How Our Belief Mindset Affects Change

Change is easy, said no one ever.

Change is hard because we all have an established belief structure or perseverance that shapes and molds how we think about what we do, how we do it, and when we do it.

Belief structures are important because they provide the platform of our life and much of the success we experience from it.

When you start to think about changing how an organization operates you are talking about taking on the belief perseverance of every single person in your organization. They operate your organization and they have beliefs about what is right for the organization and more importantly what benefits they obtain from those beliefs, ie promotions, high levels of influence, etc…what we often call What’s In It For Me (WIIFEMe)

As a leader, if you want to move your organization to become more ‘agile’, then you must understand that the process of becoming more agile, starts first with clearly understanding how your organization operates today, what drives decisions being made, how are things funded, who owns decision making, the list goes on.

You need to make this effort because it is understanding how you operate today with all of the inherent beliefs that support this way of working, that lays the foundation for understanding where you need to change people’s belief structure or mindset. You need to get them to replace their current belief with new more agile ways of thinking and working, which will become their new belief perseverance.

When we talk about getting to a new normal, what we mean is that our organization has new belief perseverance towards agility and not towards previous ways of working.

Agile as it’s sold today is focused mostly on changing the way that we develop and deliver software, however for Agility to truly emerge as your organizations’ culture, then it must be viewed as a systemic organizational change.

You can’t empower teams to be accountable for defining how they work if you don’t address the belief structure that your managers have been instilled with.

For example, I have noted when I have been in leadership roles, that both my manager/leader and my peers viewed the empowerment of my teams as a source of weakness, even though those people and teams vastly outperformed those who were managed by more traditional managers who made all decisions and hoarded ideas as their own.

Holding on to my belief perseverance even though I was viewed as a weaker leader, was challenging and frankly caused me to leave those organizations in the end. We all lose in this situation.

Change is not easy and if you don’t address it as a formal change management effort and if you don’t explain to everyone Why this change is happening, Why it is necessary and How you can support the change, then you can’t expect to change your organizations’ belief perseverance towards away from keeping everything status quo.