Business Insight Zone

Three years ago Fast Company published an Alan Deutschman article that opened my eyes to the deep need for better-informed psychological approaches to the world of business. Deutschman, who later expanded the article into a book, launched the piece with a one of those crackerjack openings that magazine writers pine for:

Change or Die.

What if you were given that choice? For real. What if it weren’t just the hyperbolic rhetoric that conflates corporate performance with life and death? Not the overblown exhortations of a rabid boss, or a slick motivational speaker, or a self-dramatizing CEO. We’re talking actual life or death now. Your own life or death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you didn’t, your time would end soon — a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?

Yes, you say?

Try again.

Yes?

You’re probably deluding yourself.

You wouldn’t change.

Don’t believe it? You want odds? Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That’s nine to one against you. How do you like those odds?

That, my friends, is how you open a magazine feature. The piece goes on to explain that Deutschman learned of those odds at an IBM “Global Innovation Outlook” conference, where Dr. Ray Levey of the Global Medical Forum and Dr. Edward Miller of Johns Hopkins delivered the sobering news that (a) many of the largest and most expensive health problems in the U.S. arise from behavioral factors — not genetics or antigens, yet (b) very few patients, even those who have come through traumatic open-heart surgery, succeed in changing their behaviors to prevent recurrence of their disease.

Please do read the whole article, which goes on to discuss how Dr. Dean Ornish and others have developed successful holistic programs designed to combine the latest developments in cardiac medicine with behavioral techniques like meditation and group therapy to promote lasting behavioral changes in their heart patients. The piece then goes on to transfer the medical observations into a business setting.

Once you’ve read it, I invite you to contemplate these business ramifications — and especially to understand better “[w]hat [it is] about how our brains are wired that resists change so tenaciously.” If heart-bypass patients with persistent chest pains find it hard to go on a low-fat diet and get a modicum of exercise, is it any wonder that your department is having trouble implementing the new quarterly review system effectively?

My own photocopy of the original magazine article is littered with my handwritten notations, in different colors of ink that reflect the number of times I’ve been back over the piece. Among many other interesting tidbits:

• “Compelling, positive visions of the future are a much stronger inspiration for change” than fear is.
• “Behavior change happens mostly be speaking to people’s feelings,” not by “giving people accurate analyses and factual information about their situations.”
• Because change implies “an emotional struggle[,] it’s important to change quickly enough to feel the short-term benefits that give a psychic lift and make it easier to stick with change.”
• Major corporate restructurings imply the hard task of reframing issues for large groups of people, yet the most successful restructurings progress quickly — even radically — rather than gradually.

To me, one of the most encouraging things in the article is the proposition that we can change our brains on purpose — that we can use behavior-based learning and other techniques to change the very way we think about the world around us.

This means that we need not be condemned to suffer like the 90% of heart patients who relapse into heart-unhealthy behaviors. Instead, we can be like the 77% of Dean Ornish’s patients who maintained their healthier lifestyles, even years after they had “graduated” from Ornish’s program.

If today didn’t work well for you or for your organization, don’t despair, because tomorrow need not be like today. As individuals and in groups, we can think and act differently. In a sense, the leopard can change its spots. Read “Change or Die” to start thinking about how.

(Photo by clix.)