet engine in the days of propeller-powered aviation. You showed us how to move forward. And now the bad news: you don’t yet understand what to do with this jet, where to fly it and how to land it.”

In many ways he was right. After the book was published, we learned from letters from some readers that, having once managed to take off on our “jet plane,” they were even able to reach their destination. But it turns out that for most people, one idea, even an attractive one, is not enough to make long-term changes in their lives. We still had a lot of work ahead of us. We had to overcome the third threshold, and it took us eight years.

During this period, we realized that helping people improve themselves and achieve changes for which they were not ready, despite smart plans and decisions, is closely related to helping them develop new thinking that goes beyond the previous narrow boundaries. Using our colleague Ronald Heifetz's hypothesis about the distinction between "technical" and "adaptive" transformations, we can say that some personal goals (especially those that we should but cannot achieve) require us to become "more." We must “adapt” to goals in order to achieve them.

Our conclusion is that to move from identifying aversion to overcoming it, you need to create an effective “learning platform” that can achieve two goals at once. We understood that our “diagnostic” technique clarified the situation. Namely, this is a stimulus for increasing the complexity of our consciousness (mental structures cease to be a “subject” and become an “object”, turning from a “master” into a “tool”). The ability to recognize and improve complexity of thinking, in our opinion, should be a key factor in solving adaptive problems. And a person’s desire for adaptive changes, with a competent approach, helps transform thinking.

This book is the result of our work over recent years. And to test the strength of our methodology, you should not ask the question “Does it help me achieve my personal goals in self-improvement?” (e.g., “Have I become a more assertive communicator?” or “Am I better at delegating to subordinates?”; although, of course, it would be better if the answer was “yes” more often than “no”).

We set ourselves a higher goal. And here another question arises: “Does the new learning platform help to increase the complexity of thinking, that is, a change that will reveal a whole range of new abilities in a person, rather than allowing him to achieve a single goal?” If the answer is “yes,” then the benefits of using an adaptive approach will be many times greater than achieving one specific goal.

As you read the examples and ideas in this book, you will judge for yourself the effectiveness of our methodology. If you answer “yes” to the second, more difficult question, then the main message of this book - people can change - will have a double meaning for you. Yes, people - even adults - can achieve self-improvement in specific areas, even if they have not succeeded in this area before. And yes, people—even adults—can increase the complexity of their thinking, just as they did at a young age. And in the process, they are able to acquire a deeper, more responsible, and less egocentric understanding of reality.

If you haven't checked out our previous books yet, you might want to check it out. We don't expect you to do this. This is not necessary to get the most out of this book. If you have ever tried (possibly failed) to change your life or tried to help others change theirs, then this book is for you. If you lead, manage, advise, coach and teach and your concern is the personal improvement of your employees or the effectiveness of your team, then this book is for you too.

If you are familiar with our work, welcome to visit us again! Perhaps while reading How the Way We Communicate Can Change the Way We Work, you wondered, “If you revealed the secret to change aversion and helped me see my problem, haven’t you discovered something that would help me solve my problem?” This book is for you too.

If you are interested in human development issues

Page 3 of 9

as an adult, thinking about the possibilities of significant leaps in improving thinking, if you have read Robert Keegan’s books “The Evolving Self” and “At Dead End” and you are interested in what we have learned, you are also part of our target audience.

Finally, if you know that our book is based on theoretical and research work on the evolution of thinking and the meaning of life, and if you have been waiting for us to combine them and outline new educational methods and an adaptive approach to change, this book is also for you .

Introduction

Managers don't need to be convinced that improvements and transformations in their organization should be the first item on their agenda. And they don’t need condolences about how difficult it is to change themselves and others. We all know that change is always hard, but we often don't know why that is or what to do about it. Most popular explanations turn out to be weak attempts to answer the question of why important changes are difficult for us. We don't understand how urgent they are? We don't have incentives? We don't know what we need to change the situation? Are these the main obstacles to change? The ones you see in yourself and in those who live and work around you?

A recent study found that when cardiologists warn their high-risk patients that they will die unless they make lifestyle changes—diet, exercise, or quit smoking—only one in seven is able to make major life changes ! And we are sure that the remaining six patients want to live, see many more sunsets and sunrises, enjoy how their grandchildren are growing up, etc. They understand the seriousness and urgency of the changes. Indeed, in their case, the most powerful incentive is life. Doctors are convinced that their patients know what they need to do. But they cannot change their life.

If people are not willing to change even when their lives are on the line, how can leaders at any level in different organizations expect success from change (even if employees wholeheartedly support them) when the stakes and possible returns from the corresponding actions are not so high? what about heart patients?

Therefore, we need to understand what hinders change and what promotes it.

Like cardiology patients, the challenges with change that modern leaders and their teams face are largely not issues of willpower. We simply cannot bridge the gap between what we sincerely, even passionately, want and what we are truly capable of. Bridging this gap is the main task of psychology in the 21st century.

Three main problems

The discrepancy between our understanding of the need for transformation and change and the lack of awareness of what is stopping us is the first of the problems that requires deep and comprehensive understanding. If you're like the leaders we've worked with in recent years, you, too, are probably skeptical about how much people (including yourself) can change. This brings us to the second problem.

Modern companies have many challenges and many opportunities. They spend valuable resources—billions of dollars and incredible amounts of time—to make workers more productive. It's hard to believe that this vast array of methods and techniques—training programs, self-improvement plans, executive development programs, performance reports, executive coaching, etc.—does not reflect leaders' deep optimism about the prospects for personal change in their workers. Why then do managers spend so much time and money on this?

But whenever we manage to achieve trust in relations with these leaders, we hear (mostly in an informal setting - over a glass of wine or a good dinner) from them: “Friends, let's face the truth. People are generally not prone to change. Al will always be Al. After 30–35 years a person does not change. You can count on small adjustments in the margins of the complex of human capabilities. But to be honest, in essence, all that remains is to make the most of a person’s natural strengths and exploit his weaknesses to his advantage. Why exhaust yourself and force changes out of an unhappy employee that he has no intention of implementing?”

