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. My Improvement Goals
(List 1 to 3 Goals):
2. Things I Do (or fail to do) that Work Against Each of My Improvement Goals:
3. My Competing Commitments (Other Things That Compete for My Time):
Notice how your competing interests might affect your ability to make changes.
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An Evening with Robert Kegan and Immunity to Change
Male Speaker
You, where your journey begins. You, and your story, join a community of stories, history, traditions, guiding innovation through onsite learning, online collaboration. You learn from those around you. You teach those who inspire you. Together, you grow into something more, more than you expected. From a solid foundation, you build the future for today, for tomorrow, for life.
Prof. Robert Kegan, PhD
I have the pleasure to share with you kind of the heart of the work that my colleagues and I have been doing for, now the last 20 years and thinking about change. But I thought as a way to get into it, I would start with a little math problem since I come from a school of education. So, here is the problem. If 14 frogs sat on a log and three of them decided to jump into the water, how many frogs would be left on the log? I know a big part of you want to say 11 is the answer to that question. But I want to suggest to you that 14 might be a better answer because there is a big difference between deciding to and actually doing it.
And I think that is pretty much kind of what this whole talk is about and of this mysterious kind of space between our actual intentions and what we are actually able to bring about.
At the beginning of the book, Immunity to Change, we quote the study from the health sector where we have ended up doing quite a lot of work, and it is a study that is now have been replicated a few times and has a lot of different versions to it. But the one that we mentioned in the book is that, if heart doctors tell their seriously at-risk of heart patients, they are likely to literally die if they do not change their ways of living around diet, exercise, smoking and the like. It still turns out that only one in seven patients can actually make the changes.
And I think this is just worth pausing on for a moment because I think we can be pretty sure that the other six people have just as great a desire to keep on living and watch their kid until their grandchildren grow up or whatever floats their boat. And if we cannot make the changes that we would want to make to literally keep ourselves alive, then what is to say about all the other changes which we may even urgently feel which are not life and death matters?
What it says to me is that we are in deep need of some new ways of thinking about what gets in the way between our genuine intensions and what we are actually able to bring about. And that question is the one that my colleagues and I have been researching now for quite some time. And we think we have actually — okay not solved it, the century is just getting started. But we do think that we have sort of happened upon some little piece or clue of this mystery. And essentially, it is kind of my purpose to try to share that with you tonight and then make a little space for us to have a chance to talk back and forth about it.
If you interview a person when they come out of the doctor’s office who has been prescribed one of these maintenance medications, and you asked them why the doctor prescribed this. You get pretty high rate of understanding and then you asked them, “If I come back in a year to see if you are taking it,” because it is generally, it is prescribed that you should take it for the rest of your life. “So, if I come back in a year to see if you are taking it, what do you think is the probability that you will be taking it?” And they look at you like you are nuts, well the doctor said to me I could a stroke and die if I do not take it, that it has no negative side effects and that is covered by my insurance. “So, duh, I would say about 100% is the likelihood, why would I not just take it and brush my teeth or whatever I do at night. I will pop one of these pills. Why would I not?” But then when you do come back a year later, 53% to 57% of the people in a number of studies now are not taking the drug. The most common reason for the people in our study, “Why you are not being adherent if you want to be?” “I do not know.” That was the most common words.
The second most common was things like, “Well something comes up” or “I get busy” or something like that. We have come to learn that these non-reason reasons are evidence usually that the person is captive of this thing that we are calling the Immunity to Change.
So, let me show you an X-ray from one of the guys in this study. And what was his map? So his improvement goal is pretty much the same as every person in the study. To take the medications everyday as prescribed and refill them on a timely basis. Then he had to tell himself all the things that he is doing and not doing instead. And he said, “I do not take them regularly. I stopped for long periods or stopped entirely. I do not refill them properly when they run out. And when I get those automatic phone messages from the pharmacy, I just hang up on them right in the middle of the message.”
