"Learning to fly while remaining an egg"

I came across an article in one of my stacks of articles (long story, but see my post "Today's word is...tsundoku!" for an explanation) that I think is relevant ("How Old Industries Become Young Again").  The article discusses the five indicators that reveal when a particular industry is about to be transformed (or should be transformed):

1. New Customer Habits

2. New Production Technologies

3. New Lateral Competition

4. New Regulations

5. New Means of Distribution

As I read through this article, I quickly grasped that all five of these indicators are impacting how we deliver health care today.  The writer C.S. Lewis said, "It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: It would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg."  That's my subtle way of saying that we can either proactively manage the changes that are coming or wait and have those changes forced upon us.  

I've been spending the last several posts talking about two great articles published in McKinsey Quarterly on change management.  Once again, Emily Lawson and Colin Price ("The psychology of change management") describe four basic conditions that are critical to the success of any organization-wide change initiative: (1) A compelling "change story"; (2) Role modeling; (3) Reinforcing mechanisms; and (4) Capability building.  Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller ("The irrational side of change management") provide additional insights that are necessary for successful change.  Today we will finish this series of posts with a discussion on how to build the capacity and capability for change.

There is no question that if organizations want to change, they must invest the time and resources in building the capability for change.  Frontline employees will need to be trained in new skills and behaviors, and they will need the time to be able to learn and practice these newly taught skills and behaviors.  I like to use the analogy of training for a marathon.  You don't just simply decide one day to go out and run 26.2 miles - trust me, you'd never make it!  You have to start slow and build up your endurance slowly over time.  The same is true for any major organization-wide change initiative.  You have to start small, build the capacity and capability for change slowly over time, and then expand as your team develops new skills and behaviors.  

As an example, our organization recently embarked on a major transformational change initiative focused on becoming a High Reliability Organization (a common goal for many health care organizations).  One of the critical components to our initiative focused on building capacity and capability.  Rather than developing a plan and rolling it out immediately to the entire organization, we spent the first year testing and refining our program on just two inpatient units (our Cardiac Intensive Care Unit and one of our medical/surgical units).  We learned a lot during this first year - we listened to feedback from the two teams and modified our program based upon their feedback as well as the results we observed.  Once we felt that we had the right program, then and only then did we decide to spread the initiative to the remaining inpatient units.  We are now starting to test our interventions in other areas of the hospital.

Change leaders should also pay attention to mindsets.  Carol Dweck published a great book in 2006 called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.  In the book, Dweck talks about the difference between a "growth mindset" and a "fixed mindset".  Individuals with a "growth mindset" are open to change and believe that they can develop new knowledge, skills, and attitudes over time (as opposed to those individuals with a "fixed mindset" who generally believe that we are born with the a certain degree of intelligence and skill that cannot be changed).  

Here's an example of what I am talking about.  Until 1954, no one had ever run a mile in less than four minutes.  Several track and field athletes came close, but they never quite broke this seemingly insurmountable barrier.  No one believed that breaking the four minute mile was possible - no one at least until Roger Bannister came along.  Bannister started his track and field career relatively late at the age of 17 years - he actually had never worn running spikes or even run on a track, but he had a promising start anyway, running a 4:24.6 mile in 1947 after only three weekly half-hour training sessions.  His career slowly progressed, and he ran in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki.  He broke the British record for the 1500 meter run but finished in fourth place.  He spent the next two months deciding whether or not he should retire.  Instead, he adopted a "growth mindset" and set a new goal of breaking the four minute mile.  On May 2, 1953, he ran a mile in 4:03.6 seconds, shattering the previous British record for the mile set earlier by Sydney Wooderson’s in 1945. Bannister recalls, "This race made me realize that the four-minute mile was not out of reach."

Roger Bannister was the first person to break the four minute mile on May 6, 1954 at the Iffley Road Track (now known as the Roger Bannister Track) in Oxford, England.  Incidentally, he had been working at the hospital earlier that day - he was a medical student at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School at the University of Oxford and graduated that same year and eventually became a neurologist after retiring from track and field.  Bannister ran the mile in 3:59.4, proving that the four minute mile was not impossible.

