Using Neuroscience to unlock our capability for change
“Using the ideas of neuroscience and recognising that it is the brain of the person we are talking to - that’s the real stakeholder ... finding out how they are feeling is so important.”
Melanie Franklin, Founder Continuous Change Community, Director of Agile Change Management
How can we measure our capability for change?
In this episode of The Neurocast™️ Cheryl Stapleton is joined by Andy Dean and Melanie Franklin to chat about why sometimes, despite our best efforts, change just doesn't happen quick enough, or doesn't achieve the results needed. Melanie talks to us about the work she is doing with senior leaders from global corporations to measure their capability for change. Her Enterprise Change and Transformation Survey provides deep insights into the obstacles that can arise during the change process. Turning to neuroscientific methods has been the key to Melanie's success, allowing her to help leaders unlock the real problems and begin to understand the emotive factors that can make or break the drive for change.
Melanie Franklin is a highly respected thought leader in change management with an impressive track record of successful realisation of business change programmes across public and private sector organisations. Melanie is a consultant, speaker, author, Chief Examiner, Founder of the Continuous Change Community and Director of Agile Change Management.
Andy Dean is one of the Founders of Truthsayers® and Cheryl Stapleton, Head of Communications at Truthsayers® joins Andy and Melanie for this insightful conversation.
❇️ Find out more about Agile Change Management the Capability for Change benchmarking survey: https://agilechangemanagement.co.uk/event/enterprise-change-transformation-survey
Transcript
Cheryl Stapleton
Hello, welcome to Truthsayers Neurocast. This is our podcast that brings together the leading voices from business, science and technology to share reflections and stories on the value of open, honest communication. I'm Cheryl Stapleton, Head of Communications at Truthsayers, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Melanie Franklin, Director of Agile Change Management and founder of the Continuous Change Community on LinkedIn. And I also have with me Andy Dean, one of the founders of Truthsayers. Melanie, lovely to see you today. Can you give us a little bit of background on who you are and what you do?
Melanie Franklin
My job really is to help organisations to build their ability to manage change. There's an incredibly high volume of new ideas coming out all of the time and organisations keep trying to implement those changes, to take themselves forward, to transform, to transition to new ways of working, but how we do that, and increasingly, how we do it across the organisation - what I mean is involving everybody, not just having a small group of perhaps external consultants who come in and do change to people - is crucial to competitive advantage for organisations and sometimes just keeping their heads above water. There is far more ambition for change then there is ability to be able to make change happen and so I'm just trying to even the score if you like, and help organisations build that ability.
Cheryl Stapleton
Great, brilliant, and we'll talk more about change as we go through this podcast. And Andy, Andy Dean, tell us a little bit about you and maybe how Truthsayers came into being.
Andy Dean
Yeah thanks Cheryl, I'm Andy Dean, co-founder of Truthsayers. Our business came into being around 15 years ago and in that 15 years, we've been developing implicit techniques to find out how people actually feel as opposed to what they say. And what I mean by implicit techniques is to try and get past the conscious thought processes that people have that can influence how they respond and actually tap into their gut feelings, their emotions which are non-conscious and the things that give them their attitudes and make them behave in the way that they do. And tapping into those non conscious emotions is a way of really finding out how people feel as opposed to what they say and that specifically is what we are about.
Cheryl Stapleton
Great, thank you and we will talk a little bit more about how Neurotech works. As we go through the podcast. I just want to open up with a kind of a question about change, really, you know, why is change so difficult?
Melanie Franklin
I think it's because, first of all, change is uncertain and uncertainty is not something that as a human being we tend to vote for. Uncertainty is full of fear. Uncertainty is full of the risk of getting things wrong, having to fix things, potential humiliation because you're not as good at something as you used to be or other people might laugh at you. For all of these reasons, change means doing something different that you weren't doing before. And often, particularly in organisations, it's compounded by the fact that you have to try and forget all of the routines and habits and processes that you were using, and that the same time your brain is telling you you're good at and that you've been successful using. So you're having to volunteer to give up known success for unknown risk and uncertainty. And that's not something that we feel comfortable doing. It's a big ask.
