The Cognitive Science Behind Sudden Change

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0:59I'm Adi Ignatius. I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

1:10So, Alison, I want to start today by talking about identity, and specifically our identity at work. So you and I, I think, are both people who feel very connected to our work. Our self-identity is wrapped up in our jobs, in our titles. We're editors, we're journalists. that's a big part of how we think about ourselves. A hundred percent. I think especially when you've studied and trained to do one profession, you've been doing the job a long time, you become an expert and leader in your organization and your field, and you're recognized for all of that. It really becomes who you are. Okay, so take that idea, right, that feeling, that sense of identity, and think about the rug being pulled out from under you.

1:53So maybe your company goes out of business, maybe you get laid off or somehow the journey you thought you were on has been derailed. That sounds absolutely horrible. And I think it would be really hard to figure out how to recover. So it is. And look, we talk about change. We talk about adaptability all the time. It's sort of theoretical. Today's guest is here to offer real concrete ideas based on research as to how to frame sudden change, how to adapt to it and how to really grow from it. So Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist. She's host of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, and author of the book, The Other Side of Change, Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans.

2:35Here's my conversation with Maya.

2:42The starting point of your book is a personal setback, and people who know your podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, know that there, too, you've tried to learn from, you've tried to share inspiration from bad breaks that have come your way. So just to set the stage, if you're willing, talk about your experiences with sudden unforeseen change and how they move you to try to understand and learn from them. Yeah, there's a fascinating number of topics you can study as a cognitive scientist. And one reason that I've been drawn to the topic of change and how we navigate it is that I really suck at navigating change.

3:17I'm really scared of it and I don't do a great job. One reason is that I really love the feeling of being in control. I don't like uncertainty. Many people share this trait with me. There's a really fascinating research study showing that people are more stressed when they're told they have a 50 % chance of receiving an electric shock than when they're told they have a 100 % chance. So we would rather be certain that a bad thing is going to happen sometimes than to have to grapple with any ambiguity. and it sounds pretty wild that this would be the case, but I think a lot of people can resonate with this, right?

3:52We like knowing how the story ends. We want to believe that the world is a clean input-output model and that our behaviors matter and that if we try hard enough, good things will happen in our lives. And so when that unexpected proverbial anvil drops from the sky, it can shatter the illusion of control that we all comfortably live with day to day and force us to contend with the true limits of our control. You know, talk about the big life change that you experienced when you were younger. I was a aspiring concert violinist as a little kid. I was studying at Juilliard under the renowned violinist Issa Perlman, and I had big dreams of becoming a professional one day.

4:32And everything was going according to plan until I overextended my finger on a single note. I damaged tendons in my hand. And after some time, doctors told me that this was a career-ending injury and that I had to give up my dream. And I remember, Adi, in that moment, feeling not simply like I had lost the violin, but also like I had lost myself in this more foundational way. I think sometimes we don't appreciate how much something has come to define us until we lose that thing. And it was through that experience that I learned a valuable lesson. I mean, I only would learn this lesson much later when I was reflecting on it, but it can be quite precarious for us to anchor our self-identities and our self-worth and our self-confidence too tightly to what we do.

5:21Because in a moment, life can take that thing away from us. And so what I've learned to do is to anchor my identity not simply to what I do, but to why I do that thing. So what I mean by this is I ask myself, what is it that you loved about playing the violin, Maya? And I realized the answer was emotional connection. That's the thing that makes me light up as a person is feeling connected with other people. And that part of my identity was still very much intact. And it could have been a softer landing for me had I known that. And it could be a guide that steered me towards my next steps. And so I would urge everyone listening to ask themselves what their why is.

6:02Maybe it's a commitment to service. Maybe it's a love of learning and getting better at something. Maybe it's having a creative outlet. Whatever your why is, it can be a stable force that makes you more resilient in the face of change and serves as a compass as you figure out what comes next. So in the business world, we always talk about embracing change. The only constant is change, as philosophers and high-priced business consultants have told us. And more and more companies are trying to hire for resilience, right, which is really an ability to deal with unforeseen change. And one of the challenges, how do you hire for that?

6:42How do you know that somebody has that resilience that will inevitably be valuable? From your experience, from your research, how can you tell when somebody has these skills that will allow them to deal with the profound changes that are going to come everyone's way? Yeah, it's a complex research question. And obviously, there's many, many factors that drive any individual person's resilience. But the one more hopeful message that I can offer is we absolutely can build some resilience in the face of change. change through concrete strategies. So you can think of resilience as a muscle that you can work at.

