How to Survive Change . . . You Didn't Ask for. M. J. Ryan

      CHANGE TRUTH #3

      Your Thinking Is Not Always Your Friend

      With our thoughts we make the world.

      —The Dhammapada

      What was the common factor in why people died in Hurricane Katrina? I bet you guessed, as I did and all the media reported, that the answer is poverty. But an analysis by Knight Ridder afterward and reported by Time magazine reporter Amanda Ripley in her book The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why showed something different: the most common factor was age. The older you were, the more likely you were to stay; three-quarters of the dead were over sixty, and half, over seventy-five. They had all lived through a major hurricane, Camille, and therefore didn't heed the warnings to leave because they assumed they would make it again. Said the director of the National Hurricane Center, Max Mayfield, “I think Camille killed more people during Katrina than it did in 1969.”

      The brain is an amazing organ, with incredible social, emotional, conceptual, and linguistic abilities. It can learn from experiences and grow new cells and pathways until you draw your last breath. Neuroscientists are just beginning to understand a fraction of what it can do and how. But not all of what it does is helpful when it comes to responding well to change, as those who stayed during Katrina found out to their peril. Two things in particular stand out from what I've learned about the brain so far.

      First, the brain has a tremendous tendency to habituate, meaning to do the same thing over and over—which is great when you don't want to have to think about how to brush your teeth, but not so good when you need to think creatively about how to cope with a situation you've never been in before. That's why we so often tend to keep doing what we've already done, whether we get good results or not, and are slow to give up some behaviors.

      To add to the problem, part of habituation is the brain's tendency to look for patterns, to match current experience with the past—oh, this is just like that thing that happened before. I once read that the average brain generalizes from an example of one, which any good scientist would tell you is not a big enough data pool from which to be drawing useful conclusions. That's what was going on with Hurricane Katrina. The folks who stayed were the ones who'd gone through a massive hurricane before. Their brains said, “This is the same as that.” But it wasn't. Environmental degradation, global warming, and sheer bad luck combined to make a change. Younger folks, who never had the experience, heeded the warning because their brains didn't have a pattern to habituate to.

      There's an adaptive reason for this habituation. The brain is always on and consumes a disproportionate part of the body's energy. It's only 3 percent of the body's weight yet uses around 20 percent of its oxygen and glucose. It takes less work to be on automatic pilot, so it makes sense from an efficiency standpoint.

      When the environment is stable, this autopilot serves us well. But during change, we have to fight against our brain's tendency to look at the situation and see the same old thing, when it's actually encountering something new. The patterns just aren't there to fall back on. We don't know what the stock market is going to do, for instance, despite all the past ups and downs, because we're in a situation that has never occurred before.

      Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, says that we previously lived in a country he calls Mediocristan, where cause and effect were closely connected because life was simpler and the range of possible events was small. Now, the global community has entered a country that he names Extremistan, where we are both more interdependent and at the mercy of “the singular, the accidental, the unseen and the unpredicted.” (One side benefit of living in Extremistan: it also increases the possibility that one person can make a positive difference. Think of Nelson Mandela inspiring the end of apartheid in South Africa or Boris Yeltsin facing down the tanks in Red Square, which toppled the Soviet Union.) Unfortunately, our brains haven't kept up with this new complexity and keep searching for patterns based on the past even when they're not useful.

      The other thing to understand about the brain is that we share many of its structures with all mammals (and even reptiles), and therefore it's hardwired to act in ways that were useful when we were being chased by animals in the wilderness but that are not well suited to the complex challenges we face today. This part of our brains, called the amygdala, is constantly scanning for danger but often gives you inaccurate information, sounding the alarm unnecessarily.

      You'll be learning about some of the implications of this aspect of our brain structure throughout the book. For now here's just one, as psychologist Rick Hanson and neurologist Rick Mendius put it in an article in Inquiring Mind. Because of the advantage there used to be in perceiving danger quickly, “The brain is hard-wired to scan for the bad, and when it inevitably finds negative things, they get stored immediately and made available for rapid recall. In contrast, positive experiences (short of million dollar moments) are usually registered through standard memory systems, and thus need to be held in conscious awareness for ten to twenty seconds for them to really sink in. In sum, your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones . . . this built-in bias puts a negative spin on the world and intensifies our stress and reactivity.” In times of change, that's the last thing we need—to perceive what's happening to us as a tsunami when it's only a five-foot wave, to ignore the good and focus solely on the bad. We need to keep perspective so we can be effective in handling the change.

      So what are we to do with these tendencies of the brain that don't serve us well during change? We don't have to be solely at their mercy. Becoming aware when we're in one of these habitual thinking ruts is the first step toward making a different choice. Plus, our brain can do much more than these habits, and we can use its amazing other capacities to find the solutions we need.

      See As If for the First Time

      To keep from falling into thinking ruts at work, Javier often asks himself, “What if this were a new job in a new company? How would I be behaving? What would I be doing differently? What would I notice that I am now taking for granted? How would I explain this to someone who knows nothing about it?” These questions have helped him keep a fresh perspective and to question what he would otherwise simply accept. Recently it led him to come up with a new marketing idea. If seeing as if for the first time is hard for you, talk to newcomers in your organization. Or to people who are not in the same situation as you. What are they perceiving because they have a “beginner's mind”?