Ready to change?

Depends on what you mean by "ready"

What if CHANGE-ing isn’t something we just “decide” to do?

When working as a therapist, work/career advisor and organizational consultant, I knew that every client of mine wanted the same thing: to CHANGE their current state to a different/better one.

Turns out that helping people change and move from where they are to where they say they want to be is as complicated as the people themselves. The change equation isn’t all about the change agent. Helpers can’t MAKE anyone change (even though many helpers and their clients wish they could and are disappointed they can’t). The client has many moving parts, and some of those act as brakes or gas pedals for change. Some people are just more change-able than others.

Ready … Set …

One of the biggest mistakes novice and even experienced helpers make is to see two different things as the same thing:

• Asking for help

• Readiness to change

When a person seeks help, it is safe to assume only two things about them:

• They are in some pain

• They are uncertain about how to make the pain stop

Pain and uncertainty are unpleasant states, and most people want to get rid of them. Readiness to change and to use help are quite different from that.

Stages of change

The problem of the alcoholic is not alcohol but sobriety. — Adam Phillips

One of the toughest change nuts to crack is the matter of so-called addictions. An addiction is essentially a compulsion, that is, a behavior experienced by the person as largely involuntary, driven by forces not recognized as self.

By the time someone shows up for treatment of an addiction, their compulsive behavior has usually done significant damage to their health and relationships. They are suffering and the people around them are in pain as well. If pain were the driver and determinant of change, treatment would be very successful right out of the box. It is not. First-attempt success rates for the treatment of most addictions are in the ~20% range. Serial treatment episodes raise that baseline only a little.

So what is the difference between the first treatment that fails and the third, fifth or twentieth one that succeeds? A new therapy? A brilliant therapist? Sometimes. But the most common reason for success as observed by people struggling with addiction is the phenomenon of hitting bottom. That is a motivational and existential state that has its own trajectory and cannot be engineered by external agents or internal effort/thought. It happens when it happens. It applies to problems of living other than addiction, and to groups as well as individuals.

Riding the wave

In his wonderful books The Empty Raincoat and The Second Curve, Charles Handy presents the S-curve (S for sine wave) as a paradigm for understanding the life cycle of … everything. It applies to people, families, organizations and nations. It’s a unified theory of energy/entropy, life, change and death. Here is what it looks like:

© Charles Handy (1994), “The Empty Raincoat”, pg. 51, All Rights Reserved

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Let’s talk about an individual life which begins at birth which happens at the bottom of the curve to the left of Point A. Assuming a healthy baby and a good-enough environment, we can expect a life trajectory of growth and development through the life stages of childhood, adolescence and adulthood. The top of the curve corresponds to various biological and cognitive peaks, and then there is decline ending in death at the end of the curve below Point B.

The big insights in the S-curve model happen at points A and B and in the shaded area under the curve.

When people (and organizations and countries) are climbing up the mountain, they are expending massive amounts of energy and other precious resources (time, attention, money). It’s a full-time job without a lot of bandwidth for extra projects. As the peak of the S-curve comes into sight, there is a lot of excitement and confidence and high-fives about scaling Mt. Everest. What could go wrong for such excellent climbers?

The thing is, nothing lasts forever (sigh). What goes up must come down. To everything there is a season. We never know we are at the top of a curve until we start riding down the other side, and even then the early signals of our down-fall are usually too weak to break through the noise of our celebrations of success.

Change and energy

We are designed to conserve energy for a later time, like money in a savings account. So most of us are stingy about spending energy until we experience a strong need to do so.

Change requires the investment of a lot of mental energy. Change requires us to disassemble a whole set of automated “routines” (habits, beliefs, assumptions, procedures) and build new ones. We are programmed to ignore/deny the early warning signs of failure as a way of avoiding making that big energy investment prematurely. Even when those signals (pain) begin to break through into our consciousness, we will often find reasons to NOT change. This helps explain how people can show up in pain, ask for help, and then not follow the change advice even when they “agree” to.

The scary point on the S-curve is Point B. That is the crisis point where the signals of downfall (failure) become very bright and loud and painful enough to break through our stingy resource conservation program and trigger a change/spend decision. Problem is, when we reach Point B on the downhill side of the S-curve, it may be too late to rescue the project.

Too little? Too late?

Here are a few examples of waiting too long to change:

• Waiting to lose weight until after the first heart attack

• Waiting to change business strategy until a competitor steals your customers with a new/better product

• Waiting to change your political strategy until your opponent surges past you in the polls

• Waiting to change your relationship behavior until your partner leaves you

• Waiting to stop drinking/drugging until you lose your family, job and/or health

• Waiting to incarcerate a violent person until after they kill someone

• Waiting to adequately arm Ukraine against the Russian invasion until the population and infrastructure are nearly destroyed

• Waiting to move away from fossil fuels until climate heating has blown past clearly identified and dangerous tipping points

What’s the point?

So what about Point A and the shaded area under the curve? Few people begin to prepare for change while they are still succeeding. This involves making a mid-course correction that will initially consume more resources than it pays back (see the dip in curve #2 and the gray zone which is a period of deficit financing and negative ROI). From a pure energy/resource perspective, this change/diversion of resources during a winning season is, well, CRAZY. And this is why most people (and organizations and countries) wait until Point B when the failure signals are really loud and the need to invest in change is obvious.

Examples of Point A corrections:

• Start a healthy weight/exercise plan when weight is ~10 pounds above optimal

• Invest in innovation incubators/labs within your company to generate new products/services when the old ones are still profitable

• Conduct periodic focus groups with key voting demographics to identify political/campaign problems early

• Engage in focused discussions/negotiations or couple therapy as soon as conflict levels become uncomfortable in your relationship

• Engage in addiction counseling when other people identify a problem even if you think everything is “fine”

• Impose prison sentences for “simple” assault

• Defend allies early and effectively

Each of these proactive changes requires an investment of precious limited resources (time, energy, money) before a crisis (Point B) emerges and it “feels” like time to change. It’s a wise but somewhat rare strategy (prevention, early intervention) for most humans and other beings.

[For an application of the S-Curve to leading change in organizations, go ➡️ here]

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