When was the last time you ate less, drank less, exercised, spoke up, said no, or asked someone out on a date?
When was the last time you did the right thing, did what was rational?
When’s the last time you forgave that guy, that did that thing to you, back in the day? Not lately is probably the answer.
Here’s the deal, you’re hanging on to the past is like drinking poison and hoping someone else dies. You’re righteous and justified about it too… You are righteous and justified about – taking poison!
You are not rational, you are absurd.
What’s even more absurd is that you don’t know how absurd you are. Even now you will be trying to find some way around what I just said. Absurd!
As Keller and Aiken identified in their landmark McKinsey & Company study involving 1546 business executives:
“In the same way that the field of economics has been transformed by an improved understanding of how uniquely human social, cognitive and emotional biases lead to seemingly irrational decisions, so too the practice of change management is in need of a transformation through an improved understanding of the irrational (often unconscious) way in which humans interpret their environment and choose to act..”
Without an equally powerful examination of the human factor, and a robust approach that includes the human condition, change management is dead in the water. The result of that being ignored, is a model of change management that says to employees,
“You are something to be processed.”
“You’ll eventually get it if we tell you enough times… you dummy. And if you don’t get it, that’s your fault.”
It’s time to consider all of the variables in the equation before we pour any more energy and money into change practices that are amateur, at best.
What if it were possible to instigate change which actually accounted for people’s irrationality?
What if executing change from their perspective was more effective than your perspective?
To do this takes the bold act of getting outside your own perspective, something that is near impossible to achieve within the traditional paradigms of change, strategic planning, and general corporate consulting. However, this can be achieved through the penetrating and rapid “ontological” processes that we and a relative handful of other groups provide.
