by David Rock, Rachel Cardero, Chris Weller / © 2024, Fast Company. Mansueto Ventures, LLC. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Imagine you’re a leader, and you’ve been tasked with driving a big culture change strategy. The company’s usual ways of doing things aren’t working, and it’s up to you to identify changes that would allow people to do their best work and deliver top-tier results.
You work tirelessly on the project and proudly present your findings. Except, after your presentation, one group loves certain ideas but rejects others, while another faction has the opposite reaction.
How will you know which feedback to accept and which you can safely ignore?
Culture change strategies are like blueprints for a house. When we build a house, we use engineering and architectural principles to ensure it’s safe and solid and will last for decades. Considering we spend most of our waking adult life at work, shouldn’t we do the same for culture initiatives?
Most organizations don’t approach culture change this way because it seems more nebulous than architecture. However, the truth is there are engineering principles for organizational behavior change. Just as experienced architects can read the blueprints for a house and know whether the design will work, every organization should have a change architect—someone who can look at a change strategy and know immediately if it will work or require constant attention.
Three concepts of ‘change architecture’
At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we believe there are three core ideas to understand:
Cognitive capacity
Cognitive capacity refers to the amount of information the brain can process, retain or recall at once. Humans are notoriously bad at estimating how well others will remember or understand their ideas; leaders, even more so. This tendency is a type of experience bias called the “false consensus effect.” It’s why leaders often assume everyone understands an idea as well as they do.
On the other hand, leaders who recognize the limits of cognitive capacity give their change strategy the best shot at success because employees can focus on what matters most. One way to think about this is by focusing on what’s essential, versus what’s exhaustive.
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