Cheryl Stapleton
And it's not an easy thing to admit either that you are scared of change. I suppose it's about how do we de risk change how do we take away that risk and allay that fear?
Andy Dean
Is 'change' the right word? Is 'change' scary for people because people often see change as threatening. And really what we're talking about as evolution isn’t it? Evolving businesses. We're making them better at changing for the better is a good thing. But I think the way that we actually articulate change needs to be looked at as a business so that we make a far more positive type of statement, as opposed to this threatening perhaps frightening situation that change and sometimes instil in us.
Melanie Franklin
I think change is a very difficult word and actually a lot of organisations are starting to avoid it. I like what you say about evolving, I also see other words like transitioning. Tansformation is an incredibly popular word, although that's now starting to get people fearful because transformation sounds like a massive shift. I agree that the language matters, because what I want to do is encourage people to try something new. I want to encourage them to experiment and learn from it. To tell them that they have to ‘change’ implies that perhaps what they were doing before, wasn't right, they were ‘in the wrong’ and now they're going to change to being ‘in the right’. That there's an implication there of a negativity which I think can be very upsetting for people, but ‘evolving towards something’ or ‘evolving out of where we are towards something new’; ‘transitioning’. Those are languages that I think people are starting to adopt a little bit more.
Andy Dean
This is why it's so important to use our Neurotech platform, which obviously you do, Melanie, because what we're doing is we're finding out more about people's attitudes and their emotions and their feelings towards change or transformation or evolution or whatever you want to call it. And it's going deeper than the traditional surveys that they used in the past and compliments those in fact, what we're capturing, is both sides of that coin, if you will; we're capturing people's conscious responses in terms of how they want to respond, if you will, or how they feel they ought to respond, compared with their automatic responses, which is how they actually feel and their attitudes. And it's vital that we capture both of those so we can see how authentic typically, but also where the gaps are within a business that the business needs to concentrate on. And the Neurotech platform does that brilliantly.
Melanie Franklin
Well, some of the questions that I'm using the Neurotech platform for it's been really important because, if I ask questions in standard sort of survey questions, about “do you think people feel that the changes are aligned to your strategic direction? Do people feel involved in the change? Do people feel aware of the number of changes that are coming?” When you see that as a standard survey question, you immediately feel the need to say “Yes,” because you think well, “Yeah, we are communicating. We're sending out emails to people.” But there's that structural “we are doing the right things”, but there's an underlying, “Yes, but does it feel good? Do people feel involved? Do they feel considered?” And I think having those questions and being able to sort of get underneath the standard survey questions and find out yeah, but “how is change really happening in your organisation?” That's what I needed so much to be able to give. Everybody who’s answering the survey, that's the kind of information that they need. It’s that feeling of “how's it really going?” And not just “how's it going on the surface,” because anybody can tick a checkbox, but what they need - to be able to further enhance their ability to manage change - they really need to know how it's going.
Andy Dean
I think there's a danger that with all conscious surveys - explicit surveys, as we call them - considered, rational responses - is that people tend to think “Okay, what do they want me to say? Or what should I say?” as opposed to necessarily, “I don’t really feel that way, but I feel I can’t say that,” and it's vital to get past that and to get to how people are actually feeling and again, I go back to what I was saying earlier that that's what we can do with the Neurotech platform. And it's so vital to do that and give people like Melanie and her organisation, the information to be able to help companies navigate their way through this transformation and concentrate on the things that really matter as opposed to what people kind of say. And the other thing is, from an emotional point of view, our emotions are often hidden from us. They're automatic, we don't consciously generate them. So you need a special tool, like our Neurotech platform, to go past that conscious response, if you will, that considered response, to draw out of people how they really feel. And people often can't express how they feel or don't know really how they feel at a conscious level because we're asking conscious questions about the non-conscious, and that's where we get this juxtaposition between traditional surveys, and the information that you get from them, and how people potentially actually feel, because there are so many things that affect how people respond, whether it's socially acceptable etc, is one thing. Whether they feel threatened by making telling people the truth, is another thing. Or whether they’re simply trying to be kind researcher, or their company by saying “oh yes, you're doing everything right. Everything's wonderful.” Job done. Well, that's not job done. That's not even part of the job done. So, getting to those emotions and attitudes is vital.