Bannister's record was short-lived.  Two months later, Australian John Landy broke the four minute mile barrier and set a new record.  Once the psychological barrier had been broken, 24 more athletes broke the four minute mile in the following year!  People's mindsets had shifted - once Bannister showed that a four minute mile was indeed possible, it became relatively easy for the next several athletes to break what was once a seemingly impossible barrier.

To summarize then, leaders have two key responsibilities in building the capacity and capability for change in an organization.  First, building capability takes capacity in terms of time and resources.  It also takes time - change happens slowly.  Leaders need to invest in their teams and in the change initiative in order for it to be successful.  Second, leaders need to help foster the right mindset - a growth mindset - both for themselves and for their teams.  

As I have said repeatedly, change is hard.  Leading change is hard.  But with some of the tools discussed in these last several posts (and with the right growth mindset), change is possible!

"A rut is a grave with the ends kicked out"

As a student of leadership in general, I like to follow and read other leadership blogs.  I recently came across one of Dan Rockwell's older posts (from August, 2020 actually) on his blog Leadership Freak that I thought was poignant.  It was entitled, "A rut is a grave with the ends kicked out" (which originally came from a quote by Vance Havner, "Many people are in a rut and a rut is nothing but a grave - with both ends kicked out.").  Rockwell elaborated, "Self-imposed irrelevance is the consequence of prolonged repetition.  Unaltered repetition leads to stagnation and stagnation is the predecessor of putrefaction."  

No one can argue that the last two years or so have been particularly hard on the health care industry.  From managing a massive influx of patients with COVID-19 to dealing with supply chain disruptions and workforce shortages, health care organizations have been forced to deal with rapid change.  What's clear is that health care organizations will need to continue to adapt to change as we position ourselves for the future.  Without it, we are at risk of stagnation, which Rockwell says is the predecessor of putrefaction!

Unfortunately, even when change is necessary, most organizations fail at doing so.  A McKinsey survey involving over 1,500 business executives found that only 30% of organizational change initiatives succeed - this is a remarkably consistent statistic that has been true going back to at least the late 1990's, when John Kotter published his article "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail" in the Harvard Business Review.  One of the reasons that change initiatives fail is that leaders fail to appreciate the importance of psychology to change management.      

Emily Lawson and Colin Price ("The psychology of change management") describe four basic conditions that are critical to the success of any organization-wide change initiative: (1) A compelling "change story"; (2) Role modeling; (3) Reinforcing mechanisms; and (4) Capability building.  Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller ("The irrational side of change management") provide additional insights that are necessary for successful change.  So far in the last few posts, I've covered the first two conditions, so today I would like to discuss how leaders can leverage "reinforcing mechanisms" to drive change.

Most of the articles discussing change management talk about "hard-wiring" new behaviors and practices into structures, processes, and incentives.  And this makes a lot of sense - it was Upton Sinclair who said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon him not understanding it."  Unfortunately, money is one of the most expensive ways to motivate people.  Moreover, it can be difficult to directly link the results of a change initiative to compensation.  Lastly, financial incentives may not be the best motivation and rarely, if ever, suffice on their own.

As I stated above, financial incentives are expensive, and they may not even be necessary.  At times, even small, token gestures can be powerful motivators.  There is a classic study (published in German) called the "dime in the photocopier" study.  Essentially, half of the individuals who were using a photocopier found a dime in the coin return.  When asked about how much they were satisfied with their lives, those with the dime reported an average life satisfaction of 6.5 (on a scale of 7), while those individuals who did not find a dime reported an average life satisfaction of 5.6!  Even small, token gestures can be very powerful motivators for change!  Sam Walton (founder of Wal-Mart Stores) said, "Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise.  They're absolutely free - and worth a fortune."

