How is it that core habits that actively get in the way of our success persist? What is extra frustrating about these challenges is that they persist when we know better. 

As you know by now, these issues aren’t going to be solved with more information. They are issues that require adaptation. 

The good news is that there are likely wonderful reasons and logical reasons why this behavior change is not happening. The key is bringing these unhelpful assumptions to your awareness and testing them. 

In my book Going Right: A Logical Justification for Pursuing Your Dreams there’s a line that says it best:

Adaptation requires frame breaking growth of perspective. Most of the time that we are stuck in a cycle of non-adaptation, we are usually being ruled by something in our blind spot.

The following is a wonderful tool from Robert Kegan called ‘Immunity to Change’. This drill requires extreme vulnerability, but can drive change in the face of hidden competing commitments and big assumptions that are literally guaranteeing that we’ll never change until we break this frame. 

COLUMN 1 - Choose a change goal that you want more than anything. You cannot have a 7/10 desire here, so think deep about what adaptive change you need to make most. Is it getting rid of crippling procrastination? Is it relinquishing the need to control?

COLUMN 2 - List the behaviors (actions and non-actions) that you’re doing that perpetuate this problem. 

COLUMN 3 - First fill in the ‘Worry Box’ with your fears. What scares you most about making this change? Don’t be bashful here, so you may want to fill an entire extra page of these fears. Get them all out. Then, you’ll fill in the third column with what honorable things you’re committed to that are impeding your change. These are “hidden competing commitments.” This column and the next may take a few iterations and a great deal of reflection to complete. Our hidden competing commitments are things we are committed to, for good reason, that act as an out-of-control immune system that is preventing us from changing our behavior for the better because of some other good intention. 

COLUMN 4 - These are your big assumptions. They may come to a “if..then” structure that gets to the heart of what you assume would be at stake if you made a change. For example, if you assumed that “If I finished a project before I knew it was perfect, then I’d be viewed as a failure or incompetent” then of course you procrastinate. Anyone would avoid a label like being a failure with a little strategy that says “I’m not done yet.” You know your big assumptions are getting close when your brain has a difficult time understanding what life would even be like if these assumptions were not true. 

What you will do with this information will be outlined in your assignment in the next section. Before you get there, you should courageously drill down these four columns until you uncovered the essence of what’s really important here.

Awareness only gets your so far.

Once you have awareness of your ‘Immunity to Change’ you’ll need to do something about it. It helps if the members of the organization all know what each other is working on and trying to overcome for transparency, trust, vulnerability, and accountability to the change. 

The actionable step here is to design an experiment. This is a smaller, less-risky test of the big assumptions you noted in the ‘Immunity to Change’ exercise. In our aforementioned example, we could choose a semi-controlled instance where our procrastinating friend is assigned a task without catastrophic risk. They can complete the task without procrastinating (it won’t be perfect) and they will have to notice the feedback they get, which likely isn’t people judging them as a failure. This observation undermines the big assumption and dissolves the block on their behavior change. 

These experiments can and should be rolled out indefinitely to expose team members’ limiting beliefs and drive adaptation for the better. They also provide a catalyst for vulnerable connection and edge work. This is at the heart of “meaningful work and meaningful relationships” that are characteristic of deliberately developmental organizations. 

Design an experiment to challenge your big assumption from the ‘Immunity to Change’ organization. 

Once you’ve shared the ‘Immunity to Change’ drill with a team member, you can now help design a developmental experiment that will challenge the big assumptions that limit another person. 

TAKE ACTION: