Immunity to Change

Key Concepts

Stages of adult development and adaptive change

“These three adult meaning systems—the socialized mind, self-authoring mind, and self-transforming mind—make sense of the world, and operate within it, in profoundly different ways.” (p. 33)

FIGURE 1-4: Three plateaus in adult mental development 

(p. 33)

“Thus, we are asking more and more workers who could once perform their work successfully with socialized minds—good soldiers—to shift to self-authoring minds. And we are asking more and more leaders who could once lead successfully with self-authoring minds—sure and certain captains—to develop self-transforming minds. In short, we are asking for a quantum shift in individual mental complexity across the board.” (p. 45)

“Heifetz says the biggest error leaders make is when they apply technical means to solve adaptive challenges. In other words, we may be unable to bring about the changes we want because we are misdiagnosing our aspiration as technical, when in reality it is an adaptive challenge.” (p. 48)

Immunity to change is about overcoming out self-protection

“We have learned that meeting adaptive challenges requires, first, an adaptive formulation of the problem (i.e., we need to see exactly how the challenge comes up against the current limits of our own mental complexity), and, second, an adaptive solution (i.e., we ourselves need to adapt in some way).” (p. 50)

“We use the medical metaphor of immunity quite mindfully to signal that, first of all, this phenomenon is not in itself a bad thing. On the contrary, an immune system is, most of the time, a beautiful thing, an extraordinarily intelligent force that elegantly acts to protect us, to save our lives. Every immunity to change can be seen as an asset and a source of strength for that person.” (p. 56)

“Change does not fail to occur because of insincerity. The heart patient is not insincere about his wish to keep living, even as he reaches for another cigarette. Change fails to occur because we mean both things. It fails to occur because we are a living contradiction.” (p. 58)

“We have come to this new appreciation for human courage because we have learned something that may be very hard for successful, capable people to believe: more than we understand, most people deal constantly with fear.” (p. 69)

“Anxiety, we have gradually come to appreciate, is the most important—and least understood—private emotion in public life.” (p. 69)

Overcoming immunity: three premises

“Overcoming immunity does not require the elimination of all anxiety-management systems.” (p. 71)

“It is not change that causes anxiety; it is the feeling that we are without defenses in the presence of what we see as danger that causes anxiety. ...So it is not change by itself that makes us uncomfortable; it is not even change that involves taking on something very difficult. Rather, it is change that leaves us feeling defenseless before the dangers we “know” to be present that causes us anxiety. Overturning an immunity to change always raises the specter of leaving us exposed to such dangers. We build an immune system to save our lives. We are not easily going to surrender such a critical protection.” (p. 71)

“Our immune systems can be overcome. Too constricting an anxiety-management system can be replaced with a more expansive one (the limits of which may eventually be discovered, and the prospect of overcoming may arise again).” (p. 71)

What makes a group immunity to change effort successful 

“While the role of the leader is key in building trust, he or she cannot, alone, make a team successful. That requires everyone’s engagement. We identified six additional elements that explain the team’s development:” (p. 233)

“The teamwide goal was a high-leverage one for the team’s development.” (p. 234)

“Individuals worked throughout on personal improvement goals that fit with the team’s goal.” (p. 234)

“People brought relevant personal business into the team’s business.” (p. 236)

“There was a strong collective commitment and motivation to improve.” (p. 237)

“Individual learning was enhanced by the social fabric of the group.” (p. 237)

“The learning structure was appropriate to the learning needs.” (p. 239)

“Three Necessary Ingredients” for overcoming immunity to change

INGREDIENT #1: THE GUT—A VITAL SOURCE OF MOTIVATION FOR CHANGE

“To start and stay the course of doing genuinely developmental work, a person must really, really want to accomplish his or her first-column goal. It is almost never enough to have a goal that just “makes sense,” not even one with compelling, logical reasons behind it. Reasons can help fuel our motivation to change, but they aren’t enough to help us cross the critical thresholds. Reasons tap into the “ought” and “should” realm of inner talk. We must also experience sufficient need or desire, visceral feelings—which is why we say they come from the gut.” (p. 243)

INGREDIENT #2—HEAD AND HEART: THE WORK MUST SIMULTANEOUSLY ENGAGE THINKING AND FEELING

“No amount of thinking or effort alone will be sufficient to solve an adaptive problem, since how we feel is inherent in the problem itself. And because how we feel is intricately tied to how we know, we cannot feel differently if we don’t know differently. We need a bigger emotional and cognitive space, one in which we experience that the internal conflicts and inconsistencies of our adaptive challenge are not inevitable and intractable.” (p. 247)

INGREDIENT #3: HAND—THE WORK IS SIMULTANEOUSLY ABOUT MINDSET AND BEHAVIOR

“We must set out. We must begin to take new action. Success follows from taking intentional, specific actions—the reaching hand—that are inconsistent with our immunity so that we can test our mindset.” (p. 251)

