Understand Why People Resist Organizational Change
Change is both a scary and a hopeful word. It’s scary in that it seems that many church people seem to often oppose it. It’s hopeful because all living things change, and we want our churches to be fully alive. Awareness of how our brains work can help you more successfully bring about the changes you want. People resist or embrace your changes largely based on unconscious factors, because the brain tends to interpret change as a threat, which, in turn, creates resistance. The brain is organized around a fundamental principle: Minimize threat-maximize reward, which results in either resistance to change or openness to it. The uncertainty of change feels like a threat, which engages the brain’s fear centers and creates resistance to change.
God wired our brains for us to seek reward and certainty in our lives. When the future feels ambiguous or uncertain, we subconsciously feel threatened, which creates an away response (avoid that which threatens us) that results in resistance. On the other hand, we are drawn toward safety, reward, and pleasure, what cognitive neuroscientists called a toward response.
Away responses from people include negativity, fear, passive aggression, or complaining. Toward responses might include excitement, support, and good gossip, how we hope people will respond. The more uncertain and ambiguous church change appears, the less support you’ll get and the more difficult the change will become. So what do we need to remember so that our changes feel less ambiguous, uncertain, or threatening? Consider these brain-based insights:
Uncertainty Causes People to Fill in Their Knowledge Gaps with Fearful Thoughts
Because uncertainty engages the brain’s fear centers, people don’t think as clearly when fear is in control. Fear causes more blood, and thus oxygen (the brain’s fuel), to flow to our brain’s emotional centers (the limbic system) and from our brain’s thinking center (the pre-frontal cortex). Because the brain is biased toward negative thinking, people will fill in their information gaps about your change with assumptions that tend to be negative. So the less information you provide, the more people will fill in those gaps with incorrect, fear-based assumptions. As a result, they will become more resistant to change.
People tend to underestimate their ability to weather difficult future events, and change is usually seen as difficult. Uncertainty causes us to poorly forecast how well we can face the difficulties that change might bring. The concept is called “affective forecasting.” When you present change, often others will initially assume that life will be worse for them due to the change. As James Belasco and Ralph Stayer, authors of Flight of the Buffalos, wrote, “Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up.” Keep in mind that people tend to initially latch onto the potential negatives of your change initiative rather than onto the positives.
You Don’t Have a Second Chance to Make a Good First Impression
When people first hear about your change, they will tend to draw an initial impression. The quaint saying that we don’t have a second chance to make a good first impression is more than folklore. Science backs it up. Make sure from day one you commit to clear and hopeful communication. The week I wrote this chapter, I blundered when I introduced a team in our church that would guide our long-range planning process. Some people drew a wrong impression about the team’s purpose. Once I realized this, I quickly created an insert for the following Sunday’s bulletin to clarify the team’s mandate and hopefully decrease resistance to the team’s ultimate findings.
Emotions Influence Receptivity to Change
As leaders, we’d prefer that everyone think logically. However, emotions profoundly affect perception, judgment, and thinking. If you simply present facts about your change without engaging positive and hopeful emotions, your change effort will suffer.
The Human Brain Can Handle Only So Much Change at Once
If you try to create too much organizational change at once, information overload can cause people’s fear centers to further activate and resist change. As I noted earlier, when people fear, they don’t think as clearly. Make sure you spread out your change initiatives over time rather than pushing too many organizational changes at once.
Old Habits Die Hard
The older we get, we more easily default to what we know. It’s like a river that for many years has cut a deep gorge in the earth. It would be hard to change its course. Likewise, older people find it harder to think about other options. Our brain’s habit centers get less flexible as we age. It’s like a tug-of-war between the familiar and easy (what we are used to, our habits) and the unfamiliar and difficult (the change). But older people can still change if you help them understand the why of change and if you communicate clearly (and, of course, if they really want to change). I’ve had to keep this in mind at my church because we have a large seniors’ group.
Resistance to Change Often Increases the Closer You Get to the Actual Change
People’s response to change actually changes over time. Let’s say you introduce a change that will take place a year from now (you plan to go to two services in your church). Initially, people may see the benefits of another service, such as the flexibility more service time options offers. They probably won’t consider the negatives as much like needing more volunteer ushers and children’s workers. When the change lies farther into the future, positive feelings usually outstrip negative feelings. However, as the change gets closer, people tend to think more about the negative implications and get more fearful. The cost of the change seems more real then, whereas the positives seemed more real early on. The closer you get to implementing change, expect more resistance because uninformed optimism will give way to informed pessimism. Consider how to accentuate the positives the closer you get to your change.
Minimize Cognitive Dissidence
Cognitive dissonance is the inner tension we feel when our beliefs conflict with our behavior (i.e., I want to lose weight but I’m eating a bag of Cheetos) or with new information. Cognitive dissonance creates anxiety that can make us less open to change. One way to help minimize it is to preach and teach to help change people’s beliefs about the change you’re proposing. If you can help them agree that the reason for the change is biblical (i.e., reach more people by starting a second service), you can help them shift their thinking to align more with a change they must make (i.e., their willingness to sacrifice convenient parking during a renovation). Behavior change tends to follow a change in belief.
Account for the Sunk Cost Bias
Change efforts demand our time, energy, and often our financial resources. Hopefully, people see the benefits your organizational changes will bring. Often, however, the changes will mean people have to give up something they’ve invested themselves in. When they’ve already invested considerable time and energy into something, stopping or changing it may seem foolish.
Unfortunately, we tend not to ask ourselves if we really should continue investing in a project or ministry. A subtle mental trap comes into play called the sunk cost bias, a concept that explains why it’s hard to stop something we’ve invested significant time and energy into. We feel that if we quit, we’d waste what we’ve already invested and be a failure, even though we should cut our losses and redirect our efforts. When seeking to effect organizational change, recognize that people may have invested in what you hope to change and their emotional connection to it may increase their resistance to the organizational change. Cueing into emotional attachments from the sunk cost bias can help you discover potential pockets of resistance.