7:23And the way that you do this is by fully internalizing that when a big change happens to you, it can also lead to lasting changes within you. You will be a different person on the other side of change in ways that might be hard to appreciate right now, but also in ways that you can actually shape. And this is a very empowering realization for a lot of people and actually boost their resilience because if you're feeling really daunted at the outset of a change, like you can't possibly navigate it with any equanimity or wisdom, it's helpful to remind yourself that the person you're going to become on the other side will have new abilities, new perspectives, new values, new beliefs about themselves and the world around them that might actually make them far more capable of navigating the change.

8:10And so one trait that I've seen by and large is a willingness to be open to that kind of self-transformation that occurs when you're going through an episode like this, not seeing yourself as fixed in stone. And while a lot of the people that I interviewed are not happy necessarily that the change happened to them, I mean, who would invite illness or loss into their life willingly, they were very happy for the person they became as a result of the change they went through. So they tapped into newfound confidence or courage or strength or a renewed relationship with their family or with themselves.

8:50And so whether it's an organization or a person who's going through this kind of disruption, reminding yourself that it's not even the same entity that will be looking back at that change can fill you with some degree of optimism. You just mentioned organizations, and I'm interested in the idea, you know, are these paths toward, let's say, thoughtful, you know, productive adaptation to change, are they as applicable for organizations as they are to individuals? Well, I'm not an organizational psychologist, so I should first caveat by saying that. But what I can say is organizations are made up of a bunch of people.

9:27That is what an organization is. And so I study people. I study individual people and how they respond. And if you think about an organization, you know, in terms of its constituent parts, if every person in a company is meeting a moment of change with this sort of personal resilience, it will have a big impact on the trajectory of the company. There's one relevant insight from behavioral science here, which is called the end of history illusion. What it says is that while we fully acknowledge that we've changed considerably in the past. So if you were to show me pictures of Maya from 10 or 20 years ago, I would try to forge as much psychological distance as I could between present day Maya and that person.

10:08But then if you were to ask me, well, how much do you anticipate that you'll change moving forward? My brain will play a trick on me and I'll think, no, no, no, no, no. I'm more or less done changing. Like what you see is what you get. This is the finished product. And so the researchers, one of them is from Harvard, Dan Gilbert, They say that our brains believe that the present moment is this watershed moment in which we have become the person we will be for the rest of our lives. And so I think this is, again, very revealing. And we want to do everything we can as individuals to overcome this bias when we are facing hardship.

10:43Right. So business experience suggests that we are not good at managing change. And that's partly because we hold on to what we know, but also because we're not good at imagining an alternative. So what does your research tell you about how we come up with these alternate ways of thinking about ourselves and our potential? All of us have had the experience of life closing a bunch of doors, right? So we anticipated that the future would look one way, and then we get news that the future is not going to look that way. And what research shows is that we can actually needlessly constrain ourselves when it comes to alternative futures that we might live out.

11:24And that's because of a failure of imagination in certain moments. It's also because of biases or prejudices that we have or just our experience seeing other people in those situations. So we might have a very limited understanding of the possible futures that are available to someone who was incarcerated or someone who was a high school dropout or someone who's a widow or someone who's unemployed. Right. But that doesn't actually represent reality. And so one of my chapters, it's actually called Possible Selves, distills concrete strategies that we can use to crack open our imagination about futures that are still available to us and may actually be newly available to us in our newly constrained environments.

12:10And I imagine actually that some of these strategies could be relevant even for businesses. So one of the techniques that I give people is called moral elevation. So moral elevation is the warm, fuzzy feeling that we get in our chest when we witness someone else's extraordinary behaviors. It might be their courage or self-sacrifice or ability to forgive or resilience or commitment to their ill partners. Whatever it is, moral elevation doesn't just make us feel good about humanity. It can actually change our brains. It can rewire our brains. and that's because when we witness someone defying our understanding of what humans are capable of in turn it cracks open our own imagination about what we are capable of and it transcends domains so if you see someone expressing extraordinary levels of compassion it might not necessarily translate into compassion for you but it might translate into you testing the limits of some other aspect of your personality that you're really eager or some other behavioral trait that you're really eager to see flourish.