“Our entire purpose in acting differently is to generate relevant data to test our big assumptions. Our immediate purpose is not to improve or get better, but to get information. In doing so, we are again working within the sweet spot of an adaptive challenge, discovering whether it is possible to replace the safety born of limiting ourselves with a safety informed by learning that the expected bad outcomes don’t materialize when we suspend self-imposed limits. Not only that, we may discover the benefits of an increased repertoire of behavioral options and the sense of excitement, accomplishment, and mastery that comes from making progress on our change goal.” (p. 254)

“What is common across all the people we have helped to accomplish adaptive challenges?” (p. 258)

“They all succeed at changing both their mindset (the meaning-making system that shapes thoughts and feelings) and their behavior; rather than changing only mindset or behavior, and hoping the other will eventually follow.” (p. 258)

“They all become keen and focused observers of their own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, and they learn to use these as information. They see the agenda that is driving them, not just the agenda they are driving.” (p. 258)

“Changes to their mindsets are always in the direction of seeing and feeling more possibilities: Spaces people had previously thought they could not or should not enter (because they were out of reach or too dangerous) are now fully accessible.” (p. 258)

“They take focused risks and build a new set of muscles and metrics around assumptions based on actual, rather than imagined, data about the consequences of their new actions. Their anxiety around the initial adaptive challenge is reduced, if not eliminated, while their experiences of pleasure significantly increase.” (p. 259)

“They experience increased mastery, more options, wider control, and greater degrees of freedom. They make progress on, or even accomplish, their column 1 commitment, and, more often than not, their accomplishments extend considerably beyond the initial aspiration. Because they have developed new mental capabilities—not just a new solution to a single problem—they can bring these capabilities to other challenges and other venues, in their work and in their personal lives.” (p. 259)

“DIAGNOSING YOUR OWN IMMUNITY TO CHANGE”

FIGURE 9-1

(p. 264)

COLUMN 1: YOUR IMPROVEMENT GOAL

“We have found that people tend to end up with maps they experience as more powerful when they start out by saying affirmatively what they want to become rather than what they want to stop being.” (p. 267)

COLUMN 2: THE FEARLESS INVENTORY

“The more concrete behaviors you can list (what you actually do or fail to do), the better.” (p. 267)

“The more items you enter here, and the more honest you are, the greater the eventual diagnostic power of your map will be. Keep in mind that no one need ever see what you enter, so take a deep dive, and tell on yourself.” (p. 268)

“Make sure that everything you enter provides a picture of you working against your own goal in column 1. (No doubt you are also doing things on behalf of your column 1 goal. Good for you, but that is not the nature of the column 2 assignment. We aren’t looking for balance here. The best information for revealing your immunity will eventually be found in the things you do, or fail to do, that have the unintentional effect of undermining your improvement goal.)” (p. 268)

“You should also be clear we are not asking why you are doing these things, or for ideas or plans about how you can stop doing these things and get better. The urge to explain our own ineffectiveness and/or to devise strategies to cure ourselves of our wicked ways is often very strong at this point in the process.” (p. 269)

“If you get regular feedback, supervision, or evaluation, you may want to consider that input as an additional source of column 2 entries. If not, and if for any reason you are unable to create a rich list of your own counterproductive behaviors, we have a final suggestion, if you have the stomach for it: seek out a few people whom you trust and feel are on your side and just ask them if they can identify any behaviors (or avoidances) in your repertoire that tend to work against your goal.” (p. 269)

COLUMN 3: HIDDEN COMPETING COMMITMENTS

“The first step in creating good entries for column 3 is to generate the raw material that will eventually get you there. Have a look at your column 2 list and answer the following question about each of those entries: If I imagine myself trying to do the opposite of this, what is the most uncomfortable or worrisome or outright scary feeling that comes up for me?” (p. 272)

“We are at another critical point here, a place where, if you do not take this to sufficient depth, the map you come up with will not have enough power. If you haven’t located a genuine “oh, shit” kind of feeling, you are probably not there yet. You have to really reach some fear, and if you haven’t gotten there yet, you might ask yourself, “and what would be the worst about that for me?” You need to get to a place where you feel yourself at risk in some way; where you are unprotected from something that feels dangerous to you.” (p. 272)

“The actual entries for column 3, however—the hidden competing commitments—are not these fears in the worry box themselves. The fears, we said, are the raw material for generating third-column commitments. The idea behind the immunity to change is that we do not merely have these fears; we sensibly, even artfully, protect ourselves from them. We create ways of dealing with the anxiety these fears provoke. We are not only afraid; we take action to combat our fears. We defend ourselves from what terrifies us. We are actively (but not necessarily consciously) committed to making sure the things we are afraid of do not happen.” (p. 275)

“We have learned that if your map does not yet feel powerful or intriguing at this point in the process, it is likely because your entries do not match these criteria in some way.” (p. 279)

COLUMN 4: THE BIG ASSUMPTIONS

“When we treat an assumption as if it is a truth, we have made it what we call a big assumption.” (p. 282)