Now, so the first thing that we asked them to do is to think about how he would feel if they even tried to do the opposite of each of the behaviors in the second column. So, let me give you an example of how this went. So, I am talking to this gentleman on the phone and I said to him, “Okay, so you have been very honest, you want to be compliant but you do not want to take the drug everyday. And when they run out, you do not refill them properly and so on.” So, tell me this, “What would be your biggest worry if you did take the drug everyday?” And he said to me, “If I do not take that drug everyday, my biggest worry is I could have a stroke and die.” Now, what would you think even formally about that answer as an answer to my question?
What? That is right; he did not answer the question I asked him, right? I asked him, “What would be your biggest worry if you did take the drug everyday.” And he told me very quickly and this happens all the time to us. The answered a completely different and opposite question. He said, “If I do not take that drug everyday, I worry, I could have a stroke and die.” This, for those of you who are interested in the brain, this is a perfect example of the way we have a tendency to walk down the familiar neuropaths that we have long created. He knew what his worries were if he did not take the drug. But I was asking him a completely different question, what his worry would be if he did take the drug.
This was a path that had not yet actually been built in his brain. And I said to him, “Of course, I understand your biggest concern if you do not take the drugs because you could a have stroke and die.” Now, I am actually asking you a little different question, just stick with me and see if something comes up for you. Imagine yourself there; you are actually taking the drug every single day as prescribed.
And then what I wanted to say was, “What would your worst feeling be about that?” but I never actually got that far because if you heard a tape recording of our interview, it would sound like this. So imagine yourself, you actually are taking this drug every single day as — if I have to take that damn drug every single day, he said, “I am going to feel like an old sick man. I am going to feel more like my father’s generation as in the nursing home. Well I am not visiting by the way.”
I said, “Whoa, it sounds like you have a lot of strong feelings about that.” “You are damn right I do.” He said, “I am 58 years old. I am in the prime of my life. I am not guy who has got one foot in the grave. I am not a half-dead guy who has to take a pill everyday.” Okay, now, we are getting somewhere. He had no clue this is going to come out when we began our little conversation. He knew what he was worried about if he did not take the drug. It had never occurred to him that there was a very, very smart reason why he was not taking the drug. I am not saying that he has a genuine commitment, why would you not take your medications everyday?
What is in the first column is actually real. He has this, it is important to him. But there is also this thing that has him, that he not have to take on what feels to him this horrible identity that he said, “I am in the prime of my life. I am 58 years old. I am not some guy who is just at death’s door.”
Once he saw this system, he said as we were ending the call, “Well, this is kind of interesting.” He said, “You know you are showing me that in order that I not feel like an old sick man, I am doing things that are likely to leave me to be a dead man.” He got it.
So, once you have the X-ray, then what can you do with it, right? And the way that we get to that is by having people come to identify what are the big assumptions they hold, usually plural, big assumptions that make these commitments seem absolutely necessary. So, just a short hand version for this 58-year fellow, I assume if I had to take a drug everyday for the rest of my life, it means that I am an old person in decline.
So, the — we have developed practices that help people create rich pictures in each one of these columns. They get a chance to see this system. They can see themselves with one foot on the gas, one foot on the brake and they begin to see some kind of way by which they might do something other than die — just trying to change the behavior some way that they might actively begin to alter the mindset itself that is producing the behavior.
So, I am going to end in a moment and give you a chance to kind of let us in on the things that were going through your head while I was doing all the talking up here. I will leave you with one last little story which is another way of naming, I think kind of this phenomenon that we have gotten so fascinated with. And it is a story about a guy who has to work each day. He goes into a bar and he asks for three separate shot glasses of whiskey and he proceeds to slowly drink each of them. And he does this everyday after working.