I've previously discussed some of the drawbacks to using financial incentives to motivate people to change (see my post "Holes" from last month).  The "crowding out effect" (also known as the "overjustification effect") is a well-described phenomenon in behavioral economics.  When individuals are paid for their services, their intrinsic motivation actually decreases!  Individuals perceive extrinsic rewards, i.e. money, as part of a "market exchange" rather than a "social exchange" (for more on this, see James Heyman and Dan Ariely's interesting study "Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets").  For example, a daycare center was trying to motivate parents to pick up their children on time, so they instituted a modest ($3) fine for parents who showed up late.  What happened?  Rather than decreasing late shows, the number of parents who showed up late to pick up their children skyrocketed!  Why?  By implementing a fine, the daycare staff shifted the relationship between the parents and the daycare from a "social exchange" to a "market exchange"!

I want to make one final point about financial incentives.  They have to be fair, but more importantly they have to be perceived as fair.  There is a very well-known model in game theory called the "Ultimatum Game".  The basic set-up is as follows.  There are two players in this game.  Player 1 has a $10 and is instructed to split the $10 with Player 2, however way he or she decides.  The catch is that if Player 2 refuses to accept the offer, no one gets to keep the money.  This game has been repeated millions of times, and when Player 1 selects a $7.50/$2.50 split, Player 2 rejects the offer almost every time (actually, 95% of the time).  In other words, most individuals would prefer to go home with nothing than be treated unfairly.  Simple economics would tell us that Player 2 should walk away with $2.50 (which, he or she did not have at the beginning of the game).  Humans behave irrationally when they perceive something as not being fair (as it turns out, even monkeys play the ultimatum game and respond in a similar way)!  Aiken and Keller write, "In making any changes to company structures, processes, systems, and incentives, change managers should pay an unreasonable amount of attention to employees' sense of the fairness of the change process as well as the outcome."

Again, in order to understand how individuals will respond to change, we must first understand the individuals!  Psychology is important.  We can and should set up reinforcing mechanisms to help drive change, but in order to do so, we must understand human behavior!  Next time, we will finish up this discussion on change management with the final condition - building capability.

"Be the change you want to see in the world"

I have been spending the last few posts discussing a couple of really great articles on change management that appeared in McKinsey Quarterly.  The first article by Emily Lawson and Colin Price ("The psychology of change management") suggests that there are four basic conditions that are critical to the success of any organization-wide change initiative: (1) A compelling "change story"; (2) Role modeling; (3) Reinforcing mechanisms; and (4) Capability building.  Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller ("The irrational side of change management") discussed some additional insights that are necessary for successful change.  For example, when creating a compelling "change story", Aiken and Keller would add that the "change story" needs to (1) Be told in five different ways; (2) Be developed by the members of the team (and not by the leader); and (3) Leverage both positive motivation and the sense of urgency to take full advantage of human psychology.

With today's post, I want to focus on Lawson and Price's second basic condition - role modeling.  The social scientist Everett Rogers first described how new ideas and technologies (i.e., innovation) spread throughout different social systems (a concept he called "diffusion") in a book called Diffusion of Innovations (now in its fifth edition) in 1962.  Rogers first defined the five adopter categories (including perhaps the best known - "early adopters" and "laggards") with the following depicting the diffusion of new ideas over time:

Rogers also discussed the different elements in a social system that increased either the likelihood of diffusion or the pace of diffusion.  He talked about the importance of "opinion leaders" who are highly influential in spreading either positive or negative information about a new idea or technology.  Whether you call them "opinion leaders", "influence leaders", "change agents", or "change champions", these individuals serve as role models for new and desired behaviors that are necessary to drive change in the organization.  There's no question that having the support of respected, influential leaders in an organization is helpful.  Lawson and Price argue that these change agents are critical to the success of any change initiative.  However, there are a couple of points (emphasized by Aiken and Keller) that are important to keep in mind.