“Some of the big assumptions you may regard as true (“What do you mean I assume some bad thing will happen? Believe me, some bad thing will happen!”); some of them you may see right away are not really true (“I can see that it is clearly not true, but I act and feel as if it were true”); and some of them you may be quite unsure about (“Part of me feels this is true, or true most of the time, but another part of me is not so sure”). However, there is some way in which you have felt, or continue to feel, that every big assumption you list is true. And you might be right. We reiterate, we are not saying all our big assumptions are false. What we are saying is that we can’t explore how true or false they are until we have surfaced and tested them.” (p. 284)

“Please generate as many possible big assumptions as you can. Check them against the above criteria. This last step in developing your X-ray may inspire its own “ahas,” but that is not necessary at this point. The critical threshold in creating a good map is that once you have completed the third column, you can see and feel your own version of the immunity-to-change dynamic. Having completed this step, your map should feel intriguing, illuminating, or at least interesting to you.” (p. 287)

“OVERCOMING YOUR IMMUNITY TO CHANGE”

OPENING MOVES: SETTING THE STAGE

“Honing your map: Review and revise your immunity map as needed, so that it feels powerful to you and you have testable big assumptions.” (p. 290)

“Initial survey: Get external input on the importance and value of your column 1 goal, and create a baseline of how well you are doing on the goal at the start of the process.” (p. 290)

MIDDLE GAME: DIGGING INTO THE WORK

“Continuum of progress: Envision what full success looks like in achieving your column 1 goal.” (p. 290)

“Self-observations: Tune in to the big assumptions in action and stay alert to counterexamples. Recognize when and where your big assumptions are activated, and when they are inaccurate.” (p. 290)

“Biography of the big assumptions: For each assumption, ask: When did it get started? What is its history? What is its current validity?” (p. 290)

“Testing the big assumptions: Intentionally behave counter to how a big assumption would have you act, see what happens, and then reflect on what those results tell you about the certainty of your assumption. Do this process several times, running tests of bigger scope each time.” (p. 290)

END GAME: CONSOLIDATING YOUR LEARNING

“Follow-up survey: Get input (from the same people who completed your initial survey) on your column 1 goal. Compare your self-assessment of progress with what they see. Learn about the effect of your changes on others.” (p. 291)

“Identifying hooks and releases: Take stock of the current status of your big assumptions; consider how to maintain progress, guard against future slippage (the “hooks”), and recover when you do (the “releases”).” (p. 291)

“Future progress: Once you are “unconsciously released” from your current big assumption, you may want to reengage the immunities process, especially around any unmet goals or areas in which you currently feel stuck or discouraged.” (p. 291)

“THE HEART OF THE PROCESS: DESIGNING, RUNNING, AND INTERPRETING TESTS OF THE BIG ASSUMPTIONS”

“For purposes of adaptive learning, it’s important to understand that the goal in conducting the test is not just to perform the activity specified in the test. We need to collect data about what happens as a consequence of that action, and then interpret those outcomes to confirm or revise our big assumption. In other words, the test has not actually been successful until its result is connected to our work on the big assumption.” (p. 292)

“First, this exercise requires that you know exactly which big assumption you want to test. If you unearthed several big assumptions, now is the time to choose one. The two criteria for selecting are, first, that it’s a powerful assumption (it has a strong hold on you and it clearly limits what you experience as “in bounds” in order to feel safe); and second, that it is testable.” (p. 292)

“A good test conforms to the following S-M-A-R-T criteria:” (p. 297)

• “S-M: It is important that your experiment be both safe and modest. You might ask yourself, ‘What can I risk doing, or resist doing, on a small scale that might seem inadvisable if I held my big assumption as true, in order to learn what the results would actually be?’” (p. 297)

• “A: A good test will be actionable in the near term. This means that the test is relatively easy to carry out (ideally, it doesn’t require you to go out of your way at all, but rather is an opportunity to do something different in your normal day) and can be conducted within the next week or so.” (p. 298)

• “T: Finally, you are clear that you are taking a research stance (not a self-improvement stance); you are running a test of your big assumption. A good test will allow you to collect data related to your big assumption (including data that would qualify your assumption or call it into doubt).” (p. 298)

Quotables

“Not long ago a medical study showed that if heart doctors tell their seriously at-risk heart patients they will literally die if they do not make changes to their personal lives—diet, exercise, smoking—still only one in seven is actually able to make the changes. One in seven!” (p. 18)

“As with the heart patients, the change challenges today’s leaders and their subordinates face are not, for the most part, a problem of will. The problem is the inability to close the gap between what we genuinely, even passionately, want and what we are actually able to do. Closing this gap is a central learning problem of the twenty-first century.” (p. 19)

“The field of “leadership development” has overattended to leadership and underattended to development. An endless stream of books tries to identify the most important elements of leadership and help leaders to acquire these abilities. Meanwhile, we ignore the most powerful source of ability: our capacity (and the capacity of the people who work for us) to overcome, at any age, the limitations and blind spots of current ways of making meaning.” (p. 22)

“Many practical guides, such as Robert Heller’s How to Delegate and Gerard Blair’s Starting to Manage: The Essential Skills, offer excellent advice—excellent, that is, if learning to delegate is, for you, a technical challenge. For most people, however, we suspect that it’s more of an adaptive or developmental challenge, of the kind we described in chapter 2.” (p. 151)