You enter the meeting like a Ninja warrior. You are prepped, pumped and powerful. This time, you’ll really knock their socks off…. They have to sign on to this idea…it’s a no-brainer solution! You do the sales pitch of a lifetime – everything works! Impeccable timing! Laughter in all the right places! Great charts! Great visuals! And yet…. there they sit. Arms crossed, eyes scanning the room, heads slowly shaking. Or heads nodding – with the vacant smiles that you recognize by now as appeasement, but not acceptance and miles away from galvanizing excitement about what you are all worked up about. You’ve been here before, haven’t you?
A few years ago, Chip and Dan Heath came up with a great metaphor for this situation in their book “Switch”. They named it the Elephant, the Rider and the Road. The Rider is you – the one with the Vision, the map, the Big Idea that will change everything. The Road is the environment – your organizational culture. And those immovable objects sitting there, glancing at their cell phones? Yup. Shake trunks with your Elephants.
In fairness, we all have aversion to change in some parts of our working lives. If something is predictable, it’s reliable, it’s a known and we don’t have to think about it. Even if its a negative, (a toxic manager, say, or the fact that needed equipment upgrades are continually shelved due to budgetary constraints), we still don’t have to expend any time or energy focused on the issue, because we have adapted to it. We know how to avoid collisions with it and it works for us in the short term. Who’s got time to think any farther out than next week anyway?
Easy to be an Elephant!
Avoiding change seems worth it for awhile. Better to develop workarounds rather than risk the unknown. Better the status quo continually reinforced, better to appease the naysayers and immovable objects than to expend time, energy, money and our reputation toward possible but unproven solutions. The Elephant’s primal, fearful but powerful impulse toward resistance is present in all of us – even those first adaptors and high fliers and teenage fashionistas…they just hide it better under all that bling. But let’s face it. It’s really easy to be an Elephant! We take up lots of psychic space, we aren’t expected to be any speed but slow. We do what we are told, we lower any expectation of better outcomes. We make do. Anything else just seems too… overwhelming.
The Binary…
One of the most effective tools Elephants employ in the face of possible change is the Binary – reducing an issue into a clearly defined black and white, good and bad, all or nothing. No shades of gray, No need to waste time discerning nuance. Nuance and discernment in fact, appear wishy-washy – not strong, not definitive, requiring too much time and mental capital to deal with. And who has any of that to spare? Reduction into a binary lends itself to an up or down response. We can stop listening, we can stop participating, and still look like “we just want to get back to work, ok?”.
Risk Aversion – Is It Really Fear – or is it just “Easier” to keep saying No?
In Shift/POV, a game I’m refining to help groups process change, some of the more intriguing responses in the product trials happen when participants are required to engage an issue from the Skeptic POV: “I started to see that I really didn’t have to do anything except continue to say ‘no’. The burden of proof for why we should do this was all on the other side. It was just a lot easier to continue to resist. At times, it was even fun to be obstructive. I had to look at that response in myself”.
A Change at the Top
I worked as a Training Coordinator for an established non-profit for a number of years. We got along pretty well as a team – we were all women, which helped bond our very different styles and talents. But along comes the new Executive Director… a male. He wants to introduce strategies to grow our base. He wants to diversify our offerings, and apply results tracking, stricter accountability. The mood on the team became increasingly toxic – and as an all female group – I’m sorry to report that no one took him on directly, but we started to get quite passive aggressive in our response to his direction. We elephants would nod our heads sagely, wait for him to go away, and proceed to do things exactly the way we always had. As he became increasingly frustrated with this dynamic, his anger and impatience escalated the situation into a binary. His way or the Highway. We women now had the opportunity to paint ourselves as helpless victims and our ED as The Terminator.
Leaning In, Not Digging In
Because the situation had reached the binary point – we stopped listening, participating, progressing. We hunkered down and dug into our respective trenches. We knew that when we got tired of that mindset, we could table the issue, pretend it never happened, and proceed with workarounds back towards the status quo. Or we could become pod people: present physically, but mentally, we’ve gone walkabout in search of other opportunities. Thankfully, this particular endgame was averted. The ED surprised us by leaning in* instead of digging a deeper trench. He took a deep breath. He got very quiet. He looked each of us directly in the eye. He asked questions and really listened to the answers. He tweaked his agenda to address our concerns…and came back with something…possible. We women were then confronted with our own investment in the binary – how some of us had started to define ourselves in opposition to this man and his plans. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t fast, but our team finally started to listen to, and really hear the need for the changes he was advocating. He wisely allowed each of us ownership of the coming vision; we elephants got our sense of humor back and turned our big slow selves toward the direction he wanted to go.
*I’m using “Lean in” in support of deeper engagement through authentic dialogue – a different application than Sheryl Sandberg’s use of the same term in the title of her book.
Resist the Binary and Protect Your Vision
Doing nothing has clear advantages. There is power to be gained in being an obstacle. We get to appear strong and committed to ideas and assumptions that no one asks us to explain – using history and business as usual as if they are precious foundational values intrinsic to the organization, the community, the country. The burden of proof is on the promoters of the change. If this goes on too long and gets too heated, rational views become muted, and a binary moves in. If the change agents buy into the binary, they will exhaust themselves in quicksand trying to reshape their idea until it no longer looks exciting, inspired and interesting… in fact, it pretty much looks like the status quo. And the possibility of real progress comes to an end.
It may not be as much fun as putting together the most amazing sell job they’ve ever seen….but leaning in with the spirit of open engagement and authenticity: questioning the other side and deeply listening to their concerns, working step by step towards building something your Elephants can buy into and take ownership of … is the only way to produce change with integrity, energy and staying power.