Fear of change

Why and How we should embrace change for the sake of our brain

Fear of change can be more easily identified in ourselves as resistance for changes. Many different researches on the brain shows that our brain connect change with lose: lose of what we know, lose of the feeling of being knowledgeable and the feeling that we know what we do, and of course the pains of learning something new. All these reasons can become unknowingly excuses for keep doing what we normally do, even if there are better alternatives, such as faster and more scalable solutions, or new ways of work, that even with the cost of learning can save effort and time in the medium and long term, and sometimes even in the long run.

In a dynamic and fast world that changes often and adopts new technologies easily, in a global environment with other people who work on similar problems and constantly develop tools, frameworks and products that we can use facing these fear can become a superpower. Super power that will help teams & individuals to work faster and focus on their unique value.

Despite learning pains and other costs describe above, adapting to changes proven to be important to our brain, and researches in last years about brain plasticity (1, 2, 3, 4) shows how learning something new and adapting to changes create new connections in our brain, and these connections improve our quality of living and brain functionality.

Symptoms (Some or all):

• Strong preference of something we know over something new.
• Working with old versions of frameworks and tools
• Using tools and process because of familiarity and not good reasoning.
• Usage of phrases like: “I’ve used that in my previous company”, “This how I always work”, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”.

Prescription:

Confronting this fear of change is crucial, as it is a major blocker for progress without real reason except fear itself. Exploring new technologies, product and practices in a regular manner using events like hackathons, conferences, meetups, and more, is a safe way to create a culture that is aware of new trends and solutions and more importantly not afraid of them.

Remedy Patterns:

• Regularly expose yourself and the team for new methods, trends & technologies using tools like — technology radar
• Create team diversity to increase chance for diverse thinking in the team.
• Create technology diversity using full stack culture, encouraging team members to learn different technologies and method of work.
• Compare tools and practices based criterias and accept new options that meet them
• Use hackathons as regularly practice starting from blank page.
• Visit meetups and conferences to be exposed to new market trends and technology changes. These conferences should end will a presentation for the team to keep everyone informed and in that spirit.
• Create physical working environment that encourage being dynamic, for example: Laptops and shared spaces (reduce attachment for specific seat), switching between teams (remove attachment for a specific team and encourage shift of knowledge from one team to another), and more.

Important Note:

Some may overuse the prescriptions above to encourage too many changes. These can create a false feeling or progress, or enable team to feel creative in an environment that don’t supply real purpose oriented ownership and/or creativity. This is a different topic for a different time.