Cheryl Stapleton
So we talked about being able to get to the emotions and be able to get to measure this but how does Neurotech work? How does it manage to do that?
Andy Dean
Well, we use a combination of two things really: Priming, which is a phenomenon that's been used in psychology for many years. And we all prime, you know, as soon as you say to somebody, “do you know so and so” you're priming their brains; neurons will start firing about that person, and they'll be able to give you a response as to what they feel about that individual. And also, reaction times. And we know that people respond quicker when two things are congruent, or, if you like, related to each other. So by using priming and reaction time, what we can do is to get people to perform a very simple task, or what people have to do when they respond to our surveys, is press one or two keys or one or two buttons. And what we can do is capture their time of response. And we affect their time of response by priming them with a statement such as, “I want to work here” or “Change is good for the business”, for instance, and then asking them to press a specific key for either yes, or specific people. And they don't have a choice in this. They have to press the key that we tell them to. And what happens is, if they agree with that statement - if they feel that statement is right - they will already have code in their brain for “Yes”, and if yes to comes up, they'll find it very easy to press the key. If “no” comes up, there are two brain microstates that neuroscientists have identified that slow that process down. And it's that difference in reaction time that we measure through the Neurotech platform, and from that we can tell how strongly people feel about the statement, either positively or negatively.
Cheryl Stapleton
And that difference in speed is probably imperceptible to the individual who's actually doing it.
Andy Dean
It's less than the blink of an eye but in terms of how fast the brain works, it is highly, highly important.
Melanie Franklin
It was really interesting when we were testing out the survey, people were saying “it kept telling me to say yes, but I wanted to say no” and vice versa and I had to keep saying to people, that's fine, that's exactly how it should be - if you could feel that there was a difference in what you were being told to press and what you wanted to say - it will come out in your speed of response. And they're going “No no no! I was pressing it quickly” and I’m going, “No seriously, there will be a difference in the speed of response and we will be able to pick that up.” Which is why the results of the survey are so interesting and being able to share that with everybody who is contributing, it's absolutely critical for getting the conversation going at a deeper level, about what it is we should do to increase our ability for change.
Cheryl Stapleton
Being able to see the implicit, overlaid with the explicit, is really quite eye opening.
Andy Dean
where people are authentic, saying one thing and feeling the same thing, that's great. The real challenge is where you've got people feeling one thing but saying another thing.
Cheryl Stapleton
And this is really where we were pointing business to say “look, this is where there's cognitive dissonance within your business, where your people will find it hard to accept change or to be able to do this.”
Andy Dean
And those are the areas that businesses need to concentrate on because that's what they can put right.
Melanie Franklin
I'm really attracted to using this approach because the Neurotech platform is based on neuroscience. And increasingly I think our most effective interventions, when it comes to change, is by recognising that it is the brain of the person that we're asking to work differently. That's the real stakeholder. And that increasingly we look at all of the stakeholder analysis I can look at 10,000 people in an organisation and I'm given the data based on their job titles, based on demographic information, how long they've been in the organisation, and I'm encouraged to group them based on the impact the change is supposed to have on their jobs. But actually, it's in their heads. That's where the difference is really made. My job is actually to win the argument that this change is worth making. I struggle with the idea that change can be managed. I think what we're doing is that we are catalysts for change. We trigger the thoughts, feelings and attitudes in people who we'd like to work differently. And if we inspire and motivate them to do that, then they will be off and running and they will make it happen. But it's using the ideas of neuroscience and recognising that it is the brain of the person we are talking to - that's the real stakeholder -and therefore getting under the skin of what's happening and finding out how they're feeling. That is why it's so important.
Andy Dean
I think the other thing is that, you know, people shouldn't beat themselves up for using traditional surveys, that they have done for years, because that's all that's been available. It's only really in the last 30, 40 years, perhaps, that scientists have been understood more about how the brain works. And we've been able to show and map, the sorts of things that we're talking about: that the brain is slower to respond to things that are incongruent than congruent. For instance, it takes longer to tell a lie, than to tell the truth, that’s the sort of strange thing that’s been found out. You can understand that because the brain is trying to work out something or doing something that it doesn't actually want to do. That's not how it's set up. The brain is very automatic; most of what we do is automatic; 95% + of everything we do is driven by that non-conscious part of our brain. And of course, let's not think that there's a division between the non-conscious and the conscious because there isn’t. Most of the time the brain is working in symbiosis, but every now and then, and particularly where there may be risk to the individual in terms of their response, they will manipulate that response. And that is not helpful for business because business is not getting truth about how people feel.