There is a well-known and frequently repeated quote by the late Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, "Be the change you want to see in the world."  Intuition would tell us that organizational leaders are ideally positioned to serve as "change agents" and should take the necessary steps to not only role model the desired changes and behaviors ("be the change"), but also mobilize the key opinion leaders within an organization to drive change ("lead the change").  While true in theory, the reality is far different.  The explanation is rather simple - most individuals don't think that they are the ones who need to change!

 It is a fact of human nature that we all think that we are better than we really are, which is known in psychology as self-serving bias (somewhat related to something known as the fundamental attribution error).  We tend to attribute our successes to our own character or actions, but blame failures on external factors that are beyond our control.  For example, the American Automobile Association released a survey showing that 8 out of 10 men think they are above-average drivers.  Another survey found that 65% of Americans believe that they are above-average in intelligence (calling to mind the radio show A Prairie Home Companion's fictional town of Lake Wobegon, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average").

As Aiken and Keller write, "Whereas conventional change management approaches surmise that top team role modeling is a matter of will ('wanting to change') or skill ('knowing how to change'), the inconvenient truth is that the real bottleneck to role modeling is knowing 'what' to change at a personal level."  In order to serve as an effective role model, leaders need to overcome the self-serving bias and recognize that they need to change just as much as the organization.  Notably, Gandhi also said, "For things to change, first I must change."  Nelson Mandela similarly said, "One of the things I learned when I was negotiating was that until I changed myself I could not change others."

Aiken and Keller make a second critical point about so-called "opinion leaders" and "change agents".  Unfortunately, these individuals don't have as much influence on changing behavior as previously thought.  For example, the writer Malcolm Gladwell writes about "the law of the few" in his 2000 book, The Tipping Point.  Basically, "the law of the few" states that certain types of people ("opinion leaders" and "change agents") are especially effective at spreading a new idea or concept (the analogy in infectious disease would be a "super-spreader").  

As an example of his "law of the few" and how these relate to the broader concept of "tipping points", Gladwell discussed what happened with the shoe brand, Hush Puppies in the late 1990's.  The shoe brand was dying off until a few New York hipsters starting wearing the shoe brand.  Shortly thereafter, the brand took off and increased sales by 5,000 percent within 2 years (to use Gladwell's terminology, they "tipped").  While that sounds great, correlation is not the same as causation.  The network-theory scientist Duncan Watts has conducted a number of studies that suggest that "influence leaders" are no more likely to start a social fad than the rank and file.  The "diffusion of innovation" depends more on how receptive "society" (or in our case, the organization) is to the new idea.  Watts argues, "If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can." 

The implication for us is that when preparing to embark on an organization-wide change initiative, we should not overestimate the importance of these change agents.  Rather, we should appropriately invest time and energy in preparing the organization to be more receptive to the change!  Again, change leaders and opinion leaders are important, but they are not the only component necessary to a successful change initiative.

We are almost done!  I will continue this theme on change management for at least my next two posts.  Next time, we will talk about how to develop "reinforcing mechanisms" to increase the likelihood of successful change.

Burn your ships

History says that the Spanish conquistadore Hernán Cortés set sail with eleven ships and over 500 men on a voyage to the New World in the year 1519.  In July that year, he landed on the Yucatan coast at Veracruz.  He was eager to march inland to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, so he ordered his men to burn all but one of the ships.  His men thought he'd gone insane and naturally resisted.  When asked how they would get home if they burned all of the ships, Cortés reportedly replied, "If we are going home, we are going home in their ships!"

Just imagine how committed his troops were to the mission at hand now!  Cortés was certainly not the first to use this technique, nor was he the last.  As it turns out, leaders have been burning their ships - both literally and figuratively - throughout history!  The management professor John Kotter created a very well-known 8-step change model, whose first step is to "create a sense of urgency."  The key to this first step is to convince the members of your team or organization that a change is necessary and that the team's success or organization's survival is dependent upon making that change.  In effect, Kotter is telling change leaders to "burn your ships."  