Unfortunately, the apparent optimism expressed in all these attempts to develop employees always hides a deep pessimism about the extent to which people are generally capable of change.

We see these pessimistic sentiments. And we have heard stories similar to the one below more than once in different countries and industries.

Our company takes employees' annual reports seriously. These are not cartoons in which people, entering a conference room, raise their eyes to the sky and wait for the psychological chatter to end. The managers at various levels listening to the employee’s report and considerations are very attentive. It takes a lot of money and time to summarize and analyze. Everything is studied very carefully. Sometimes employees cry during meetings. They make sincere promises and make detailed plans about what they will change in their work that needs to be changed. Each reportee leaves the conference room with the feeling that he and his employer had a sincere and deep conversation and that he spent time usefully. And then? A year later, we all gather in the hall again, and exactly the same thing happens as a year ago. There's something wrong with this system.

Yes, the system is not working correctly. That's why we wrote our book. We have a compelling answer to the question of whether people themselves and the culture in the organizations where they work can change.

The changes you will read about here are not “small tweaks in the margins.” And the proof of their possibility is not based on self-deception and distortions of self-esteem. It relies on assessments, often anonymous, from your toughest critics: the people around you at work and at home. Here, for example, are reviews from our clients.

You helped Nicholas, but can you also help his partners? (One of our clients)

Our entire team is noticing a huge change in Martin. It was a pleasure to work with him. Our group's productivity has increased. Previously, I would never have believed this. (Colleague)

I had my first real conversation with my mother in years. (Family member)

They immediately believe that something important is really happening around them.

Our experience of collaborating with the leadership of a school district from a distant city bears witness to this. We have been cooperating with him for several years. And since he is far from us, we created a team of “change coaches” from local specialists, which became involved in the program. One day we invited a very promising candidate to join the program at a meeting of the “trainers” working group. She was very experienced

Page 4 of 9

organizer of school education. We asked her to sit, listen and feel the nerve of the work the team members were doing with us.

We were engrossed in the discussion at the meeting, but our guest had a worried expression on her face. Two hours into the meeting, she stood up and silently left the conference room. There was a tense expression on her face, as if she was in shock. She did not return to us that day. "The experiment failed." That's what one of us thought.

A few days later, we contacted one of our team members who happened to meet the woman on the street. She confirmed that the woman was struck. “I’ve worked with school organizers all my life,” she said. “And I’ve never been to such a meeting.” I have never seen people be so frank and approach things so responsibly. I haven’t heard people express ideas that could lead to real changes in the school.” (You'll soon find out what those discussions are.) It turns out that she left because she had another appointment. And she asked how she could connect to the team of “change coaches.”

The pages of this book will present new ideas and practical techniques for managers who are interested in issues of self-learning in organizations. It's been about 20 years since Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline appeared, where he first suggested that leaders think about learning organizations, and 25 years since the publication of Donald Schon's book The Thinking Practitioner, where the author highlighted the idea of ​​​​the need to think work. Today, all over the world, in all industries, leaders are striving to make their organizations self-learning and force themselves to reflect on their own actions.

But issues of individual and collective learning at work must be taken to the next level if organizations are to meet the demands of the 21st century. Otherwise, we can study and reflect as much as we want, but the changes that others hope for and expect from us will not happen. And all because we will learn and reflect without changing our worldview. And this brings us to the third of the problems raised in the book.

At the end of the last century, our colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Senge and Sean, encouraged many modern leaders to include learning in organizations as a priority issue. The scientific base and set of techniques integrated into the concept of a self-learning organization are expanding. But a very important aspect of it has not yet been worked out, which is best visible to people who have been engaged in research in the field of pedagogy for many years. We are talking about insufficient elaboration of issues of adult development.

When Senge and Sean wrote their books, neuroscientists confidently believed that the human brain and mental activity do not change qualitatively after adolescence. But, like other scientists who combine research with practice, we carried out our own developments, which showed a completely different picture. Today, both theorists and practitioners believe that the development of human thinking does not necessarily end during adolescence. But we still need to understand all the consequences of a serious revision of our capabilities.

The lack of understanding of adult development in the theory of learning organizations is especially important today. Leaders are increasingly asking and demanding people to do things that they are not capable of doing without sufficient training and level of development of thinking. In the field of “executive development,” there is an overemphasis on executives and not enough attention on development issues. Many authors try to identify the most important aspects of leadership and help develop the necessary qualities. But we ignore the most powerful source of any opportunities - our own abilities (and the abilities of the people who work for us), which at any age provide us with victory over our shortcomings in understanding the meaning of what is happening.

If we do not learn to understand the essence of human development: what it is, what contributes to it, and what hinders it, then we will not develop leadership skills, but will only train some of them. The knowledge gained from management training will be more similar to new files and programs running on the existing operating system. They are useful in their own way because they provide more depth and variety in understanding reality, but their use is limited by the operating system. True development is the transformation of a system, not the expansion of knowledge or skill sets.

If you are a leader at any level, you promote your plans and formulate your goals. But there are other plans and goals that control your behavior. And you don't realize it. You are not yet ready to take responsibility for them. And most often, these unconscious programs of thinking and behavior hang over you like a sword of Damocles and limit your ability to achieve outstanding results.

If you don't pay as much attention to development as you do to leadership, you will be limited only by your plans and goals. These are not goals or plans that unconsciously “guide you.” Consequently, your ability to change will be limited.

The ideas and stories in this book offer you a path to development, qualitative expansion of the mind, and therefore increased productivity. And not through the exploitation of natural data, but through their renewal.

Book structure

The book is divided into three parts. The first introduces us to a new perception of change. The second shows the value of the approach to the employee, teams and organizations. In the third, we'll tell you how to try new approaches.

