Powered by Change by Jonathan MacDonald

Author:Jonathan MacDonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2018-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

The first barrier to surpass is fear. In Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear,52 Dan Gardner discusses how our level of fear is inversely proportional to our level of understanding. However, this is only true in terms of rational fear. Irrational fear doesn’t work like that. Irrational fear is not linked to a level of understanding. You could inform someone with a fear of flying that the most dangerous part of an airplane journey is the drive to the airport, which is true. You can even try and convince someone that only one in five million airline journeys involves a fatality, contrasting heavily with the one in 35,000 motor traffic journeys that causes deaths.53 However, if their fear is irrational, even an addition of understanding won’t necessarily be enough to change their level of fear.

In business, irrational fear is something that can be seen either as a hindrance or an irrelevance. If it’s a hindrance, then the test will be one of willingness, and we will address that shortly in the first section of the People blade. What we do know is that when fear is rational, the level of understanding we have decreases the amount of fear we feel. This means that to actually eliminate fear, the first port of call is to raise the level of understanding in organizations, and enable people to actually grasp exactly what’s going on.

There’s only one exception to this, and that is in the circumstance where people have a high level of understanding but yet they’re still very fearful. In my opinion that means they probably have a good, rational reason to be fearful and they should be listened to. Sometimes people who are fearful despite a great deal of understanding are simply called wise.

The second barrier is uncertainty. In cases of uncertainty what we need to do is attempt to decrease the level of uncertainty by reducing the level of complexity. As much as fear and understanding are inversely proportional, uncertainty and complexity are directly proportional. Many people who are very uncertain are that way because they see a hugely complex set of speculative outcomes. What we need to be doing in these situations is taking the time to explore a number of very different scenarios and projections, then make the predictions that are actually based on those. In that way, we can gradually base our predictions more and more on as many established facts as we can. Ideally we need to be continually diminishing the level of complexity, and thereby the level of uncertainty. This is an extremely effective method for overcoming the barrier of uncertainty.

Fear and uncertainty, however, are minor inconveniences in comparison with getting people out of their comfort zones, which can be one of the biggest barriers to overcome if we really want to be effectively powered by change.

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