Finally, the bartender says, “I have been serving you like this for months and I know it is none of my business, but I just have to ask you why. Why do you do this? I mean if you want a triple, we have bigger glasses.” The guys said, “I will explain it to you.” He said, “I have two brothers. And for many years we all lived together here in the city. At the end of work each day, we go off to a bar and we would each have a drink and we would sit around and tease each other and talk about the day. It is just a nice way that we stayed together. But modern life being what it is, their work has taken each of them far away. One lives in Atlanta, one lives in London, we obviously cannot get together at the end of work each day. So, what we each do is at the end of work in our respective time zones, we go to our favorite bar or pub and we each order the three separate glasses and we just sit there and we kind of mull through the day mull through what has happened and we kind of unwind. And we think about each other. And it is just a nice way we stay together because we each know that the other two are doing it as well.”
So the bartender said, “Well, okay I get it. I never heard anything like that before but okay.” And each day when the guy came in, the bartender would see him coming, he would set up the three glasses and he would start pouring the three glasses, everything was great. But one day he walked in, the bartender set up the three glasses and the guy said, “I just want two glasses today.” So, the bartender did not say anything, but he just poured the two glasses. And the next day the guy came back and he just wanted the two glasses again, and this time, the bartender did not say anything either but he was aware that he was not asking because he was concerned if he did ask what he might hear.
But the guy kept coming back and he kept ordering just the two glasses and after a while, just got to be too much for the curious bartender. So finally, he said, “Okay I know this is none of my business again, but I just got to ask you. I mean, you explained this whole lovely thing to me, why you have the three glasses, now you only have two glasses, what has happened?” And the guy looked at the bartender and he said, “I have quit drinking.”
Self deception. Self deception is a very powerful force in human affairs. We think we are doing one thing and we are, but there is also this other whole thing that we are doing. And that other whole thing and being able to look at both things at the same time is kind of this thing that has fascinated us and I hope you find it fascinating too and thank you for the chance to talk with you, by the way.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Using your Immunity to Change Map, you will construct a development plan for successfully managing a personal change in the workplace. For example, you may be thinking about becoming more planful or reflective by reserving some time each week just to think. Consider what is keeping you from implementing this change; What are the barriers present in the organization that inhibit you from making the change, and what are the competing priorities?
By successfully completing this assessment, you will demonstrate your proficiency in the following course competencies and assessment criteria:
· Assess the complex and dynamic nature of organizational change.
· Analyze ways in which leaders and managers can effectively initiate, shape, and support organizational change.
· Communicate effectively in a professional manner.
Preparation
If you have not already done so, complete the Immunity to Change Map. Use the Capella University Library to find one other resource that addresses committing to and implementing a personal change in the workplace.
Assignment Description
Using the questions and steps outlined in “The Real Reason People Won’t Change,” by Kegan and Lahy, the principles discussed in the Kegan video in the studies, and the Immunity to Change Map linked in the Resources, construct a map for a personal change you want to commit to. Provide a narrative that includes the background and assumptions on the need and drivers for change and include the following:
· Describe the personal change to target, competing commitments, and big assumptions.
· Develop a plan for successfully managing the selected change. Be as specific as you can in how you might work on meeting the goals of your plan.
· Analyze the drivers for change and anticipated outcomes of successfully implementing the development plan.
Your development plan should be written coherently to support a central idea. Use appropriate APA format, with correct grammar, usage, and mechanics as expected of a business professional.
Submission Requirements
· References: In addition to the Kegan and Lahy article, support your analysis with at least one other academic resource from the Capella University Library. You must use proper APA style to list your references.
· Length: 3–4 pages, not including the references list and your Immunity to Change Map.
· Written communication: Demonstrate graduate-level writing skills through accurate communication of thoughts that convey the overall goals of the analysis and do not detract from the message.
· Formatting: Use APA formatting, including correct in-text citations, proper punctuation, double-spacing throughout, proper headings and subheadings, no extra line spaces before headings and subheadings, proper paragraph and block indentation, no bolding, one-inch margins all around, and no bullets.
· Font and font size: Times New Roman, 12 point.