Part I begins with a brief overview of scientific advances over the past 30 years regarding the development of complex consciousness in adulthood and the implications of these findings for work. Chapter 1 provides the scientific and empirical basis for all further ideas and case studies. In Chapter 2 we will tell you about the discovery of a phenomenon that is holding us back from the changes we so desire. We call it “change aversion.” In Chapter 3, you'll learn from two executives, one in business and the other in government, how and why they brought our ideas to their teams and how they benefited.

In Part II we will look in detail at change in various organizations and people in situations where they recognize and struggle with aversion to change. These people work in various fields and strive for self-improvement. In Chapter 4 we will describe situations in which groups or teams evaluate their aversion to change. In Chapters 5 and 6 we will talk about the same situations in individuals. And in Chapter 7 we will touch on the most complex model: when individual group members strive to overcome aversion to change, and the entire group tries to improve its effectiveness.

In Part III, we invite you to experience for yourself what constitutes

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the main idea of ​​this book. We will guide you on the path to overcoming your and your team's resistance to change. Chapter 8 shows the elements that enable the change process. In Chapters 9 and 10, we'll teach you step-by-step how to diagnose aversion to change and then work to overcome it. Chapter 11 equips you with tools and techniques to help combat change aversion in your team or organization. We conclude by discussing seven leadership qualities that help create an environment conducive to developing individual and team capabilities.

You would not be reading this book if you did not understand the importance of improving people's effectiveness, hope that there is new reason to believe in this possibility, and wonder what can be done to realize these hopes.

We hope that the book will be useful to you in many ways: as food for the mind and heart, as a source of willpower and skills. And let it help you achieve the results you strive for.

Hidden dynamics in aversion to change

The Problem of Change: Revisited

What will be the most important thing for the leadership of your organizations in the coming years? We are sure: the ability for self-development is yours personally, your staff and your teams. Everywhere in the world - in the USA, and in Europe, and in China, and in India - human capabilities will become the most important variable in the new century. But leaders who view human talent and ability as a fixed resource that must be sourced “outside” put themselves and their organizations at a disadvantage.

And leaders who ask themselves, “What can I do to make my organization the best place in the world to develop human capabilities?” create the conditions for success. They understand that in order for everyone to achieve their ultimate dream - to take advantage of new opportunities and cope with new challenges - they need to cultivate new skills. Such leaders know what makes it happen and what gets in the way.

The challenge of change and self-improvement is often misunderstood as a need to better cope with the increasing complexity of the world. By “coping” we mean adding new skills to existing ones and expanding the range of responses to external challenges. But we remain the same as we were before we learned to “cope.” We just have increased some of our resources. We learned new things, but did not necessarily take a step forward in our development. Coping with problems is a valuable skill, but it is no longer sufficient to meet the needs of change in people.

When we talk about increased complexity, we mean not only the modern world, but also people, bridging the gap between the needs of the world and the capabilities/development of an individual or organization. To bridge this gap, there are two ways. The first is to reduce the complexity of the world. The second is to develop our capabilities. The first is unrealistic. The second was considered inaccessible, especially in adulthood.

We have been studying the problems of developing the complexity of consciousness in adults for many years. Our research will help you better understand yourself and those who work around you or for you. You will gain new insight into the limits of human performance, an area that will be the focus of tomorrow's successful leaders.

Modern views on age and complexity of thinking

The ideas and techniques that you will find in this book show the fallacy of modern views on the development of human consciousness throughout life. When we began our work, it was believed that the process of mental development of a person is similar to the process of physical development of his body. It was believed that a person stops growing and developing by the age of 20. Physical growth for most people stops in their early 20s. If 30 years ago you had asked experimenters to draw a graph, one of the axes of which would reflect the level of a person’s ability to “complex thinking”, and the other would reflect his age, they would confidently show you something similar to fig. 1.1: a steeply rising line reaching the “20 years” mark, and a horizontal line beyond. And they would do it with absolute confidence.

Rice. 1.1. The relationship between age and the level of complexity of consciousness: 30 years ago

In the 1980s, we began to report the results of our research, which suggested that some (though not all) people undergo a process of qualitative complication of consciousness already in adulthood. Moreover, the complication in form resembled quantum leaps of consciousness from early to late childhood and from late childhood to adolescence. When we reported our results at serious scientific forums, the neuroscientists sitting next to us greeted our reports with polite contempt. “You can assume that your conclusions come from longitudinal studies,” they said. – But exact science does not allow unsubstantiated conclusions. We look at things realistically. At the end of late adolescence, the brain does not undergo significant changes. Sorry!” Of course, these “natural scientists” did not deny that older people sometimes show greater wisdom and knowledge than young people. But they believed that this was a consequence of experience, which made it possible to “extract” more from unchanging mental abilities, and not of a qualitative improvement or complication of the abilities themselves.

So what now, 30 years later? It turned out that everyone made speculative conclusions, including neurophysiologists, who thought that they were observing the “immediate reality” of the object being studied. Today their experimental base is richer. And now the brain does not seem to them the same as it did 30 years ago. They talk about neuroplasticity and recognize the brain's phenomenal ability to adapt to its environment throughout life.

What if we were asked to draw the same graph of the level of complexity of consciousness versus age today? Based on 30 years of longitudinal research conducted by us and our colleagues—the result of painstakingly studying the responses of hundreds of people we surveyed at intervals of several years—we would draw this graph as in Fig. 1.2.

Rice. 1.2. The relationship between age and the level of complexity of consciousness: a modern view

Now two points are clear to us.

With a large enough sample, a moderately upward curve can be identified. From the perspective of the general population, complexity of consciousness tends to increase with age—throughout adult life, at least into old age. So its development does not end at age 20.

There are variations within any age group. For example, any of the six people who have turned 30 years old (darker points) may be at their own stage of consciousness development, different from the others. Consciousness

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Some 30 year olds may find it more complex than 40 year olds.

If we were to quickly draw a picture of what we have learned about the trajectory of human mental development in adulthood, it would look something like Fig. 1.3.

Rice. 1.3. Trajectory of human mental development in adulthood

This graph allows us to draw the following conclusions.