13:16And so I have noticed that introducing moral beauty into my life and moral elevation has had a profound impact on the futures that I've seen when I feel like many doors have closed. And I wonder in the business context if, you know, you might not get a warm, fuzzy feeling in your chest, but looking to other businesses, other leaders, other managers for ways that they lead that, again, violate your understanding of what's necessary to lead or who are kind in ways that you find so awe-inspiring or so unexpected, that can shift us as leaders too. I feel like in many ways, the message of your book is don't just feel sorry for yourself.

13:56I mean, if you think about your journey, you were on a path maybe to become a concert violinist, You suffer an injury. You know, I feel like in my life, I've met a lot of people who were on some path and something like that happened. And they never quite dug themselves out. They just felt the world had conspired against them. Is it a superpower to overcome a setback that profound? Or in your life, are you meeting people? Like, what's the norm? Are you the norm? Or is the norm that these things swamp us and we never quite recover? Well, I should first say that my story of losing the violin just pales in comparison to the intensity of stories that I write about in The Other Side of Change.

14:37So it feels like I got the smallest serving of change compared to what some of these people go through. And so I so admire the way that they have tapped into resilience in these wild moments, right? There's a woman who has a brainstem stroke and ends up with locked-in syndrome, where you can only voluntarily move your eye muscles and no other muscles in your body. And so the only way you can communicate with the world is through blinks. And then there's another young man who's dealing with a prison sentence and another dealing with a very mysterious health diagnosis, right? I think the human mind is exceedingly adaptive and resilient.

15:17Now, you have to make a mindset choice, right? Which is, I think it's very natural to feel profound grief after loss, right? My husband and I, this is something I talk about in the final chapter of the book, kind of unexpectedly. I went through my own change as I was writing it, which was we had been on this long journey to try to start a family and were met with heartbreak after heartbreak. And I should mention, I spent a lot of time feeling really sad and really grief stricken and did not know what a happy future could look like for me in the absence of being a parent. And so it does take time and patience.

15:52But I, seeing the evolution within myself, now really firmly believe, and I don't even think of myself as a particularly resilient person, believe now that, wow, the brain is wired to adapt to change. We might not like it. It might feel very uncomfortable. It might fill us with all this unease because of the uncertainty I was talking about. But by virtue of living on planet Earth, change is the name of the game. So it makes sense that our brains evolved to try to make the best of it. That said, I do think it's important to engage in more deliberate mindset shifts because I think if we leave our minds to their own devices, if you will, they can run away with negative thoughts indefinitely.

16:34There's a whole chapter of my book focused on rumination. and how in the aftermath of a change, our minds can just keep spiraling and looping over the same negative thoughts over and over again and catastrophizing the future or marinating in our regret. And so it is important for us to introduce healthy mental habits so that we can guide ourselves towards a better future. I didn't know a lot of these habits when I was a teenager dealing with the violin. So I was probably just a mopey recalcitrant teenager that was really annoying to be around. But now I feel like I have a much better toolkit that I can use in these moments to make sure that I'm avoiding the pitfalls, right?

17:12Avoiding the stuff that would just lead me down a path where I'm just feeling self-pity and sorrow all the time and towards a slightly more productive, healthy path.

17:43Thank you.

17:53So there's another business trope. We constantly tell ourselves to celebrate failure. That if you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough, and then you need to learn from it, but you need to let go and move on. So failure is a little bit different. Failure is more, I guess, it's something you do and it doesn't work as opposed to something that just sort of befalls you. Does that idea, learn from failure, but let go of it and move on, But does that resonate with your research? Yeah, it's so interesting. This past summer, I actually served as Chris Hemsworth's brain coach on the show Limitless with Chris Hemsworth.

18:29And it was all about exploring neuroplasticity and how we can insulate our brains from some of the negative effects of aging. And one of the biggest lessons to come from that TV series is the importance of challenging yourself enough that you do fail. And that's because it's only when we fail that we send a signal to our brains that this current system's not working, that the brain needs to rewire itself in order to achieve the task. And that's how you tap into the brain's capacity for neuroplasticity and how you keep strengthening it and boosting it over time. When we fail at something, our brains release this really powerful cocktail of neurochemicals that really help drive growth and learning.

