Sticky Beliefs And How To Change Them

The Covid-19 pandemic. Remote work, mental health and burnout. The Great Resignation. Diversity, equity and inclusion. Climate change. Inflation. Political polarization. Globalization. Supply chain vulnerabilities.... Your organization is being buffeted by amped up forces of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) from all directions all at once. And while it may be clear to you that your organization must adapt, your people may be moving far too slowly and/or resisting change altogether.

While people will take action when they strongly believe they must and make changes when they believe change is absolutely necessary, they won’t easily come to that belief if it challenges what they think they already know. That’s because people are not naturally wired to do that—to abandon their beliefs—even in the face of indisputable evidence that they’re wrong.

As a leader, you need to understand how beliefs work and what it takes to change them 

In a 2018 Psychology Today article (“What Actually Is a Belief? And Why Is It So Hard to Change?”) the author describes beliefs as, “our brain’s way of making sense of and navigating our complex world.” They are “mental representations of the ways our brains expect things in our environment to behave, and how things should be related to each other—the patterns our brain expects the world to conform to.” According to the article, beliefs are beneficial in several ways: 

• They “act as templates for efficient learning and are often essential for survival”;
• They are often “intertwined with how we define ourselves as people”, including our reputation and/or the structure of key aspects of our lives; and
• They mean we don’t have to continuously create a new worldview, which is “effortful, time- and energy-consuming”.

A Guardian article from 2005, “Where Belief is Born”, adds a couple of other benefits to the list:

• Beliefs “help people's brains categorise others and view objects as good or bad, largely unconsciously”;
• In conversations, beliefs “act as filters for the deluge of sensory information and guide the brain's response”.

By having our own personal belief framework, therefore, we are able to learn more efficiently, filter out noise, make rapid judgments about potential threats, avoid over-taxing our brains, and maintain a sustained sense of ourselves. And given that on top of all of these other benefits, many of our beliefs are learned at an early age from parents and other adult authority figures, beliefs can be very sticky. So much so that we will react strongly to and explain away contradictory evidence that challenges our deeply-held beliefs, rather than abandoning them (see “This Article Won’t Change Your Mind” for a lot more on this). 

As the Guardian article says,  “beliefs don’t need to make sense to be deeply held”. 

The Psychology Today article introduces another word—homeostasis—in the context of what a belief framework does for us: “Beliefs preserve a kind of cognitive homeostasis—a stable, familiar approach to processing information about our world.” They help us to maintain our equilibrium by dampening what might otherwise be wild swings back-and-forth in our moods and behaviors as we receive new information. “When a new piece of sensory information comes in,” says the Guardian article, “it is assessed against these knowledge units before the brain works out whether or not it should be incorporated.”

Homeostasis means “any self-regulating process by which an organism tends to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that are best for its survival”. If beliefs play this role in one sense—keeping us from thrashing about in the face of change—they can also prevent adaptation, holding us in a familiar comfort zone where all the hard work of creating a new worldview isn’t necessary. In this latter sense, beliefs don’t act as a homeostat at all, driving us to avoid change even when the need is abundantly clear and potentially even an issue of survival.

Your organization also has a sticky belief system

Groups—your family, your local community, your company—also have belief systems that make communication more efficient, filter out noise, accelerate learning and decision-making, and support the formation of a shared identity. Like individual belief systems, these group belief systems are time- and energy-consuming to change. They show up in mission/purpose statements, core values, and so on. They underlie culture. And like personal beliefs, they are often learned at a relatively early point in people’s tenure with the group—from colleagues, supervisors, mentors, bosses, and other authority figures.

An organization’s belief system enables persistence of core attributes like mission, purpose, and values. Shared beliefs also support the continuation of tried-and-true practices that have always delivered customer satisfaction and profits, even when that constancy comes at the cost of institutional resistance to change. In the face of VUCA, these beliefs may feel like the only firm ground people have to stand on. 

Your organization’s long-held beliefs act as a sort of homeostat by keeping your people on course and undistracted by ‘ripples in the force’ around them. They also act as an anchor, though, when they become immutable and unchallenged, when being a ‘good team player’ outweighs speaking out in favor of change, when following the rules is rewarded and risk-taking is punished, and/or when hierarchy protects the proverbial unclothed emperor from being called out.

You need to beef up your organizational homeostat 

If people are resisting a change program, you aren’t going to compel them to comply by brute force. Instead, you have to help them balance all the good stuff they currently believe about the organization, its mission/purpose/values, its direction, its practices, and so on, with the need to challenge, update and, when necessary, annul those beliefs that are getting in the way of urgently-needed adaptation.

To establish this homeostatic balance between beliefs and adaptability:

• Start by demonstrating to others what it takes to change. Annul one of your own long-held beliefs and do so transparently and with a lot of noise. If one of your beliefs is that senior leaders  show too much vulnerability or weakness when they are open to being wrong, start there.
• Retrain or replace leaders who are themselves too steeped in their beliefs and/or too fearful of change to be genuinely open to risk-taking and adaptation, and who in fact suppress that openness in others.
• Review and adjust your organization’s mission statement, core values, goals, objectives and practices so that the right safeguards remain in place to protect things like product quality and safety, while also allowing for experimentation, failure, learning and adaptation. For example, if people already have personal objectives related to putting the ball on the bat (e.g. reliably hitting numbers), add some objectives related to swings-and-misses (e.g. running pilots that fail but yield new learnings). Make it a good thing to challenge the status quo.
• Embrace variety in all things. Bring a whole mix of brains and thinking styles and positions and backgrounds into conversations about strategies and tactics. Rejig existing business processes to include points where decisions are informed by all voices that matter. Intentionally inject diversity—including genuine outsiders—in planning processes. Make sure that those who are involved in making decisions about target audiences (like customers) represent the rich cross-section of human beings in that audience.
• Use iteration to give people the opportunity to let go of what they thought they knew, listen to others, and try on new beliefs. 
• Actively solicit advice and input from others when you’re deliberating on something important—many others—and open yourself up to what might emerge as you blend their thoughts and perspectives with yours.
• Champion experiments that challenge beliefs. Ensure that experiments are run with a scientific, dispassionate lens on their success or failure, and ramp them up or shut them down accordingly.

And be quick about it. VUCA isn’t going to slow down and wait for everyone to get on board.