Change gurus love to preach their formula for organizational change. It goes something like this: Identify what you want to change; make a list of options; choose the best one; assign a timeline to it; and put someone in charge of making it happen.

It all sounds great on paper. It all seems perfectly rational.

Why doesn’t it work?

Because people aren’t rational. They think they are. They’d like to believe that they follow that process in any decision that they make, but it’s a lie. The truth is that they act according to their existing beliefs, not the ones they aspire to.

Cognitive dissonance

In 1957, Leon Festinger developed a theory which he called cognitive dissonance. The basic idea is that holding beliefs that contradict one another creates inordinate stress in people. This can be occur either because their beliefs and behaviours are inconsistent, or because what they believe is juxtaposed with the beliefs of another group that has influence over them.

The incident involving the Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in 1974 has been is a good example. Ms Hearst was kidnapped by this group when she was 19 years old and then held by them for a year and a half. She soon made it clear that she had joined the SLA and became involved in their crimes. In 1976, she was convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 35 years imprisonment, though her sentence was commuted after less than two years. Psychologists put her radical conversion down to another phenomenon called the Stockholm Syndrome – a condition whereby a victim “develops positive feelings towards their captors” (reword).

Kidnapping means that someone is abducted against his or her will. But when an affinity develops between the victim and the criminals, then it ceases to be kidnapping. Instead, it becomes a willing relationship; and in order for that to happen, the “victim” has to change his or her beliefs. That’s because the new behaviour is inconsistent with the old beliefs.

That means that in order for Ms Hearst to have willingly participated in the criminal activities of the SLA, she had to believe that doing so it would further their cause which she by then saw as just.

At the time, there was a lot of debate about whether or not her finger was on the trigger of the gun during the robbery; but the fact remains that her own cognitive dissonance would have made it impossible for her to “pull it off” in full knowledge of the risks of doing so unless her beliefs had changed.

Resistance to change

When it comes to organisational change, the popular view is that people are resistant to it – usually the ones on whom the changes are being inflicted. The truth is that managers and employees resist and largely for the same reason. One is that they feel trapped by their circumstances. Managers want the organization to survive the tough times, and employees want to keep their jobs. Changes to the status quo can threaten both.

One suggestion for reducing resistance has been to use the principle of cognitive dissonance bring about desired changes by linking the beliefs of the people in the organisation with the behavioural changes it wants to make. The argument is that people will embrace change rather than resist it in order to resolve the dissonance that they feel.

There certainly is empirical support for this. If you hire people who “think green”, then any changes the organisation wants to make that support “green” behaviours will be welcomed enthusiastically. However, in order for that to work, something else has to happen first; and unless it does, cognitive dissonance will make organisational change more difficult.

Recruit for change

Some years ago, the mantra was that you should “hire for attitude and train for skill.” And what that meant was that organisations needed to employ people who thought like them instead of simply looking at their qualifications. Where that principle is practiced, cognitive dissonance can work in your favour. But, if skill has characterised your recruitment habits, then you will have people working for you who have conflicting beliefs. And that means that any changes that you try to implement will find resistance. That’s why simply making people aware the organisation’s purpose – its need to change – doesn’t guarantee that resistance will melt away. It doesn’t matter how passionate managers are or whether they “walk the talk”. The truth is that the employees whose beliefs are different from the organisation will be just as passionate. The difference is that they will be on different paths.

That means that you have to hire people who are on the same path as you so that when you want to change something that’s important to you, you are already sure that it’s important to them; because without them, you have no chance.

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