There are distinct levels – plateaus. The boundaries between them are not arbitrary. Each is a separate way of understanding the world.

Development is not continuous: there are periods of stability and change. When a person reaches the next plateau, he remains at this level for a long time (although it is possible to expand his knowledge and competencies). The intervals between transitions to new levels (periods of being on a plateau) lengthen over time. The curve shown on the graph becomes thinner, meaning the likelihood of reaching new, higher plateaus decreases. What are the levels of complexity of consciousness in adults? Is it possible to talk about what a person can see or do at a higher level, but not at a lower level? Today we know a lot about these levels. They don't show how smart you are in the traditional sense. Complexity of consciousness is not measured by the amount of knowledge or intelligence quotient (IQ). It does not imply the ability to comprehend complex matters like the endless formulas of a theoretical physicist the size of a school board.

Three plateaus – levels of complexity of human consciousness

We will cover this issue in more detail later, but for now we will begin with a brief examination of the three plateaus, or levels of complexity of adult thinking. Let's study Figure 1.4 and the sidebar. Three semantic systems of consciousness are shown here: socialized, self-authoring and self-transforming mind. Everyone makes sense of the world and acts in their own way. To see how each level manifests itself at work, you need to understand how they perceive the same phenomenon, such as the flow of information.

Rice. 1.4. Three plateaus in the development of adult consciousness

Read more about the three plateaus of adulthood

Socialized mind

Our personality is determined by the expectations of others.

Our personality remains intact through attunement with and loyalty to the group with which it identifies.

This sense of self is expressed primarily in relationships, either with people, or with ideas and beliefs, or with both.

We are able to detach ourselves from the environment in order to form our own internal position, on the basis of which we make judgments, that is, we gain authority for ourselves, allowing us to evaluate external events and make independent decisions.

Our personality maintains its integrity through being attuned to our belief system, ideology, or code of conduct and the ability to choose our path, hold our position, set clear boundaries, create and regulate them as we see fit.

Self-transforming mind

We are able to detach ourselves from our ideology and personal authority and see their limitations; understand that any system or self-organization is incomplete; show greater respect for controversy; strive to maintain multiple worldview systems, instead of sticking to one (your own) and projecting the rest onto other people.

Our personality maintains its integrity thanks to the ability not to confuse it with wholeness or completeness, as well as attunement with the entire dialectic of the process, and not with one of the extreme poles.

The operation of the system is determined by how information flows in the company: how people accept and receive it, to whom it is transmitted and how they treat it. Scholars of organizational culture, organizational behavior, and organizational change often study this issue, drawing on sophisticated theories about the influence of systems on human behavior. But, as a rule, they have a very rough idea of ​​how important the level of complexity of consciousness is when studying organizational culture.

Socialized mind

This level significantly affects the transmission and reception of information at work. The data that people send out depends largely on their beliefs about what others expect. Classic studies of groupthink show that team members often withhold important information when developing a common decision because, as one of them put it (this was revealed in a survey conducted some time after the study), “I thought the plan had no chance.” success, but our leader really wanted us to support him.”

Some studies were initially conducted in Asian countries. There, participants who “withheld” information claimed that they were trying to “save face” of the managers and not subject them to shame, even to the detriment of the company. The research results were presented as typical of “Asian civilization.” And the famous study of the phenomenon of submission to powerful authority, conducted by the famous social psychologist Stanley Milgram, was initially undertaken in order to comprehend the mentality of the “respectable Germans”. Milgram tried to determine what allowed a generally decent and non-sadistic people to obey orders to exterminate millions of Jews. But in pilot experiments in which the psychologist wanted to test his data collection method before heading to Germany, Milgram was surprised to find similar “respectable” people back home in the United States. We think of prudery as a characteristic feature of Asian culture, but research by Irving Janis and Paul Hart has clearly shown that groupthink is as pronounced in Texas and Toronto as it is in Tokyo and Taiwan. Groupthink and obedience to authority are based not so much on the national and cultural affiliation of people, but on the level of complexity of consciousness.

The socialized mind significantly influences how a person perceives incoming information. Because maintaining valuable connections and a sense of belonging is vital to the integrity of the individual, the socialized mind is highly sensitive to and highly influenced by the information it receives. Because of this, he often perceives something that goes far beyond the main, obvious layer of the message. We may become more attentive to subtexts or imaginary “clues,” giving them much more meaning than the sender of the information. Speculation usually surprises and irritates managers, who cannot understand how subordinates or team members could interpret their words so wrongly. But since the recipient of information may have a system for recognizing signal and noise that is impaired, what he perceives sometimes bears little resemblance to what the sender wanted to communicate.

A person at this level of consciousness tells others what he thinks they need to hear in order to

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optimally fulfill the tasks or mission of the project. He determines (consciously or unconsciously) the direction of his thoughts based on his own plans, his position, strategy and goals. It is in this context that communication takes place. The developed course of action or plan can be brilliant or not so brilliant. A person may be talented at attracting others to participate in his plans or not be able to do this. This affects other personality traits as well. But the level of complexity of consciousness greatly influences whether a person orients his information flow in order to, figuratively speaking, drive the car himself (as in the case of the self-authoring mind) or sit in the passenger seat so that someone else will drive him (the socialized mind).

This approach also works when obtaining information. We create filters that shape the flow of incoming information. They classify information by priority, highlighting that which a person expects or does not expect, but which is important for his plans, position, and status. Filters also discard unnecessary and uninteresting information.

A person whose thinking is at this level usually has an excellent ability to concentrate and distinguish between the important and the urgent in order to effectively spend limited time resources on correctly classifying the endless signals vying for his attention. It is by this attribute that one can define a self-authoring mind. But the same property can lead to disaster if the plan created is flawed, misses an important component that is discarded by the filter, or the world changes so much that a previously effective filter becomes obsolete.

Self-transforming mind

The self-transforming mind has a filter, but does not “merge” with it. A person is already able to look at it, and not through it. Why? Because he treats any idea, belief and opinion with both respect and suspicion. He realizes that no matter how attractive the idea may seem, there are likely to be flaws in it and something has been overlooked. a self-transforming mind understands that an idea lives in time, and the world is constantly changing and what is important today may become unimportant tomorrow.

