Resistance to Change – Part 2: The inertia of culture
We are creatures of habit. We operate within our comfort zone and resist change that makes us act outside of it. The resistance level is proportional to how far outside of the comfort zone we are asked to go. Thus a change program must move our comfort zone by increment towards new practices. But that is not enough.Teams exist because we are creatures of habit. We need the consistency of others. It allows us to operate within our comfort zone within the team. In fact the team culture mandates it.
Culture is not something we define or prescribe. It emerges. It is a tacit agreement between all participants. I like to think of culture as an unconscious jigsaw puzzle, where each individual comfort zone is made to fit together. Team members fit in the team by adjusting their actions slightly. If we are in a team long enough, these adjustments become part of our comfort zone. And that’s the problem.
I was assigned to lead a large multi-million dollar bid. We were proposing a system that had consistently lost in the last few years. A bureaucratic system of interdepartmental paper trail ensured that no department would share ideas with the next to reduce overall costs. Corporate silos reinforced with Kevlar.
Opting for speed and cooperation between departments, I ignored the system. Within days, I had managers pulling me aside to explain that I ought to use the paper trail system. Otherwise, after we lost, I would d have no way of protecting myself. I’d surely get fired. Worst, I would drag unsuspecting low-level engineers ignorant of office politics with me.
None of the managers consulted each other before they talked to me. They just did. None of them instructed their engineers to not give me information if I did not document the requests according to the bureaucratic system. They just did.
A few engineers on the team who had been against the system, and followed suit got the same treatment. It was us against the culture. And the culture was winning.
Culture reinforces actions that are aligned with it and resists actions that are not. It does not reason with you. It’s automatic, and comes from everybody, at the same time. The culture validates the comfort zone of all members. Individually, they each defend their comfort zone, and in doing so protect all others. Your changing would force some if not all of them to adjust to your change. Having pushed yourself outside of your comfort zone, you’re forcing them out too. Reaction is swift, and strong.
“Listen sonny, I don’t know how they did things at that place you came from, but that’s not the way we do things around here.”
In physics, inertia is a property of an object that resists change to its motion. The more massive the object, the more inertia it has. It’s the same with teams. Just replace mass with the size of the team. Culture is the inertia of the team.
To beat the inertia we need to apply enough force to enough mass. Within teams, we speak of reaching “critical mass”. Mass for our purpose is a combination of the influence people have, as well as the number of people. The greater number of people that change, the less there will be those who remain to push back. Of course, if everybody changes except for the management, it will be hard to reach critical mass. But we already know that management must support change, so I won’t focus on it.
It’s all about the comfort zone. We must plan Change in increments, designed to minimize individual resistance at each step. And we need critical mass. Enough team members must step through the change process at the same time.
There’s more to change than this, obviously. For example, how to choose the increments to make change happen fast. But without managing the comfort zone and achieving critical mass, change is but impossible.