Anybody who’s ever pursued significant change of any kind knows that some of the opposition can be absolutely nuts, with no rational basis at all. Change consultants often suggest we look for a “root cause,” but that’s often a fool’s errand. You’ll not only drive yourself crazy running in circles, you’re also likely to lend credibility to their attacks.
Consider the Semmelweis effect,, the human tendency to reject new evidence because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms. It gets its name from Ignaz Semmelweis, a young doctor who discovered that hand washing at hospitals could prevent infections and was driven literally insane for his trouble.
The simple truth is that when you are trying to get people to change things that they think or do, many won’t be ready to hear you. Some will never accept what you are trying to achieve and will actively work to undermine you. But by better understanding irrational resistance, we can develop strategies to overcome it. Semmelweis’s story is a great place to start.
Paradigms And Synaptic Pathways
We spend a good portion of our lives learning established paradigms. We go to school, train for a career, and hone our skills. We work hard to master fundamental principles and are rewarded when we demonstrate that mastery. As we grow into skilled practitioners, we find that increased proficiency often brings greater success and status.
Neurologically speaking we’re building up connections in our brains called synapses. These pathways strengthen as we use them and degrade when we do not. Or, as scientists who study these things like to put it, the neurons that fire together, wire together. That’s why thinking or doing something new is often uncomfortable, it goes against the way that our brains have been wired through experience.
That’s part of what happened in the case of Semmelweis. The reason that the medical establishment had so much trouble accepting his discovery was that the existing model, called the miasma theory, held that it was bad air that made you sick, so it didn’t make any sense to them that washing hands would prevent infection.
Statisticians call this a confounding error. Things that smell badly, such as sewage and rotting organic material, are breeding grounds for bacteria. So proximity to those things would make you sick, but because of the bacteria and other infectious agents, not because of the noxious odors.
Yet there was probably something deeper as well. We tend to associate bad smells with low status. It is the poor, unwashed and uneducated that live and work around things that smell badly. If doctors themselves could spread disease, then what did that say about their status?
The Inherent Costs Of Switching From The Status Quo
The miasma theory wasn’t just any idea, but had been conventional wisdom for over two thousand years, since Hippocrates in the fourth century B.C. It was ingrained in every aspect of medicine, from how doctors were trained, to how they treated patients to how they conferred with each other and discussed cases amongst themselves.
Adopting Semmelweis’s practice of handwashing wasn’t just a matter of taking a few minutes to prepare before seeing patients, it would require doctors to adopt a new idea. Semmelweis, it must be said, didn’t have a competing theory or way to explain why hand washing would help prevent infection. The germ theory of disease wouldn’t arrive for another two decades.
There are a number of reasons overcoming the status quo incurs significant switching costs. Some are psychological, such as our innate bias for loss aversion, which makes us hesitant to switch from what is familiar. There is also the availability heuristic, our tendency to overweight information that is most easily accessible. Everybody was aware of bad smells emanating from unhealthy places, nobody in the 1840s knew about microscopic bacteria
There were also institutional costs. The practice of medicine involves not only doctors and nurses, but hospitals, medical schools and other organizations, all of which were invested in the miasma theory. Change required their buy-in, which didn’t come until the 1860s, when the work of pioneers like Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister and John Snow eventually won the day and established the germ theory.
Overcoming Network Effects
We tend to adopt the ideas we see working around us, not ones we just hear about. Decades of research has shown that we will conform to the opinions of our peers and that the effect extends to three degrees of social distance. So it is not only those we know well, but even the friends of our friend’s friends—people we don’t even know—that affect our opinions.
A great example is the spread of air conditioners in the 1950s. Back then units were installed in windows. The sociologist William Whyte observed that these didn’t propagate evenly, but in clusters from building to building. People weren’t buying air conditioners after hearing about them, but after visiting a neighbor who had one.
This is why methods of persuasion and creating awareness are usually a waste of time in driving large-scale change. Semmelweis’s problem wasn’t that he couldn’t get the word out about hand washing. In fact, the idea was hotly discussed, but the people who heard about it were embedded in networks that reinforced the miasma theory.
Here’s where the air conditioner example is helpful and instructive. If you want to spread an idea, don’t go to a building that, metaphorically speaking, has no air conditioners. You go to where the idea has already taken root, or at least has the potential to. You look for buildings that already have some air conditioners and help them spread faster and further.
As I wrote in Cascades, it is small groups, loosely connected and united by a shared purpose that drive transformational change. A change leader’s job is to help those groups to connect and to inspire them with a sense of purpose.
You Don’t Have To Convince Everyone All At Once
When we feel passionately about something, our first instinct is to often go and try to convince the skeptics. We’re sure that once they understand the idea, they will embrace it. That’s almost never true. More likely is that they will work to undermine what you’re trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive.
In How Minds Change, author David McRaney found that people involved in cults or believed in conspiracy theories didn’t change their opinions when confronted with new facts, but when they changed their social environment. We tend to adopt the ideas of those around us. The best indicator of things we think and do is what the people around us think and do.
The truth is that the status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. People spend years being absorbing existing paradigms. Embracing something new means rewiring their brains, incurring switching costs and and pushing against the pull of their social networks.
That’s why opposition to change, even when the stakes are life or death, can be completely irrational. The status quo has many champions—our brain chemistry, our social networks and our need for psychological safety. It feels normal and right, so challenging it can feel like a betrayal of what we’ve come to trust.
Ideas that are new and different are, as Pixar’s Ed Catmull has put it, like ugly babies and they need to be protected. You don’t need to convince everybody all at once. Go out and find others who are as enthusiastic about the idea for change as you are, who are willing to nurture it until it can gain traction and scale.
If an idea is important, don’ t leave it vulnerable to those who want to kill it. Protect it, find others who love it as much as you do and give it a real chance to succeed.
Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, and bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change. His previous effort, Mapping Innovation, was selected as one of the best business books of 2017. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
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