Therefore, in communication, people with this level of complexity of consciousness not only promote their plans and ideas, but also leave opportunities for their modification or expansion. They may send messages that include requests and requests for information. But they are looking for new information not only within their frame of reference or project (to complete their tasks). They also strive to adjust their coordinate system. They are looking for information that will allow them or their team to improve, develop, or even change the original idea and add new approaches. Unlike people whose complexity of consciousness is at a socialized level, people with a self-transforming consciousness do not send signals about being included in the number of “passengers”, and unlike people with a self-authoring mind, they do not only send signals about being admitted to control of the car, but also about clarifying the map or changing direction altogether.

When a self-transforming mind perceives information, it uses the filter to its advantage, but does not become a hostage to it. People with this level of mental organization can drive a car when they know they have a good map. But they prioritize information that alerts them to the limitations of their frame of reference or perspective. They value their filter and its ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, but understand that it may also miss something valuable: a thought or idea that no one asked for, an anomalous event, an out-of-the-ordinary point of view that will turn the project on its head and will be taken to a higher level.

People whose consciousness is at this level are more likely to pay attention to such information: it is to them that it is usually communicated. Why? Because they not only pay attention to it, but also understand that their behavior can significantly influence the determination of others to approach them with such information. People around them do not doubt whether they should convey “minor” and yet potentially important information. They send her because people with self-transforming minds have made it clear to everyone in advance that they welcome her.

Complexity of consciousness and performance

The above description of the three plateaus of complexity of consciousness, based on one important aspect of the organization's work - its information flows - reflects the characteristics of each of these levels. These characteristics also determine the value of each of them. Theoretically, each subsequent level is formally “higher” than the previous one: people on it can perform cognitive functions of a lower level, while adding new ones.

But a discussion of the issue of information flows assumes that the formal characteristics of development levels are manifested in life and have real consequences for a person’s behavior in an organization and his professional competence. In general, it can be said that people with a higher level of complexity of consciousness usually perform better.

Can this be considered just a hypothesis, not yet fully substantiated, or has this conclusion been thoroughly tested and systematized? There are already a number of studies that link measurements of the complexity of a person’s consciousness with independent assessments of his professional competence and effectiveness. We'll talk about them in more detail later, but for now we'll just try to understand the main trends.

Renowned leadership researcher Keith Eigel assessed the complexity of the minds of 21 presidents and CEOs of large successful companies, each of which has become an industry leader and has an average annual revenue of more than $5 billion. (He used a 90-minute interview technique that was developed by us and our colleagues. “Subject-object interviews”, described below, have been widely used in many countries and in various fields over the past 20 years. They accurately reveal the dynamics of changes in the level of complexity of consciousness in people, as well as development trends within one level.)

Using a variety of tools to measure executives' performance, Eigel assessed their abilities in the following areas.

Ability to question the effectiveness of accepted organizational processes.

The ability to be a source of inspiration for the emergence of a shared vision.

Ability to manage conflicts.

Ability to solve problem situations.

The ability to delegate some of your authority to others.

Ability to promote the development of independence.

Ability to build relationships.

How do we assess the level of complexity of consciousness?

Our tool is a 90-minute interview technique. It was called “Subject-Object Interview”. We chose it because the complexity of the development of consciousness is a derivative of how it distinguishes our thoughts and feelings (that is, it can look

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on them, to make them an object of awareness) from the thoughts and feelings that “own us” (that is, guide our actions and the subjects of which we are). Each level of complexity in its own way draws an invisible boundary between what at a given level is an object for a person and what is a subject. The higher the level, the more information a person is able to perceive as an object. What he does not see (the subject) occupies less and less space. The technique is very accurate: it helps to reliably determine the five transition points within each level of complexity of consciousness.

The survey begins with an invitation to use ten key cards on which key words are written.

Anxiety, nervousness.

Firm position, conviction.

Depression.

Touched, inspired.

Loss, separation.

Turn.

Importance.

In the first 15 minutes, we ask the interviewee to make notes on all the cards with answers to the questions: “Remember recent situations that made you angry (nervousness, fear, excitement, etc.), and write down on the card the first thing that comes to mind " Next, the survey is carried out systematically: the respondent tells us what happened (and caused anger, awareness of success, etc.), and we try to find out why this happened (what that situation meant for him). We chose these cues because previous research has shown that they successfully delineate the boundaries within which people construct their understanding of the world around them. A trained interviewer can effectively analyze material to understand what the interviewee can and cannot currently see in the world around them (so-called blind spots).

Surveys are recorded and processed using a uniform methodology. Thousands of such surveys have already been conducted in different countries of the world, the participants of which were people of different ages and different social status. Most of them find these surveys very interesting.

Current page: 4 (book has 22 pages total) [available reading passage: 6 pages]

Change Resistance Card: Ron

Let's take a look at another “snapshot” that reveals the true picture of aversion to change. Ron Halpern is the CEO of Peter's company. He has been by Peter's side almost from the day he founded the company. A bright, open and gentle person. Ron has over 30 years of experience in the financial services industry. A lawyer by training. Ron and Peter are more than colleagues: they are good friends.

As the manager responsible for the day-to-day running of the company, Ron must often make decisions without consulting anyone and risking criticism from his colleagues. He usually does his job easily, except for one case: when he has to approve decisions from senior management. And in principle, he was not surprised by what he heard from his colleagues when he asked them to express their comments, considering them one of the most important assistants in self-improvement. Ron described his goals and commitments (column 1) as follows.

Communicate your thoughts more clearly and persistently to your colleagues.

It is more effective to approve decisions from the company management.

Don't try to "be good to everyone."

Do not be afraid to express your opinion to the CEO, focus less on his approval and support.

Like Peter, Ron was direct and frank when filling out Column 2.

I'm not straightforward enough.

