The COVID-19 pandemic has been a case study in human contradiction. And in staggering numbers, people have refused – and continue to refuse – to comply with mask rules and vaccinations. Some are busy sending them home to work and sending their children home from school. When everyone was summoned again, some were turning to that as well. It’s an ongoing and wide-ranging lesson in interaction, a concept that at least any leader tasked with trying to bring about change should have fleeting knowledge.
Psychological interaction theory originated in the 1960s with Jack Brehm, who developed it while he was a professor at Duke University. Brim said that humans are negatively affected when they perceive their freedom as a threat. What constitutes a threat to freedom? This is your call. If you believe that delegating a mask restricts your freedom, Brihm’s theory suggests that interaction will not only increase your desire not to wear a mask, but may also cause you to refuse to wear a mask, even to the point where you drift off an airplane.
I ran across a reaction in a recently published book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance Awaiting New Ideasby Laurent Nordgren, organizational psychologist and professor at the Kellogg School of Management, and David Schonthal, clinical professor at Kellogg and director of the Project Acceleration Program. Nordgren and Schonthal seek to add what they call friction theory to the discipline of change management, arguing that organizational change initiatives often fail because leaders focus their attention on drawing people to their cause, while ignoring four frictions that work against change: inertia, effort, emotion, and yes reactance.
Organizational change initiatives often fail because leaders focus on attracting people to their cause, while ignoring the frictions working against change.
“A lot of leaders become leaders because of their charisma and ability to promote a vision,” Schonthal explained to me during a video interview with both authors. “But you have to balance being able to commercialize a vision with a willingness to remove some friction and actually help employees start on the path to that vision.”
Nordgren added: “Leaders do not think about barriers to action.” “Shifting your focus to friction requires moving away from the idea and thinking about the audience. Taking that perspective requires empathy, it requires understanding the context, and it requires more effort and attention.”
The efforts involved in negotiating a return to office are closely related to the way friction in general and reaction in particular can torpedo change. “The mistake a lot of companies make is thinking they can simply pay people more – for parking, Ubers or lunches – to make the idea of coming to the office more attractive,” Schonthal said. “I don’t think they appreciate that this isn’t an incentive issue. It’s an interaction issue. They’ve given people the autonomy to work at home, and now they’re going to remove it. The companies that win people over are the ones that have conversations about maintaining a certain degree of autonomy.”
As the back-to-work puzzle suggests, interaction is not triggered by change per se. It is triggered when change collides with established standards, beliefs, or expectations, as is often the case with organizational change initiatives – which may help explain why failure rates for such programs are tied around 70%. “If people have a structured belief and you try to change that belief, that is the moment when people are most inclined to feel reactive. The stronger that belief is, the stronger the regression is,” Nordgren said.
The natural tendency in such cases is to respond to reactance by making a tougher case for change and backed by a lot of evidence. The problem with this approach, as we’ve seen repeatedly in the past couple of years, is that it increases pressure for change, which in turn creates the flywheel. “For me, this is one of the most important ideas about interaction,” Nordgren explained. “If you believe in climate change and you deal with someone who does not believe in it, or if you believe in vaccines and you deal with someone who does not believe in them, the more evidence you throw at them, the more they will fight against it. They see it as a hard sell, and it makes them more resolute in their beliefs, And not less than that.”
So how should leaders manage interaction? Nordgren and Schonthal suggested several tactics.
Ask, don’t tell. “Executives often feel a duty to lead change rather than engage in conversations about it,” Schontal said. “Sometimes, just being open to talking with the people you’re trying to change can go a long way in desensitizing their reaction to change.”
“This is a fundamental principle of behavior change,” Nordgren added. “People are more deeply persuaded by the ideas they generate themselves than by the ideas given to them. This is what makes the Socratic method so powerful. Socrates used questions to convince his disciples to arrive at an inescapable truth, but they made the journey—they got to the situation.”
Start with yes. “Sometimes leaders of other bad habits start conversations at the point of conflict,” Nordgren said. “So, you and I might agree that we need to cut costs, but we disagree about where those costs should be. I have to start in the area of alignment – we both agree that cutting costs is vital.”
By asking “yes” questions, leaders can use areas of agreement to defuse the reaction. “If I were trying to persuade members of my department to hire a neuroscientist that I knew they would likely disagree, I would ask questions that would spark a common understanding, like ‘I was thinking who would make a good assignment, and it seems like someone who can keep the department up front and help differentiate it would be valuable. do you agree? ” Nordgren explained. “The more you can get them to say ‘yes,’ the more they will feel that this is our idea.”
Give people a chance to sign the change. “If you are trying to do something transformative within an organization, include the people who will be affected by that transformation in its design,” Schonthal said. “When you involve them in the design, not only do they benefit from a warm-up to the idea of change, but they can also see their fingerprints on the outcome.”
“This does not mean that everyone needs equal control or that they are involved in every stage, but the more people are heard in the process, the better,” Nordgren added. “Leaders may groan about this because it adds steps and time, but if they don’t give people a role in designing change, they increase the chances that change will never happen.”
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