Cheryl Stapleton
And the time is now you know this is this is the new frontier in how we measure how people feel about work, and that we got a number of big organisations who clocked on to this and are ahead of the game with it. I don't only if you could you talk about some of the work we've done not only naming people but how that's helped businesses?
Andy Dean
There's one very large global company that's taken our platform in house and is a consultancy and has built products on our platform for all sorts of areas in terms of total reward, well being, mental health and a number of other areas that our platform can be tapped into. Basically as with any type of question, you can, you can tap anything like that into our platform, and you'll get an answer for it. So it's an incredibly flexible platform. And it's really sort of, I think, opened the eyes of some businesses and some business leaders to the fact that you know, what I thought was happening in my business is actually quite different to what is actually happening. And we've been focusing in the wrong area. So it's really given them a better ROI, if you will, in terms of their spend, where they're focusing and what they're doing within the business.
Melanie Franklin
I was attracted to the fact that there were global brands that are already using your platform. Knowing that I'm doing a global survey and that the people that are answering this survey are senior leaders within their own organisation, I wanted to put in front of them something that I know, other organisations have been very successful with. Even though it's still pretty cutting edge, there are a number of organisations that as you say, have taken it on in the last few years and are getting really good results. And I think for me that was that link between so many organisations using it for their staff engagement surveys, and how their staff are feeling about the organisation, and in my survey, I'm asking senior leaders to use the platform to say how do we think our capability for change is actually happening? How confident are we with our ability to make change happen, and I wanted them to have a reliable track record, if you like, because, you know, they're senior leaders and I don't want to waste their time.
Andy Dean
And of course, when you're talking about change and doing things differently, what leaders have to do is also accept that you may have to use different methods of getting information than what you use for the last sort of 20 or 30 years, and complementing those functional, traditional surveys, if you will, with the more modern behavioural science, psychology based type of information gathering platform that we have with Neurotech
Melanie Franklin
And this is what I've done is that I've used the functional questions if you'd like to find out what elements of the change process and techniques do we have in place. So what structural stuff are we doing? And then being able to align that to “Yeah, but how confident are we feeling that it's working?” So it's pulling those two together? That's what makes the results so very interesting.
Andy Dean
And the beauty of the platform is that it’s a global platform. So, it can be used in any country translated into any language, used on any digital device. And that's really great for picking up cultural differences, which again, traditional surveys don't always do because in some areas of the world it's impolite to say anything negative, so you tend to get a very positive response all the way through a survey, which doesn't tap into how people are really feeling.
Melanie Franklin
I’m really pleased that I’m using the Neurotech platform, because I think it is new and different and I think it’s going to produce important information about our ability to see what’s in place for change; the strides that we’ve taken in terms of producing frameworks and processes and we’ve done training with staff; and then how it actually feel in terms of “are we making a difference?” And I think those are the results that I want to get out to people. And we’re in a brave new world now where we have to ask ourselves the difficult question. Not, “have we done everything?” but “is it actually working?”
Cheryl Stapleton
Yeah, it’s going to be the brave, open-minded leaders who really benefit from this
Andy Dean
I think they have to take a step back and say right you want to do something different in your business, that you have to accept that there's a different way of doing things and embrace that.
Cheryl Stapleton
Fantastic talking to you both today. Thank you for coming onto the Neurocast. Thank you Andy Dean and thank you Melanie Franklin, I’ll hopefully see you again soon.
❇️ Find out more about Agile Change Management the Capability for Change benchmarking survey: https://agilechangemanagement.co.uk/event/enterprise-change-transformation-survey
❇️ Watch more from The Neurocast™️: https://truthsayers.io/truthsayers-neurocast/
❇️ Find out more about partnering with Truthsayers®️: https://www.truthsayers.io/partners
