The legendary physicist Max Planck once said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” That may be a bit extreme, but the point still stands.
The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. To bring about genuine change, you not only have to point the way to a new and better reality, you also need to displace what people already know and are comfortable with. To do that, you need to overcome resistance, both rational and irrational.
More specifically, you need to overcome three forces that support the status quo: the synapses that support our basic neurology, the culture that reinforces norms, and the economics that need to be overcome to do anything new. To drive genuine change, you need to help people not only unlearn old assumptions, but realign the underlying forces that keep things as they are.
The synaptic effect
We tend to think that we experience the world as it is. We see and hear things, store them away as knowledge, and then take new facts into account. But that’s not how our brains actually work. In reality, we filter out most of what we experience, so that we can focus on particular points of interest. In effect, we forget most things so we can zero in on what seems to be most important.
The effect is also cumulative. What we think of as knowledge is really connections in our brains, called synapses, which develop over time. 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.
So as we go through life and learn the ways of the world, we become less able to imagine other possibilities. Our mental models become instinctive and standard practices become “the right way to do things.” This effect becomes even stronger and more pervasive if we see our mental models as being responsible for our success.
That’s why unlearning is at least as important as learning. We need to break old synaptic patterns if we are to replace them with new ones. Genuine change can only begin when we recognize that progress isn’t just about learning more, but about having the courage to unlearn what once made us successful.
The culture effect
While our previous experiences tend to blind us to new developments, those around us will help reinforce common beliefs. In fact, a series of famous experiments done at Swarthmore College in the 1950s showed that we will conform to the opinions of those around us even if they are obviously wrong.
That’s why the best indicator of things we think and do is what the people around us think and do, and that effect extends out to three degrees of separation. 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 and actions.
As Thomas Kuhn pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, new paradigms don’t emerge all at once. They first arrive as a series of quirky anomalies that are easy to dismiss as “special cases” that can be worked around. That usually works pretty well for a while and things go on much as before.
So even if we notice that something is awry, that things aren’t quite what we thought they were, we will usually brush that thought aside and get back to business. After all, not only do we believe in our present working model, everyone around us does, too. The world is a messy place and every rule has exceptions. We carry on and don’t think too much more about it.
In How Minds Change, author David McRaney found that people who were 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. Just as our synapses favor the status quo, so do the cultures we are embedded in.
The cost effect
Another barrier to adaptation is that change incurs real costs. In one particularly glaring example, the main library at Princeton University took 120 years to switch to the Library of Congress classification system because of the time and expense involved. Clearly, that’s an extreme case, but every change effort needs to take inevitable frictions into account.
There are a number of reasons why switching costs can become a significant roadblock. The first is our innate bias for loss aversion. First identified and documented by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, we all have a tendency to avoid losses rather than seek out new gains. The comfort of the status quo can be more powerful than the uncertain promise of transformation.
Another important force is the availability heuristic, which reflects our tendency to overweight information that is most easily accessible. What we experience in the here and now always seems more tangible and concrete than the more distant benefits of change, which many will suspect will never come.
The status quo has often had years or even decades to embed itself into the fabric of institutions. Significant resources have been invested in developing textbooks, standard operating procedures, and best practices to support the old paradigm. To truly embrace something new and different, it’s not just ideas that need to change, but everything that underlies and supports them.
Change always involves switching costs and, unless the benefits to change are clear, the inertia of the status quo will win out.
Becoming an effective change leader
There is probably no better example of institutional resistance to change than the story of Ignaz Semmelweis. In the 1840s, as a young doctor at Vienna General Hospital, he discovered that simple handwashing could dramatically reduce infections and save lives. Yet the medical establishment rejected the idea outright.
Millions died needlessly before the germ theory of disease gained prominence two decades later. Since then, the term Semmelweis effect has been coined to describe the tendency for institutions to reject new evidence when it contradicts established beliefs or paradigms. Sadly, it appears not much has changed in the 120 years. That tendency persists.
Viewed through the lens of synaptic, cultural, and cost effects, the story begins to make more sense. Doctors’ mental models were shaped by the miasma theory, which held that “bad air” made people sick. High-status physicians felt insulted by the suggestion that they themselves were spreading disease, and system-wide reforms would have required significant costs and disruption.
So we can’t just blame institutions. We also need to look at Semmelweis, who was an ineffective advocate for his ideas. Rather than identifying why the medical establishment was unwilling to change, he simply railed against it, sending nasty letters to prominent doctors. They closed ranks against him and things ended badly. He would die in an insane asylum, ironically of an infection he contracted under care.
If you truly believe in change, passion and good intentions aren’t nearly enough. You need to be an effective advocate. That starts with understanding why we fail to adapt and addressing the barriers that hold us back.