9/25/07 6:00 AM

Smoothing Change Management: It’s All in the Mind

By Leon Rubis

HARROGATE, England—Neuroscience—the study of the anatomy and physiology of the brain—is at the beginning of a new era in understanding the brain in ways that can advance organizational change management.

That assessment comes from David Rock, founder and CEO of Results Coaching Systems, a Sydney, Australia-based international coaching and training consultancy, who spoke here Sept. 18 at the annual conference of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the U.K. association of 130,000 HR professionals.

Recent discoveries in how the brain functions offer new insights into why change is so difficult for individuals, according to Rock, a faculty member of CIMBA, an international business school in Europe, and author of Quiet Leadership: Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work (HarperCollins, 2006).

Change is painful because it requires hard work. Only 4 percent of the brain—the last part to develop in humans’ evolution—is used to process data, and “it takes a huge amount of effort,” Rock said. He cited research showing a significant drop in research subjects’ glucose levels immediately after they completed an assignment requiring them to make a decision.

From birth, people learn and develop by continuously making millions of new connections in the brain. “When we make a connection, we feel engaged. … We get a little burst of adrenaline and dopamine,” Rock said. On the other hand, when the brain struggles to make connections between new and old information, “a mental impasse has been reached, which we revisit until resolution.” While “people are energized by new connections,” they find disconnections frustrating, tiring and de-energizing.

Essentially, he said, “The goal of coaching is to change the brain. You’re facilitating self-directed neuroplasticity,” or helping people change their brains.

An initial key is to gain people’s attention and engagement of their “working memory.” This is a “mental sketch pad” where people think, summoning memories, experiences and data to process tasks and make decisions. Rock likened it to a small stage upon which only a few actors will fit at a time.

Using this part of the brain “is very intensive—it requires getting something out of your long-term memory and holding it there” without degradation. In fact, pondering three concepts or variables at a time is an effective limit for most people, and performance drops dramatically when a fourth is introduced.

Imagine the difficulty “if you’re trying to put on the stage something you’ve never seen” such as new, unfamiliar job responsibilities or an employer’s vision of future business demands. “It’s very hard to put on the stage what we haven’t seen or haven’t seen recently. … We have to respect the limitations of the brain when we ask people to change.”

How can understanding how the brain works help organizations implement change? Rock noted that any change in a job may threaten an employee’s actual or perceived status compared with others’, a quality that—at an instinctual level—affects survival.

It’s also important to give people “some kind of choice. When people feel they don’t have any choice, that’s a major stressor. … When we have a choice, we’re in the connection side rather than the disconnected side,” Rock said.

And it’s necessary to give people time to reflect and process new information and the necessity for change. “The act of change is made up of many very small insights,” he added. “When you tell someone what to do, your status goes up and theirs goes down. When they have an insight, their status goes up.”

Rock even recommended including information on how the brain works in change management programs to help participants understand how they are reacting and can better accept needed changes. “A lot of people say ‘I’m not going to introduce that into my company because it’s too complicated,’ ” said Rock, “but there is so much useful that is very handy.”

HR Challenges in Europe

Another presentation at the conference reviewed the major HR challenges that European businesses foresee, as revealed by a 2007 survey conducted by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the European Association for Personnel Management.

The survey of 1,350 executives in 27 countries, supplemented by in-depth interviews with 100 executives, identified five topics thought to be of high importance for the future and of limited HR capability:

• Managing talent. Because of talent shortages in Europe and abroad, companies must source skilled professionals from throughout the world, targeting their opportunities to meet the needs of different ethnic groups, nationalities, ages and other factors.

• Managing demographics. The graying of the Western European workforce presents the risk of lost capacity and knowledge as workers retire and lost productivity as the workforce ages.

• Becoming a learning organization. Organizations must help employees cope with the accelerated speed and complexity of the global economy. Training programs must have clearly defined and measured return on investment.

• Managing work/life balance. As the boundaries between personal and work time blur, companies will need to offer flexible work arrangements to attract and retain the best talent as well as appeal to employees’ desire for a sense of greater purpose in their work.

• Managing change and cultural transformation. Entering new markets and hiring more international workers puts a premium on managing corporate and cultural change.

Presenter Michael Leicht, BCG project leader in Dusseldorf, Germany, emphasized that “if you want to get support from senior management [to face these challenges], you have to be good in the basics” of HR such as recruiting, staffing and other HR processes, and in serving as a strategic partner with sound business acumen and metrics.

The CIPD conference concluded Sept. 20.

Leon Rubis is editorial director of SHRM.

Related Resources:

Results Coaching Systems

NeuroLeadership Institute

The Future of HR in Europe: Key Challenges Through 2015

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