19:12And so I think, you know, it might be more of a metaphor in the organizational context, but I absolutely believe that when a company fails, think about all the lessons they're learning, all the mistakes they won't repeat, and also the fact that they tried something hard, right? We don't often fail at easy stuff. And so it can be an indicator that a company was really pushing the limits and testing out something very ambitious. This may be another way of getting at the question, but there are many leadership cultures that reward emotional control, fast action without a lot of introspection. I'm interested in your thoughts.

19:47What gets suppressed or distorted when leaders feel they shouldn't do that kind of introspection and should just kind of pull forward? Yeah. I mean, I think introspection and observation of others is so critical because when you're going through rapid change, right, maybe the company has a new mission statement, maybe the company has new leadership, maybe we're in a really difficult economic time and the company has to adapt. you need to get indicators along the way of how internal dynamics are shifting as a result of the changes you're making. And if you're just powering through, just steamrolling over the change or steamrolling through it, you aren't going to get all of these pieces of data that can inform the path forward.

20:35And so I think that's true on an individual level as well. I mean, if you're going through a really intense change, but you never reflect on the ways in which you're changing, Those changes can go unnoticed. And I found myself doing that. You know, I alluded to the fact we struggled to start a family. And there was a point where we'd just been trying and trying and trying. And, you know, we're so goal oriented that there came this moment where my husband and I thought, we have to press pause on this process just for a little bit. We have to take stock of everything and evaluate our own minds and our well-being.

21:09And it turns out that when we did that kind of investigation into our own psyches, we learned really important things about how we had changed as a result of the six or seven years that we had been trying to achieve this goal and had been in the trenches, so to speak. And so I do think that taking a step back and having moments of reflection alerts you to the ways in which you've changed and also helps you to actually not make the same mistakes again and fall into those same traps. From a management perspective, how can we tap into what our employees are experiencing, right, when their sense of who they are is shaken by a dramatic change, you know, possibly in their work life?

21:47Are there ways to sort of pick up the signals and then to try to be helpful? There's obviously many ways in which that discontent can express itself. But I think what's even more important is being discerning and really listening to what people are telling you so that the solution you put forward is actually the right one. One thing that I've experienced as a manager and leader of my team is a feeling of, you know, someone will come to me and say, I'm feeling really burnt out. I'm feeling really exhausted. And sometimes it is just because of work overload. But sometimes it's actually because they no longer feel like their work is aligned with or is contributing to a bigger mission statement.

22:30And what they're actually lacking is meaning and purpose in their day-to-day lives. And that's been an aha moment for me as a manager leader. My instinct initially is like, if someone's coming to me with those feelings, you think, okay, just take work off their plate, right? But actually, sometimes the signal is telling us more. They're not feeling as connected anymore with the company's goals. They're not feeling like they're chipping away at the company's North Star metrics or what have you. So we know that one of the biggest sources of anxiety in the workforce, among the workforce now, is about AI.

23:08And some people are just running with it. But a lot of people are sensing, I need to change. I don't know if I can. I don't know if I like this technology. I don't know if I'm up for the change that's required. That's a real tangible thing that I think millions and millions of people are facing now. You don't need to be an expert on AI, but when faced with, in this case, a tangible, it's not just a kind of theoretical resilience, but a tangible, I need to change because there's a technology that's reshaping my business. What is your advice for people who are just not quite sure how to do this?

23:46How do they cope with this looming sort of changemaker? Well, we talked about this before, but humans are exceedingly resilient. And we're also very bad affective forecasters. So we're extremely bad at predicting how we will respond to events in the future. We know from decades of research that we overestimate how bad the bad stuff's going to feel. And we overestimate how good the good stuff's going to feel. That's one of the many ways in which we get it wrong when it comes to how we think some future change will affect us. And so my advice, actually, in this space is to have a profound amount of humility when it comes to change, both good and bad, because I think you'll be surprised by the spillover effects that certain changes have on your life, the unexpected consequences, and sometimes the unexpected silver linings that a particular change carries.

24:36So for people who are listening to this podcast who think, all right, this is all pretty interesting. What's your, you know, if you had to give one piece of advice to the general listener for how to be a more resilient person, be more receptive to change, to adaptation, what would you say? I think it's that we can come to see change, especially unexpected negative change, not simply as something to endure, but as an opportunity to reimagine who we can be. And that's an insight that I glean from, again, all the people that I interviewed for the book, who at the outset could only see the negative, right?