While metaphorically "burning your ships" can definitely "create a sense of urgency", Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller at McKinsey would suggest that this approach is not sufficient.  Their research suggests that only about 30% of all organizational change initiatives succeed.  A "change story" that focuses solely on what's wrong at the organization invokes blame and creates change fatigue and resistance.  

So, maybe we should focus on positive motivation for change.  Researchers at the University of Wisconsin studied two bowling teams by recording their performance during a number of games and tournaments.  One team's video concentrated on all the things that the team was doing wrong, while the other team's video concentrated on what the members of the team were doing correctly.  Who do you think did better as the season progressed?  The team that studied its successful game performances improved their scores by twice as much as the other team (see the published research study here).  

Again, understanding human psychology is important to managing change in an organization.  We humans are more risk averse when it comes to losing something than when it comes to winning something.  The Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky (Tversky died before winning the Nobel Prize) developed their prospect theory based on the concept of what has come to be known as loss aversion.  For example, given a choice, would you choose between a "sure thing" bet that wins $100 or a 50/50 chance of winning $200?  Simple mathematics says that there is no difference, but in study after study, people would choose the former rather than the latter.  Conversely, would you rather choose a sure loss of $100 or a 50/50 risk of losing $200?  Studies show that most people would take the chance of losing either $200 or nothing.

Aiken and Keller suggest that "it takes a story with both + and - to create real energy".  By taking a "carrot and stick" approach (positive motivation = "the carrot" and burning the ships = "the stick"), change leaders can leverage human psychology to optimize the successful completion of a change initiative.

Let's go back to the original article by Emily Lawson and Colin Price ("The psychology of change management") and summarize the last few posts.  Lawson and Price suggest that the first step in any change initiative is to develop a compelling change story, because the members of the team or organization need to see the point of the change and agree with it before they will actually modify their behavior.  Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller would add that the change story needs to (1) Be told in five different ways; (2) Developed by the members of the team (and not by the leader); and (3) leverage both positive motivation and the sense of urgency to take full advantage of human psychology.

We will talk about the next three steps described by Lawson and Price (with some additional considerations posed by Aiken and Keller) with our next three posts.

Write your own lottery ticket

 I've been spending some time reading and writing about a really great series of articles published in the McKinsey Quarterly a few years ago.  Emily Lawson and Colin Price ("The psychology of change management") introduced the concept that there are four conditions that are critical to the success of any organizational change initiative: (1) A compelling story, (2) Reinforcing mechanisms, (3) Role modeling, and (4) Capability building.  Scott Keller and Carolyn Aiken ("The irrational side of change management") offered some additional insights, as well as discussing some of the more common traps that cause organization-wide change efforts to fail.  

In my previous post ("Give me something to believe in"), we talked about the need for a compelling "change story" and discussed why change leaders need to tell the change story in five different ways.  Just as important, individuals need to feel that they "own the change" in some way.  Keller and Aiken recommend that the story needs to be told in five ways, but the individuals (and not the leader) need to write the change story.

The Nobel Prize winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman conducted a now famous experiment several years ago (it's reported in Chapter 16, "The Illusion of Control" in Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases) that involved a lottery with a twist.  Half the participants were handed their lottery tickets (randomly assigned, just like a real lottery), while the other half selected their own number (again, just like some individuals who play a real lottery).  Before revealing number, Kahneman and his team of researchers offered to buy back the lottery tickets from the study participants.  No matter how many times that they've run the experiment, Kahneman found that they had to pay at least five times as much to the participants who selected their own number compared to those whose number was assigned by random!  Of course, this makes absolutely no sense.  The participants who selected their own number weren't more likely to win the lottery than those whose numbers were assigned at random.  According to the simplest rules of economics, both groups should have sold their tickets for a similar price.

As Keller and Aiken write, "When we choose for ourselves, we are far more committed to the outcome (almost by a factor of five to one)."  Leaders can leverage this feature of human psychology to increase the likelihood of a successful change.  Having front-line employees write their own "change story" is incredibly powerful.  Even if the leader needs to provide some direction, employees will still "own the change" when they have a say in how the "change story" is written.  

