Ghosts in the machine – reading the organisational subconscious to keep change projects on track
Neil Micklewood bring 17 years of experience across neuroscience and behavioural psychology, he guides us through organisational dynamics, the deeper, often subconscious forces that determine whether change lands or quietly dies, and how change practitioners can spot and manage them before they derail a project.
An organisational ghost story
A few years ago there was a financial institution, which we will call Apex Finance, that launched a project to deliver high performance while navigating a complex economic environment. It had a $50 million budget, consultants from the key agencies, and a project plan so detailed it looked like the blueprints for a space station. Every KPI was green, every steering committee meeting was met with applause, and a new agile innovation hub was built with beautiful glass doors, beanbags and all the accoutrements to support the process.
That is when the haunting started, and it was subtle. The innovation hub stayed empty. People booked the glass rooms for meetings and then sat there alone on their laptops using the old legacy system. In meetings everybody nodded along, but once management left the room the mutterings began: we have had several changes in the past, they all died, so we will just wait this one out because it is going to end the same way anyway.
Six months into the rollout the lights were on and the budget was being spent, but there was no life in the change project. The consultants were baffled and the CEO was frustrated, because every visible factor looked fine. The technology was there, the incentives were in place, the training was done, but it was not getting the traction expected.
What the project missed
The plan did not stall because it was a bad plan. It stalled because the organisation carried ghosts that nobody had picked up on:
- A long standing pattern of caution and risk aversion in the way it did business, which had helped it survive challenging times when more laissez faire businesses went under
- A merger about five years earlier that had damaged trust and created a more challenging internal relationship
- A customer group facing significant financial stress in an economic downturn, with staff becoming influenced by that psychological contagion and increasingly reluctant to try anything new
The organisational subconscious perceived the change as a risk or a threat to survival, and it resisted. The goal is to learn to spot those ghosts while they are there, and to manage them so they do not derail your change projects.
Iceberg of Change
- Above the water (things you can see) 10%
- Strategy, Org Charts, IT Systems, KPIs and Process Maps
- Below the water (things you can’t see) 90%
- Attitudes, behaviours and hidden promoters and opponents
- Organisational dynamics
- Org ‘personality patterns’
- Psychological contagion
- Subconscious group fears and needs
Even so, things do not always land as hoped. Organisational dynamics take us deeper still, into the organisational ghosts, so we can better identify and manage them before they strike.
Core concepts in Organisational Dynamics
Organisations, like people, carry subconscious material that drives behaviour. Four concepts sit at the heart of this.
Subconscious processes
Organisations have subconscious assumptions, beliefs and fears that drive behaviour outside of explicit awareness, just as individuals do. In the Pike River coal mine tragedy of 2010, a methane explosion killed 29 people. The sensors were tripping, the ventilation was failing and the reports all said stop, yet the organisational machine kept rolling. A belief roughly along the lines of we must turn a profit at any cost was never necessarily stated aloud, but everybody knew the rules they were playing by.
Emotional Contagion
Organisations mirror the psychological patterns of the customer groups they serve and the operational environments they work in, adopting similar emotional states or defence mechanisms. At Pike River the organisation was under immense pressure from shareholders and the board to prove its financial viability, and that anxiety spread from the executive through management to staff, creating an internal culture of desperation
Defence Mechanisms
Defence mechanisms are a way of dealing with anxiety, uncertainty and threat. Common defences include denial, blaming, an us versus them mentality and black and white thinking. At Pike River this looked like burying their head in the sand, because acknowledging the risk would stop production, and the organisation convinced itself it was resilient through a degree of blind optimism: if we just believe it will be okay, it will be okay.
Leadership Dynamics
Leaders are not just rational decision makers. They bring their own personalities and absorb the anxieties and dynamics of the organisations they operate in, creating an interactional effect. The Pike River CEO had a deep personal investment in the business, having climbed the ranks, along with a real sense of optimism and determination. Those sound like strengths, but within a highly anxious business facing potential failure they can become a defence mechanism when realism and pragmatism are most needed. A similar interaction plays out with high profile risk takers whose move fast and break things philosophy comes with consequences such as poor psychological safety and significant organisational risk.
Organisational personality shapes how change is received
Organisational personalities are as unique as human personalities, but there are common structures we see in businesses that are underperforming. These influence how change projects are accepted, adapted or resisted
The anxious or controlling organisation, where there is a fear of losing control and change is perceived as a threat to the established order. This shows up in the public sector and in certain large banks
- The siloed organisation, where a lack of trust and an us versus them mentality is managed by dividing the organisation into silos. It creates a perceived sense of safety, but it is very difficult to bridge the divide and gain traction when implementing change
- The complacent organisation, which has experienced significant success in the past and developed overconfidence. That can turn into a view that there is little need for change, or into an impulsive response where we can just wing this because we have done well before. Blockbuster and BlackBerry both followed this path, failing to perceive how the landscape was shifting and failing to act in time
How to identify Organisational Dynamics
Put your ear to the ground and look for recurring patterns of behaviour, unspoken rules and the emotional climate of the business. Look for high anxiety, cynicism or apathy, but also for an overly positive, rosy exterior, because that can signal a lack of genuineness. Above all, look for what is not being said.
Narrative analysis
The common stories, jokes, themes and metaphors people use to describe an organisation, its history and its challenges tell us a great deal about what is going on, including the subconscious processes that surface conversations miss. So rather than asking why are they resisting, it is far more useful to ask what are they protecting.
In the Apex Finance story, staff may have been protecting themselves from comfort zones and the familiar, from resentment over another failed change, and from the fear of things getting worse. Leadership had been critical and invalidating when staff raised concerns, which closed off open communication. With no safe space to work through those emotions, staff used their behaviour to diffuse the risk and make their voices heard without saying a word.
Understanding the group need
The group need is the subconscious driver of the group, related to core human needs rather than the logical or rational explanation for how the project functions. You identify it by considering the likely outcome of the behaviours and reactions you are observing. In the Apex Finance story the group need was to be safe, and the subconscious rationale was that if we resist change, everything will be okay. The resistance blocked the change and kept things safe by maintaining the status quo.
Putting the insight to work
Working within the brain’s tolerance for change
Our brains only really tolerate certain types of change within a safe green space, and to a degree within the lower end of the fight or flight zone if the change is brief and contained. Most organisational change is neither minor nor brief. If we do not create resources for people to contain their emotions, we push them towards the dangerous end of the yellow zone, or into the red zone, where problematic defence mechanisms take over. Organisations often hurry emotional processing because emotions make people uncomfortable, but shutting down or avoiding stakeholder emotions steers people into the states most likely to derail the change.
The holding container in practice
- Emotions are normal, not dangerous
- Make space for emotion rather than hurrying it away
- Work through emotion constructively so people can move towards more adaptive responses
Significant change triggers defence mechanisms, but handled well it does not need to derail a project. As practitioners we can help organisations identify unhelpful defence mechanisms while acknowledging the valid intentions behind them. Blame, for example, is a strategy for keeping oneself safe: the core intention is reasonable, it is the behaviour that is the issue. The work is to support people towards more helpful, adaptive responses.
The takeaway
The real work of change often sits underneath the hood, in the organisational subconscious. By putting our ear to the ground, reading the narratives, understanding the group need and building a container for difficult emotions, we can translate what is really happening into something the organisation and its leaders can understand and act on, so that the ghosts do not get the last word.
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