Remember my thoughts on “wanting to want”? They were about creating an attitude and a context for something new, agility for example, and about how building that culture takes time and patience. Since then, one question has come up again and again: why do some people handle change so well while others struggle with it? Part of the answer is that our readiness for change depends heavily on the unconscious, which uses our experiences to set the frame for what we do.
To make this concrete, picture three companies. The boss comes back from a conference full of enthusiasm and announces: “DevOps will solve all our problems. Make it happen.” The teams at all three companies like the idea and get going. Team A jumps right in, experiments and has first results after a week. Team B knuckles down, works through it and keeps hitting setbacks, but after six months DevOps is in place there too. Team C gives up after a year of meetings, turf wars over responsibilities and frustration. Good grief, how did that happen? Of course there isn’t one single cause. And please don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. Not even me!
Today I’d like to add another perspective: a biological and philosophical one. It’s a little bit right too, just like the others.
The Brain: Why Readiness for Change Starts in the Unconscious
Let’s sketch a model of how we process data. An incredible stream of sensory input flows at us all the time: images, sounds, smells and so on. Our conscious mind doesn’t have anywhere near the capacity to process all of it (try decoding a 4K movie on a 386, it’s not going to happen).
Luckily, there is a filter in front of it that works unconsciously. It checks every bit and byte at incredible speed:
- Is this new or familiar?
- Is this important or unimportant?
A lot gets thrown out or handled automatically. But if the unconscious concludes that something is new and important, that it can’t make sense of it and that it needs attention, the task gets passed to the conscious mind. You take care of it. This screening takes about 300 milliseconds, so it’s pretty fast.
The unconscious is subjective and very smart: it keeps learning. All the time. Without a break. In the sandbox, at school, during the first kiss, the first breakup, at work, at home and on vacation. Every experience feeds into the system and shapes the next round of filtering.
Free Will, Almost
In the conscious mind, we are free to make big decisions about what we do and how we behave. But only within the frame the unconscious allows through its filtering and perception. Throughout our lives, it keeps building our own individual reality, and inside that reality we can move freely and steer our actions consciously.
Arthur Schopenhauer put it in one fitting sentence:
“Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”
(Arthur Schopenhauer)
So if we “want” to work on our wanting to want, the way runs through the unconscious. And that means: gaining experience, gaining experience, gaining experience.
If I have learned unconsciously all my life that change is great, turning it into action comes easily. If I see stability as success, it’s all the harder.
Group Formation
And our three teams? Well, birds of a feather flock together, unconsciously too. We team up with people who tick the way we do (that already worked well back in saber-tooth times). Maybe what connects us is the vision. Or job security. Curiosity about technology, or about people. The system sorts itself out.
In a traditional company that has done the same thing for decades, a “From now on, we do DevOps” won’t set off cheering choirs. Even if everyone wants to do it together. Companies that have always put self-organization first also attract self-organized people. Their frame for deciding to act is similar, so DevOps or agility takes hold faster.
How to Change Your Own Attitude toward Change
So simply wanting to do isn’t enough to bring about change. We are where we are today as the sum of our past experiences, each of us on our own and together as a team or a company. If you want to shift your own attitude toward change, there’s no way around gaining new experiences: every one of them feeds into the next round of filtering.
