Change is scary. a GM once sold me on the idea that his team wanted to change. It was true, the team all wanted to change. The problem was that none of the individual team members wanted to be the one that changed. They just wanted everyone else to change around them while they stayed the same.
Being afraid of change is as old as time. Even when all of the evidence around us screams out that we should change, we struggle to journey into the unknown.
Don’t feel bad if you are scared of change, even the NBA, a highly competitive and transparent environment that can iterate quickly didn’t change when the numbers told them they should.
Why are people afraid of change?
People are afraid for a number of reasons – Loss Aversion, Status Quo Bias, Sunk Cost, Sample Size, and Death to name a few.
Loss Aversion
We feel more pain from losing $5 than the joy we get from finding $5. We feel the loss so much more so we avoid it at all costs. This means the teams that are winning don’t want to change what they are doing.
Why risk the loss? There is little incentive to change if you are winning. The irony is that the winning team has the goodwill to try things and keep improving but it can feel risky.
You need some team with nothing to lose to be the canary in the coal mine and try the radical new concept. This started happening in Div 3 men’s basketball when Grinnell College put up 86 three-pointers in a single game. Now the Houston Rockets have attempted an NBA record 61 three-pointers in a single game.
Status Quo Bias
People don’t want to change the way they work for fear of getting fired. If I do what I have always done then what will always happen will happen. i.e. I will have a job.
The author of the Black Swan, Nassim Taleb talked about the turkey thinks that the farmer feeds them. Every morning the farmer comes and gives them food so they see this pattern and think it will always continue until one day the farmer doesn’t turn up with food but with a shiny metal thing in their hand.
Sunk Costs
People place value on things they have paid more for or already invested in. You purchase a software solution that isn’t working but rather than taking the hit now, accept and acknowledge the mistake, you continue the loss because you don’t want to change paths.
You see this all the time in the NBA when teams pick a player high in the draft but they don’t work out but they give them chance after chance rather than going with the lower pick or even an undrafted player that shows promise. The executives don’t want to say that all their research was wrong so they continue to inflict more pain on the organisation.
Sample Size
There is a lot of reluctance to change when there isn’t enough ‘evidence’ that the new strategy works so no point changing because we haven’t seen it work.
This self-defeating philosophy is why it took the NBA 25 years to see the value in shooting more three-point shots. Mathematicians figured it out. The expected return for a three-pointer was higher than a two-pointer at a certain shooting percentage. Percentages that NBA plays could routinely make.
Death
It sounds intense, and it kind of is. Death means that change requires your previous identity to die in order to create a new one. This letting go of the previous identity is one of the biggest challenges. Human beings don’t want to leave the tribe, it used to mean literal death when you were kicked out of the tribe.
You see all the time when players refuse to adapt their game to the approach of father time. They can no longer run as fast or jump as high and what was once their competitive advantage is now a liability.
What does this mean for you and your organisation?
Change is normal and natural. The question you have to ask is do you want to look at the world and change yourself in advance of what is happening, or wait for what is happening in the world to force you to change?
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 