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.

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.

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 you so far.

Once you have awareness to 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 chose 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.

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.