Next time we will finish up our discussion about developing a compelling "change story".

"Give me something to believe in!"

I have to admit that I have a rather eclectic taste in music.  I enjoy listening to just about every genre (classical, rock, country, pop, jazz, blues, even occasionally hip hop and rap), depending upon the prevailing mood of the day.  My background preparation for today's post jogged a musical memory from the 1980'-1990's era hair band Poison, who released a song in 1996 called "Something to Believe In".  It's a classic rock-n-roll ballad, and I immediately thought of it when I started to write this post.

We all need something - a purpose, if you will - to believe in.  All of us, leaders and managers as well as front-line employees, want our work to have meaning and value.  Keeping with our recent theme on managing change, according to Emily Lawson and Colin Price, writing for the McKinsey Quarterly ("The psychology of change management"), individuals will alter their mind-sets only if they see the point or underlying reason for the change (and if they also agree with it).  John Kotter (see Kotter's 8-step change model) calls this "creating a sense of urgency" for change, while others have called it a "burning platform".  Whatever you call it - a sense of purpose, meaning, a sense of urgency, or a "burning platform" (I am going to call it a "change story"), the ultimate success of any organizational change initiative will depend to a great extent on how this "change story" is told and the degree to which the leaders and employees in an organization believe in it.

When talking about purpose, leaders can leverage something that is called cognitive dissonance (first described by the psychologist Leon Festinger in the late 1950's and mentioned at least a few times in previous blog posts - see for example, "Sour grapes and sunk costs..." and "Blue sky on Mars.  That's interesting").  Cognitive dissonance arises when individuals find that their beliefs are inconsistent with their actions (an extreme example would be an agnostic priest).  Individuals are internally motivated to eliminate this cognitive dissonance by either changing their beliefs or changing their actions.  In other words, if individual employees believe in the organizational purpose, they will be internally motivated to change their actions (otherwise, they will suffer from cognitive dissonance).  

There is of course another important point.  As Scott Keller and Carolyn Aiken from McKinsey & Company observed, a compelling change story is not enough.  Keller and Aiken have worked with a number of organizations on their change initiatives, and they generally employ two types of change stories.  The first is the "good to great" story, which often goes something like this: "Given our historical market position, skills, assets, and staff, we can easily become the industry leader."  The second type of change story is the "turnaround story": "We're performing below our peers.  If we are going to survive in this market, we have to change how we operate." 

The problem here is that both these kinds of change stories ("good to great" and "turnaround") will motivate only 20% of the entire workforce.  Both these change stories center on the organization itself.  In general, there are five sources of meaning:

1. Society (e.g., "Our initiative is going to improve the health of our community")

2. Organization (the "good to great" and "turnaround" change stories focus on the organization)

3. Customer (e.g., "We are going to improve access to care at our hospital, which will improve the patient and family experience")

4. Team (e.g., "Our initiative will focus on improving staff wellness and resilience")

5. Individual (e.g., "Our initiative will empower our front line workers to make decisions")

I've been a part of one of the organizations that Scott Keller and McKinsey evaluated for a major organizational change initiative.  When he asked a room full of leaders, managers, and employees which of these five sources were most important, we separated equally into five groups.  In other words, a change story focuses on just one source of motivation (say, the customer), you will only be motivating 20% of your workforce.  The McKinsey team has found this result in surveys of literally thousands of employees working in organizations from every industry they've studied.  The implication is that leaders have to tell five change stories at once!  

Keller and Aiken write, "What the leader cares about (and typically bases at least 80 percent of his or her message to others on) does not tap into roughly 80 percent of the workforce's primary motivators for putting extra energy into the change program."  The lesson is that the change story has to be told in five different ways in order to capture the attention of and motivate the entire organization.

I will continue on the theme of a compelling change story in my next post.

"Imagine how hard physics would be if particles could think."

