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How do you go about initiating change in your organization? Not so easy, is it? A ChangeThis article by David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz, “The Neuroscience of Leadership”, suggests that the physical operation of the brain itself may have a lot to do with it.

To me, the challenge of change in any organization (particularly for broad, organization-wide changes) is to encourage it in such a way that acceptance becomes rapidly widespread. Otherwise it becomes bogged down, sidetracked, or otherwise ineffectual. Once that happens, the next attempt at change becomes even harder to initiate.

David and Jeffrey suggest the best way may not necessarily be to tell people what’s best for them, but to present ideas in such a way as to allow each person to experience their own insights into how best to behave. Then, when leaders remind others about their useful insights, a positive feedback is formed, and the new behavior becomes more entrenched.

Steps to building acceptance can be summed thus:

1. Focus employees’ attention on their own insights, by facilitating discussions and activities that involve being entrepreneurial
2. Regularly provide “gentle reminders” so the entrepreneurial maps become the dominant pathways (in the brain) along which information, ideas, and energy flow
3. Catch the team when they get sidetracked and gently bring them back

I have no problem with the steps outlined above, but translating that into the real world is not so cut-and-dried. Suppose you have an organizational change you want to introduce (internal blogging, for instance). How do you go about getting the organization to envision it? Where do you begin?

More to come on this in the future…

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