I too often adjust to someone else’s mood, coordinate issues, and overly insure myself against negative reactions.

I try to please people, especially management.

I value the CEO's opinion too much.

After filling out column 3, the mind map, or “X-ray” of aversion to change, took the following form (Table 2.3).

Table 2.3. The original map of the Rhone

Ron's adaptive problems are different from Peter's. But his cards show balance. Immunity to change balances the opposing forces of conflicting commitments. This is always a “one foot on the brake pedal, the other on the gas pedal” situation.

Some people call our maps a person's internal status quo. We do not use this term: it carries with it connotations of static and lack of energy. When one foot of a person presses on the gas and the other on the brake, this closed system contains huge amount of energy. But since it flows in opposite directions, the car does not move. Imagine if Peter and Ron could tap into the energy that lies in their resistance to change. And in their place it could be you (or your colleagues). What could Peter and Ron (or we) do with this energy that we are unable to do now? (We'll talk more about this in Part II.)

The shortcomings that Ron identified in his chart (column 2) cannot be corrected with “New Year's resolutions.” “X-ray” testifies: a lack of directness, an excessive desire to coordinate everything and everyone, constant attempts to please colleagues and management are the most effective actions from the point of view of his hidden commitments, reflected in column 3. But his habits do not at all stem from that , which is inscribed in column 2. Ron discovered (as we will tell later) the desire to please everyone in the company and have authority, as well as to maintain a strong relationship with Peter at any cost.

But the reasons for such behavior may be different. Another person with similar goals and shortcomings may find himself trying to avoid responsibility for bad decisions and company failures (hence he always tries to shift responsibility for key decisions to others). Someone may find out that they are trying to avoid envy or resentment, not stick out too much, not be “on the other side of the barricades,” approaching the status of “boss” and moving away from “mere mortals.” (Ron doesn't have such problems, although he might well have.)

As we will see later, the latent commitments in column 3 are the main indicators of the need for adaptive change. It is important to understand that although many people have the same shortcomings, their true motivation (which ensures effectiveness) may be different.

Let's go back to the example of losing weight. (Are you already intrigued? After all, you probably expected us to help you fight for your waist.) We said that the weight problem was not adaptive for Peter, unlike most of us. People all over the world lose millions of kilograms of weight every year thanks to diets. But then they gain even more. What is the reason?

What we wrote down in the overcoming map on the table. 2.4 applies to many of us.

Table 2.4. Collective map of problems associated with weight loss

Column 1: We usually have a sincere desire to lose weight—to improve our health, for vanity, or to make our clothes fit better. The reasons may vary. Column 2: When we are asked to identify those behaviors and actions that interfere with achieving a goal, many begin to say that they are not eating well. We eat too much even when we are not hungry; We consume too fatty foods or carbonated drinks.

We are trying to solve the problem using the actions outlined in column 2. In this sense, the diet example is very clear. It often fails because we need a clearer (non-technical) formulation of the problem. We must understand that the change required here is adaptive, and our behavior described in column 2 is not necessarily unconstructive. It may even be correct and effective in its own way.

But while the items in Columns 1 and 2 may be similar for different people, the actual reasons for aversion to change often differ. This shows up in column 3.

We have worked with many people who wanted to lose weight. (There is currently a project underway in Copenhagen that is evaluating the effectiveness of our approaches to treating obesity.) One of our patients discovered that he overeats not out of hunger, but to relieve boredom and inner emptiness. For him, food became a kind of cure for these feelings.

Another person described himself as “a member of a loving clan who finds joy in weekly hearty, intergenerational feasts. I’m Italian-American!” He was referring to shared Sunday family dinners: “You can't fully understand this unless you're Italian. But when I go on a diet and refuse extra spaghetti cooked by my loving aunt, I see the martyr look on her face and hear the words that pierce right through me: that I now consider myself above my family members, and not one of them. And I love all my relatives. And they offer me not just a supplement, but their love. Giving up on her is unbearably painful. I guess you could phrase it as the desire to feel a close connection with these people.”

Our third client regularly tries to lose 10 kg. Usually she boldly goes on a diet, loses these kilograms, and soon gains them back. She found that she tended to avoid "excessive sexual pressure" in interactions. Whenever she loses weight, she finds herself surrounded by men who look at her not as a person, but only as a sex object. Having personal sad experience, she gets irritated.

No matter how similar the goals and flaws in the behavior of these three people are (columns 1 and 2), the specific (adaptive) formulations of the problem of their struggle with weight are different (see Table 2.4). For each of them, losing weight is an adaptive problem, but different in all cases. None of them will achieve success solely through diet. The path to success is different for them, because the reasons for not accepting change are also different.

This is the essence of the process by which we discovered the phenomenon of aversion to change. We can imagine the reaction you are most likely experiencing right now. It's quite possible that as you look at these first "X-rays" from our lab (especially the third columns of Peter and Ron's charts), you're thinking, "Where do they find people who are so eager to show strangers their underwear? I don’t know whether to admire their honesty, frankness and responsiveness, or to be horrified by their desire to expose themselves naked, to demonstrate their flaws and all that. But this is not the main thing. I can't imagine that my colleagues, and especially me myself I can show this to others. Of course, the ideas are interesting and help you look deep into yourself. I’m even beginning to imagine what some of my friends would write in the third column. But I don't understand what can be done about it. I am sure there are few people who would agree to reveal themselves to others. I think Keegan and Lahey are working with a special type of person who is open to this kind of experimentation.”

And we might think the same if we didn’t know what happened later with these “X-rays.” But more on that later. And now we confidently declare: the people from whom these “pictures” were taken, like many others like them, in no case belong to any special type. They are the same as you. They work in the same fields as you. Most likely, they belong to the same age group and social classes as you. And they are no more inclined than you to share personal feelings with someone.

