The difficulties in enacting organizational change is legion.  Both individual and institutional habits and behaviors are notoriously difficult to shift.  A recent study from INSEAD, IE Business School and Pamplin College of Business suggests that it might not always need to be thus however.  Instead, the study suggests that change might actually be something we prefer doing than maintaining the status quo.

“When evaluating goal difficulty, our brain first considers the gap between the starting point and the desired state. Usually, the bigger the gap, the more difficult the goal. However, if there is no gap to speak of, as in the case of a status quo goal, the brain starts scanning the context, anticipating potential reasons for failure,” the authors say.

Future gains

When we assess context, we often do so with a negative bias so that we are alert to potentially bad news.  As such, we can instinctively give more weight to potential failure than success.  This doesn’t occur when we look at potentially modest improvement however, as the absence of a substantial gap between present and future states, thus making volunteers in the study prefer a small incremental goal to a maintenance goal.

This finding emerged across six distinct studies, with it transpiring that the brain assess the difficulty of a goal using a two-step process.  The first of these sees the gap between reality and your goal sized up.  The second step is then skipped to if this gap is actually zero, which is the context in which the goal is to be achieved.

Participants would rate a goal as easier, even than maintaining the status quo, when it involved only a modest increment.  When asked to explain this peculiarity, the volunteers highlighted the obstacles that might emerge in maintaining the current situation.

The researchers believe that their findings have significant implications for managers whenever they set goals for their team.  The negative light in which maintaining the status quo is viewed can be especially strong in challenging economic circumstances, as setting such goals only draws attention to the negative context.

“Marketing-wise, promotions requiring consumers to achieve modest attainment goals, such as a small increase in a customer’s account balance in the case of a bank, may prove more popular than promotions involving no such goal,” they conclude.