Dr. Murray Gell-Man, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics, once said, "Imagine how hard physics would be if particles could think."  I don't know about you, but I thought physics was a really difficult subject in college (and I didn't even take the one that the engineering students took).  Quantum physics is even more of a mystery to me.  So, when a Nobel Prize winning physicist claims that physics would be even more difficult if subatomic particles (quarks, bosons, and leptons, etc) could think like humans, that catches my attention!

Managing people is hard.  It's not supposed to be easy.  Joe Dunn, writing for Medium explains why, "Management is hard because everybody is at least a little bit crazy."  He goes on, "The problem is people.  They’re a mystery."

Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote an outstanding book called Thinking, Fast and Slow in 2011.  People are driven by two systems, which Kahneman calls System 1 (the "Fast" system, known by other authors as the emotional system) and System 2 (the "Slow" system, which is also known as the rational system).  When we are thinking and making decisions with System 2, we are being deliberate, methodical, and careful (hence, "slow").  Conversely, when we are thinking and making decisions with System 1 (and I use the word "thinking" here very loosely), we are using our instinct, or making decisions with our "gut" (hence, "fast").  

One of the examples that Kahneman uses is helpful to make the distinction between System 1 and System 2 even more clear.  Answer the following questions:

What is 2 x 2?

What is 17 x 24?

Most, if not all of us, likely answered both these questions correctly.  Most of us likely answered the first problem very quickly, almost instantaneously.  I bet that it took a little longer to answer the second one.  We were using System 1 (the "Fast" system) when we solved 2 x 2, and we were using System 2 (the "Slow" system) when we solved 17 x 24.

When we use System 1, our emotions can and often do take over.  And, even when System 2 thinking is appropriate for a given decision, System 1 thinking will take precedence when we are anxious, stressed, or just pressed for time.  The social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt suggested another useful metaphor in his book, The Happiness Hypothesis.  Haidt suggests that our rational system (System 2) is like a rider on an elephant, which is our emotional system (System 1).  The rider thinks he is in control, but in reality it is the elephant who controls the situation.  Haidt writes, "I’m holding the reins in my hands, and by pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I’m no match for him."

Now, consider that you are trying to manage an entire herd of elephants and their riders!  That is at least one reason why managing people can be so difficult.  We often assume that the members of our team are using System 2 (i.e. they are being rational), when in fact that they are using System 1!  As a matter of fact, one of the scientific truths of human nature is that people are often irrational - so much so, that we can predict it!

As Scott Keller and Carolyn Aiken from McKinsey & Company write, "We systematically fall victim to subconscious thought processes that significantly influence our behavior, even though our rational minds tell us they shouldn't."  Consider this example.  How many times have you spent several minutes driving around a crowded parking lot for that perfect spot that is close to the entrance (so that you are close and can "save time"), when it would have taken far less time just to park in any of the available parking spaces?  Understanding human psychology is so important, that W. Edwards Deming, one of the founders of the science of quality improvement, included it as one of the four components in his "System of Profound Knowledge":

Management isn't easy.  I have to again invoke another episode of one of my favorite television shows, The Office here.  During Season 7 in the episode entitled "Search Committee", the team at Dunder-Mifflin are trying to find a replacement manager for Michael Scott (after a couple of failed managers, one of which was played by the actor Will Ferrell).  Ryan Howard, the former temp and now full-time employee of the Scranton branch says, "I got away with everything under the last boss and it wasn't good for me.  So I want guidance.  I want leadership.  Lead me...when I'm in the mood to be led."

I have often said that managing change is one of the most important jobs for a leader in any organization.  Managing change is all about managing people.  And managing people is hard.  Using formal logic (it's called a syllogism by the way), if managing change requires managing people, and managing people is hard, then managing change is hard!

As it turns out, people generally want to be led, but only when they are in the mood to be led!  Managing people is hard, and by extension managing change is hard.  It's like herding elephants.  It requires a thorough understanding of psychology.  And at least one Nobel Prize-winning physicist suggests that it's even harder than quantum physics!