We can make these statements because the type of people we created these maps with are very common. It includes different personalities of different professions and positions. These are engineers and teachers, CEOs and CIA officers, surgeons, professional judges, doctors and university presidents, administrators in the child welfare system, school principals and their deputies, corporate vice presidents, bankers, lawyers, business consultants working in the largest multinational companies, librarians, managers, senior managers, production managers, accountants, people with doctorates in business, education, government and medicine, professors and retirees, army colonels, union leaders and programmers, CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations , and small business owners. They live in the USA, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, South America, India, the Middle East, Singapore, Shanghai and South Africa. Although most are college graduates and middle class, they are no different from other people in terms of self-disclosure, self-esteem, or expressiveness. They may have spent no more or less time than you in the offices of psychotherapists or other self-reflection specialists.

When we started creating their maps, none of them were prompted to draw such revealing and intriguing pictures. If we had told them in advance what we expected of them, some of them might well refuse to participate in our experiment, and others might be skeptical about it. So don't think that people who have their X-ray portraits taken are special.

At the simplest level, any manifestation of resistance to change is a picture of how we are systematically working against the very goal that we sincerely want to achieve. But the dynamic equilibrium, or status quo, hinders us much more than in achieving a single goal. It holds us at one point on the curve of the complexity of consciousness. Our aversion to change gives us an understanding of both the “external” and “internal” reasons for asserting that the adult mind is developing.

We can find these external and internal reasons if we discuss in more detail what we have already discussed earlier. The immune system is very wise and seeks to protect you, maybe even save your life. Taking a deeper look at this function will help us understand what aversion to change really is. Moreover, the idea will arise that development involves the work of both the mind and the heart. We said that the adaptive formulation of problems usually occurs at the border of our level of thinking and it always reflects the world of our feelings and thoughts. How does aversion to change work in this “dualistic” understanding? What new things do we learn from it about our minds and hearts?

Let's start with hearts. It is impossible to constantly deal with a phenomenon we have discovered for 20 years and not develop a new approach to human courage.

Courage involves the ability to act even when we are afraid of something. Even a serious and consistent step will not be courageous if we do not feel fear while taking it. Any step can show how smart, energetic and focused we are. But not everyone will demonstrate how brave we are. Our courage can only be shown by taking a step associated with fear. We have come to a new appreciation for human courage because we have discovered something that would be hard for a successful and capable person to believe: people are afraid more often than we think.

Surely now you are saying to yourself: “I am not afraid. I'm fine." And you're right. You don't feel afraid. After all, you deal with him constantly. Without realizing it, you have created a very effective anxiety management system. This is aversion to change, or immunity to change.

Worries and anxieties, as we have gradually realized, are the most important (and least explored) personal experiences of a person in his public life. When you look at "x-rays" like Peter and Ron's, you see a dimension of a person's thinking that usually remains hidden. It belongs more to the realm of feelings than rational thinking. It's not anxiety as such. This is a tool to manage it. An X-ray of our resistance to change offers us a schematic picture of how a person copes not with acute or episodic anxiety, but with persistent, latent anxieties that accompany him throughout his life.

Peter's immune system is probably trying to suppress the constant fear that he may no longer be indispensable and will lose control over everything. Ron's immune system must control his worries that his personal relationships in the company's leadership may be at risk. But none of them consciously experience these worries and fears; their immune systems work automatically. Successful people like Peter and Ron, we, you, have very strong and self-sustaining systems for suppressing worry and anxiety that help in a variety of situations.

But even very effective systems for controlling worries and anxieties are expensive. They create blind spots, prevent us from learning new things, and constantly constrain our actions in different areas. These costs are especially pronounced when we are unable to make the changes we desperately need to move to the new, higher level we so want to achieve.

Many of our efforts at self-improvement take place in a limited psychological space that does not allow significant changes to manifest themselves. Without the map, Peter and Ron would try to change their actions recorded in column 2. A person wanting to lose weight would go on a diet. No matter how hard they worked, no matter how hard they tried to eliminate their shortcomings (column 2), everything would remain the same until the way of thinking changed. They can't learn new things. Neither Peter and Ron, nor we, are able to maintain the old way of thinking and at the same time achieve our goals indicated in column 1. How to resolve this contradiction?

We can summarize much of what we've learned about overcoming change aversion into three things.

Overcoming immunity does not require refusal to use all systems that resist unrest and anxiety. We will always need them. When our physical immune system rejects what the body needs, the answer should not be a complete rejection of the immune system. The solution for Peter and Ron, as for all of us, is to change the immune system so that it achieves the goals formulated in column 1. Of course, changing it is a difficult task, because...

It is not the change itself that causes anxiety, but our feeling that we are vulnerable to what we perceive as danger and what makes us anxious. One of the most common, universally accepted and misunderstood quasi-truths is “change causes discomfort.” If you were told that tomorrow you would win the lottery, find the love of your life, and finally be promoted to partner, I think you would only agree that it would bring big changes in your life. But you will also say that anxiety is not people's first reaction to such news. It is not the prospect of change that brings discomfort, nor even the change itself, which is sometimes associated with serious difficulties. Rather, what is alarming is change that leaves us vulnerable to the dangers around us. We create an immune system to save our lives. And it is not easy for us to give up such important protection.

But remember: we Can overcome the limitations of our immune system. It is not so difficult to replace a too rigid system of managing anxieties and fears with a more free one (the boundaries of which can also be discovered over time, and the problem of overcoming them will then arise again).

When we overcome our aversion to change, we stop engaging in unworthy trade: our immune system freed us from worry, in return creating the illusion that there was much we could not do. But we can. As if testing the wrongness of his beliefs, Peter began to give in to others, facilitating integration in the new, more complex company he began to create. Ron became much more effective at getting feedback from management and found that in most cases, not only did he not jeopardize his relationships within the company, but he very often succeeded in strengthening them.

The phenomenon of change aversion that we discovered not only explains why people sometimes have difficulty deciding to make changes that they themselves passionately desire. It shows how everything works system. It helps us control a very powerful part of our emotional lives - the deep (and often justified) feeling that danger is all around and a reasonable person must take care of himself. An "X-ray" of change aversion is like a page from the secret plan of a personal defense system. The bottom line is that we cannot successfully make adaptive changes without risking what has previously taken care of us well.

