Riding the Elephant in the Room
Driving Organizational Change
Organizational Change
“Working on change without believing in it is like waiting for the train on a station without tracks.”
Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical leadership at New York Stern School of Business is the author of this striking metaphor. He thinks our brain is like an elephant and its Mahout or rider, the small man sitting just behind the head on top of the big beast with only a little stick or bull-hook to guide his animal.
Looking Towards the Future
The mahout looks towards the future and is capable of reasoning. The elephant follows his emotions and reacts primarily on the stimuli from its environments. The rider represents our analytical, planning side. The rider decides, “I need to go somewhere, here’s the direction I want to go,” and sets off. However, it’s the elephant, our emotional side that is providing the real power. The rider can try to lead the elephant, but in any direct contest of wills the elephant with its six-ton advantage is going to win.
Organizational Change Management
The rider on top of the elephant can, after training, steer the several thousand kilo grey animal underneath him. Yet, if the elephant refuses to listen or change direction the rider doesn’t stand a chance. In Switch, Dan and Chip Heath use this elephant metaphor why OCM often fails. In a lot of cases change demands immediate sacrifices for a reward that will happen later.
Motivation and Leadership Narratives
Part of achieving change, in either our lives or in organizations, is aligning both sides of the brain by pointing out the direction for the rider and motivating the elephant to undertake the journey. Of course, the path the elephant walks down matters too. High-ranking executives can use leadership narratives to shape that path, the environment, and make the journey easier even when the elephant is less motivated.
Rider Elephant Conflict
The rider–elephant conflict may be a reason not to press too hard on formal levers. It’s not enough for people to intellectually understand that an organization must start moving in a different strategic direction. People need motivation but the typical way of corporate communicating speaks primarily and in a lot of cases almost exclusively to the rider. It builds an intellectual case for OCM and relies on formal authority and logic. A lot of the time the rider fails to lead the elephant long enough to reach its destination.
Organizational Change Alignment
It’s not enough to show intellectually that we need to change and then to decree what those changes will be. If it were, a lot more organizations would succeed in successful OCM and making swift strategic shifts. Formal power is tremendously useful, but if we start by wielding it we probably haven’t aligned the rider and the elephant. And if we rely only on the formal levers of power to lead, we may get too far ahead of people — they probably understand that they must change, but the motivation hasn’t kicked in. So how do you steer your elephant in the right direction?
Catalyzing Organizational Change
Neurofied can help managers catalyze change more effectively by drawing on an enormous body of research from psychologists on how the brain works. Applying psychology and neuroscience can help organizations and teams to better understand their audience, take better decisions, improve conversion optimization, implement organizational change, marketing, and management efforts. If you’re facing change, and who isn’t, please contact us.
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About Neurofied
Neurofied is a behavioral science company specialized in training, consulting, and change management. We help organizations drive evidence-based and human-centric change with insights and interventions from behavioral psychology and neuroscience. Consider us your behavioral business partner who helps you build behavioral change capabilities internally.
Since 2018, we have trained thousands of professionals and worked with over 100 management, HR, growth, and innovation teams of organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Deloitte, Novo Nordisk, ABN AMRO, and the Dutch government. We are also frequent speakers at universities and conferences.
Our mission is to democratize the value of behavioral science for teams and organizations. If you see any opportunities to collaborate, please contact us here.
