The Last Time You Really Changed

Learning something new is not the same as changing.

We keep talking about change. Every strategy deck has a change plan in it, every program has a workstream for it, and most of them are built the same way.

But how does a person change, really?

Think of one thing about yourself that changed and stayed changed. Not something you held for five weeks and let go of. Something that lasted.

There was probably a moment where you learned something. You read it, or heard it, or sat through a session. That was not the moment you changed, but it was where it started, or the seed was planted.

So what turned the learning into a change?

It became about you. Not just a good idea in general, but something that made sense based on your own situation, or put words on something you had been living with for years.

Then you tried it. It went well enough to be worth doing again, and after a while it was simply what someone like you does.

That is the order. Knowledge, then belief, then behavior. Skip the middle and the last one does not hold.

In organizations we stop at the first step.

We deliver the knowledge. Train the steps, publish the new process, measure completion, report attendance. Then we treat the certificate as though the change has already happened.

Six weeks later half of the trainees are back in the spreadsheet.

That gets expensive quickly. You paid for the system in full and are getting the value of half of it, against a benefits case that assumed everybody would be using it. Two processes run side by side, the official one and the real one, with people paid to reconcile between them. Your reporting draws on both, so nobody can say which numbers are right. And the training budget is about to be spent twice on the same people.

The biggest cost never shows up in the variance report. The next change you announce will land in an organization that has just learned, from experience, that new ways of working do not last here.

Baldwin and Ford's review of the training transfer research (Personnel Psychology, 1988) found that whether training holds depends on three things together: the person, the design of the training, and the work environment they go back to. The third is the one most rollouts leave alone.

What did we skip?

The middle step. Everything between knowing how it works and believing it is worth doing.

The belief that the old way was faster, which is usually true for the first few months. The belief that this will be replaced again in two years, which is often true as well.

And underneath both, something more personal. The people who knew the old system cold were the ones everybody came to. That was part of who they were. It was their identity. The new system makes them a beginner again, after twenty years in the organization.

None of that was on the training agenda.

Knowing the steps has never changed who somebody believes they are.

Why does the belief win?

Because your brain does not store information about who you are in the same place it stores instructions about how something works. Anything you take personally sticks harder, and it counts for more when you decide what to do next. Researchers call it self-referential processing.

So the new steps learned in that training room are already fading. The question about what this means and how it changes the trainee’s identity remains unanswered.

So what does the rest of the work look like?

None of this argues against training. People have to learn the new way, and the session is where that starts. It argues that the session is the beginning of the work and not the end of it.

Say the loss out loud. Someone who was expert is now a novice, and pretending otherwise insults them. Name it, then name what they become instead.

Give the people who knew the old way a real role in developing the new way, so that who they are at work survives the change instead of fighting against it.

Then watch what visibly happens to the first person who does it the new way and is slower for it. Everybody else is watching too.

One thing this will not fix.

There is a level above belief, and it has nothing to do with the software. It is the organization around it.

What gets measured. What gets promoted. What quietly happens to somebody who is slower for a month while they learn. You can do the belief work well and still watch it undone by a place that keeps rewarding the old way.

We will cover this in a later article.