Exploring change aversion takes us deeper into our emotional world, as does framing any adaptive problem. Immunity to change, as this phrase itself tells us, is our self-defense system.

But our resistance to change is not just a self-defense system. Now we will tell you something very interesting. If we are lucky, you will soon understand how the phenomenon we talk about in this book - immunity to change leading to change aversion - brings together all the elements we discussed above: gaining a new understanding of change, increasing the complexity of human consciousness and constant need to manage anxiety.

The basis of any knowledge (what philosophers call epistemology) is an abstract-sounding category called “subject-object relations.” Any way of knowing can be described in terms of for what he looks (object), and that With using what he looks (the same “filter” or “lens” of which he is the subject). For small children, for example, subject there is still sensory perception. When something looks small (for example, people and cars, if you look at them from the roof of a tall building), then the child believes that it really small 9
The way they see and feel the world is subject to this subject– sensory-sensory perception, or, as it is called in academic psychology, the level of perception. They cannot yet distance themselves from the subjectively perceived senses; they are this perceptual perception. When consciousness develops, at a higher level it acquires the ability to be aware of perception, to take some kind of perspective in relation to it, that is, to look at it as conscious an object. Then what is perceived ceases to be interpreted literally. Note scientific ed.

Children three to five years old may exclaim: “Look how small the people are below!” Those who are already 8–10 years old are able to step back from their perceptions and look at him as an object. They will say: “Look how small seem this is where the people are from!”

Knowledge of the world becomes more complex when a person is able to look on that what used to be something through what we looked at the world 10
In other words, to make an object of awareness what was previously exclusively our subject. Note scientific ed.

In other words, when we create a new system that integrates the existing one and expands on its basis. If we want to increase the complexity of our consciousness, we need to transfer some aspects of understanding the world from the zone of the subject to the zone of the object. Then our view will change, and the way of knowing or understanding characteristic of the current level of development will become something like a “tool” that we have(we can use it and control it), ceasing to be what owns us(and therefore controls and uses).

Each of the levels of complexity of consciousness that we began to explore in Chapter 1 is characterized by clearly different relationships in the subject-object pair. Each subsequent level is a more complex way of cognition, allowing objective look at what through the prism of what we used to perceive the world. Figure 2.1 summarizes subject-object relationships at each level of adult development.

Rice. 2.1. Subject-object relations expand at each level of consciousness development

For example, a person who perceives the world at the level of a socialized mind is subjectively subordinate to the values ​​and expectations of the environment (be it his family; his religious or social group; his leaders who determine the conditions of his professional or financial existence). The risks and dangers perceived by this person stem from the fact that he is not included in the team or those around him do not trust him; that he may be rejected by his environment and lose support; that he may be treated poorly by those whose assessment is directly transformed into his self-esteem.

At the next level of complexity of consciousness - self-authoring - a person is able to distinguish between the opinions of other people (even those important to him) and his own. Of course, he is able to take into account other people's opinions, but determines himself, to what extent and how it will influence him. People who have advanced to this level of consciousness can take an entire category of worldview, consisting of the opinions of other people, and use it as a tool. This more complex way of understanding the world allows us to perceive the opinions of other people as a conscious object, rather than a perceiving subject.

The ability to subordinate opinions, values, beliefs and ideas (our own and others) to a more complex system, to place them in its context - to rank by priority, to combine, to create new values ​​and beliefs that we did not know existed before - allows us to become authors your reality and view yourself as the source of your own internal authority. Hence the term “self-authored mind.”

This new way of knowing does not eliminate the anticipation of risks and dangers from our mental life. Rather, it changes the basis and context in which forebodings arise. Anxiety is no longer caused by the fear of being rejected by one’s own clan, or “tribe,” but, for example, by the fear of not meeting one’s standards; fear that we will not be able to fulfill our goals and objectives, that we will lose control over life; fear of the ink drying out in the pen with which we write the story of our lives.

And if a person is not going to remain forever hostage to his theories, concepts, plots, contexts and ideology, he must create an even more comprehensive system of knowledge that will allow him to look on your belief system, not through her. Then the conceptual coordinate system used by a person becomes preliminary, developing. This allows you to gain more emotional and mental space, to question the boundaries of existing frameworks, rather than just defending the existing framework as complete and viewing any counter-proposals as a blow to yourself.

These three qualitatively different levels of complexity of mental development represent three different approaches from the point of view of epistemology. Every way of knowing maintains a balance between what is the subject and what is the object. The development of the ability to cognition - adaptation - implies bringing the cognitive system into a non-equilibrium state, allowing one to gain the ability "look at"where before we could only " look through».

But the question remains: “ What helps or enables us to make the transition from subject to object? What determines the development of complexity of consciousness? Can we use our understanding of these factors to nurture and accelerate this development?”

Research from Harvard professors that will help you overcome inertia and “immunity to change” in your company.

A recent study found that when cardiologists seriously warn their high-risk patients that they will literally die unless they make lifestyle changes such as dieting, exercising, and quitting smoking, only one in seven such patients turns out to be capable of serious changes in his life!

If people are not willing to change even when their own lives are at stake, then how can managers at any level in different organizations expect success from the changes they make (even though employees may wholeheartedly support them) when the stakes and possible Are the returns from these activities not at all as high as in the case of heart patients?

Like cardiology patients, the challenges to change facing today's leaders and their teams are, for the most part, not issues of will. The problem is our inability to bridge the gap between what we sincerely, even passionately, want and what we are actually capable of. Bridging this gap is a major challenge for psychology in the twenty-first century.

In their book, Keegan and Lahey show how you can overcome “change immunity” and lead your company forward.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part introduces you to a new understanding of change. The second shows the value of Keegan and Lahey's approach to the employee, work teams and entire organizations. The third part is devoted to practice - in it the authors invite you to try the approach on yourself.

Who is this book for?

For managers and executives who are interested in self-learning issues for their organizations.