The promise of change is exciting, but the execution of change is painful.

It’s not just a lack of willpower or toughness, which are the usual culprits we blame when failing to change. Biology is where we should start…

Anders Ericsson, author of Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise, explains the resistance of change:

The human body has a preference for stability…The technical term for this is “homeostasis,” which simply refers to the tendency of a system to act in a way that maintains its own stability…So to keep the changes happening, you have to keep upping the ante: run farther, run faster, run uphill. If you don’t keep pushing and pushing and pushing some more, the body will settle into homeostasis, albeit at a different level than before, and you will stop improving. This explains the importance of staying just outside your comfort zone: you need to continually push to keep the body’s compensatory changes coming…

Because the work of change is uncomfortable, the promise of change becomes intoxicating: we get to imagine all the benefits of the expected change without any work or investment. It’s all a fantasy at this point. And one we hope comes true. But hope isn’t a strategy, and eventually it becomes a handicap.

Kelly McGonigal, author of the Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It, describes the seductive nature of hope:

Vowing to change fills us with hope. We love to imagine how making the change will transform our lives, and we fantasize about the person we will become. Research shows that deciding to start a diet makes people feel stronger, and planning to exercise makes people feel taller. (Nobody said these fantasies were realistic.) People will treat us differently, we tell ourselves. Everything will be different. The bigger the goal, the bigger the burst of hope.

So far, so good. We have a change in mind, and we feel good. But as I mentioned, we haven’t done any of the work yet.

McGonigal continues:

Unfortunately, the promise of change—like the promise of reward and the promise of relief—rarely delivers what we’re expecting. Unrealistic optimism may make us feel good in the moment, but it sets us up to feel much worse later on. The decision to change is the ultimate in instant gratification—you get all the good feelings before anything’s been done. But the challenge of actually making a change can be a rude awakening, and the initial rewards are rarely as transformative as our most hopeful fantasies…

For many people, change was never meant to be fulfilled. It was meant for quick comfort. A temporary oasis in the harsh desert of reality. In other words, it’s a false hope.

Here’s McGonigal:

Polivy and Herman [researchers at the University of Toronto] call this cycle the “false hope syndrome.” As a strategy for change, it fails. But that’s because it was never meant to be a strategy for change. It’s a strategy for feeling better, and these are not the same thing. If all you care about is the feeling of hope, this is not an irrational strategy. Resolving to change is, for most people, the best part of the change process. It’s all downhill after that: having to exert self-control, saying no when you want to say yes, saying yes when you want to say no. The effort of actually making the change cannot compare, from a happiness point of view, to the rush of imagining that you will change.

People aren’t the only ones that confuse the promise of change with actual change. Organizations are hooked on the same fantasy.

Most corporate initiatives, rebranding programs, and developmental programs are never about actual change. It’s about the promise of change. It’s about talking about change. It’s never about delivering change.

Andy Grove, the legendary former CEO of Intel and author of Only The Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company, explains why leaders prefer diversions and distractions over addressing the real issue:

When companies are facing major changes in their core business, they seem to plug into what seem to be totally unrelated acquisitions and mergers. In my view, a lot of these activities are motivated by the need of senior management to occupy themselves respectively with something that clearly and legitimately requires that their attention day in and day out, something that they can justify spending their time on and make progress on, instead of figuring out how to cope with an impending strategically destructive force.

Change requires facing and admitting to a reality that many don’t want to face. For many organizations, it’s too painful to admit you have a disenfranchised workforce. Or you have substandard talent that is just hanging around until retirement. Or you have a business that is a commodity and isn’t special.  Reality doesn’t lie, no matter how much you want to convince yourself otherwise. These are tough, unpleasant thoughts, so we prefer false hope.

Good people don’t wait around when leaders evade reality. Mike Sarraille, author of the Talent War: How Special Operations and Great Organizations Win on Talent, explains:

People, especially highly screened and highly capable people, will not tolerate poor leadership—they will do their best to influence and change it. If they cannot, they will leave. We saw this in the [Navy] SEAL teams and we see it in the corporate world. Bad leadership destroys the retention of good people. Good people will also leave if they are not encouraged and allowed to improve themselves—not only their skill level but also their level of responsibility.

You can provide all the corporate wellness programs, free lunches, casual Friday’s, meditation rooms, and foosball tables, but they are never meant for real change. It’s an evasive gimmick that replaces accountability with distraction. It doesn’t increase pay. It doesn’t eliminate micromanagement. It doesn’t enable autonomy. It doesn’t alter a company’s competitive position. It doesn’t change anything that people actually care about.  

Workers don’t want new slogans or programs of the month.

Edward Deming, whose methods led Toyota to become a quality control icon, describes the frustration in his book, Out of the Crisis:

Exhortations and posters generate frustration and resentment. They advertise to the production worker that the management are unaware of the barriers to pride of workmanship.

In The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer, author Jeffrey Liker describes why process, not programs of the month, are favored by Toyota:

Unlike most companies, Toyota does not adopt "programs of the month" nor does it focus on programs that can deliver only short-term financial results. Toyota is process oriented and consciously and deliberately invests long term in systems of people, technology, and processes that work together to achieve high customer value.

There’s nothing wrong with adding fringe benefits to employees, provided they aren’t used to cover up the ugly systemic truths that continue to go unaddressed.

Albert Rutherford, author of The Systems Thinker: Essential Thinking Skills for Solving Problems, Managing Chaos, and Creating Lasting Solutions in a Complex World; describes how most “changes” are really short-term interventions that never address the real problem:

When we intervene by granting a subsidy or providing a good to solve a problem within a system, the short-term results can be very positive and make us think that a solution has been achieved. In reality, by shifting the burden to the intervention, we won’t achieve lasting positive results. The subsidy won’t last forever or our bodies and diseases will build up a tolerance to a medicine that eventually becomes ineffective. It is then that we will fall back into the same old problems. This is because we put a Band-Aid on a problem for a quick fix without digging deeper to really uncover its root cause and putting in the hard work to solve it for the long-term.

Leaders become politicians. Big promises made, but never delivered. Unrealistic optimism and empty rhetoric covering up gradual, but impending, catastrophe.  

Never look at what is being said, only what is being done. And never look at activity, look at results.

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, explains the difference between motion and action:

The difference between motion and taking action. The two ideas sound similar, but they’re not the same. When you’re in motion, you’re planning and strategizing and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce a result.

Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome. If I outline twenty ideas for articles I want to write, that’s motion. If I actually sit down and write an article, that’s action.

We want action, not motion. Motion looks valuable but often prevents us from doing the actual work. The action.

Ask two questions when it comes to change:

First, what uncomfortable truths are being addressed? If the change isn’t addressing a painful, root cause, it’s not the answer. Get to the pain quickly. The quicker you find the pain, the sooner you can improve.

Second, is the change costly? Cost, whether in monetary, time, or effort terms, is directly proportional to the value of the change. Deciding to pay your workforce top decile pay? That’s a costly decision that’s meaningful. Spending several hours per week developing your junior employees? Again, that’s costly in the context of time and effort, which makes it more likely real change is about to happen.