How should speakers, writers, and other communicators talk about change most effectively?  Not the way we’ve been doing it.  Not with all the moral outpourings that usually go with the change imperative.  How else?  To understand the answer, it’s important to think about how we deal with change.

Not well.

We beat ourselves up over change.  We don’t like it, often.  We resist it, then blame ourselves for doing so.  We pay lip service to the idea that ‘the only constant is change’ but few of us live our lives as if that were so.

In fact, if we are being honest, we’re often traumatized by change.  Job losses, relationship challenges, changes to living conditions, changes around us – all of it can throw us for a proverbial loop.

A good deal of our dysfunctional behavior around change comes from the natural fear of loss that derives ultimately from our evolutionary sense of the precarious nature of life back in the woolly mammoth era.  Food was scarce, danger was omnipresent, and the fire in the cave kept going out.  Under those conditions, it would be natural to crave continuity and fear change.

But another part of our ineptitude around change comes from a misunderstanding of our actual agency in our daily lives.  Here’s how it works.  We believe ourselves to be mostly aware and in charge of our lives in a moment-by-moment sense.  As a knowledge worker, for example, I might have assignments handed out to me – prepare this briefing for upper management, Nick! – but I believe I am in control of when I start to work on the project, when I take breaks, when I go to lunch, and when I go home.  Within certain parameters, then, I believe I am in charge of the daily ebb and flow of my work and home life.

In fact, a number of research studies show that it is precisely this kind of daily life that consists mostly of unconscious behavior governed by habit, rather than conscious choice.  I have coffee at roughly the same time every day not because I am making a daily, mindful decision to drink coffee at 10:00 AM, but because I’ve got the coffee habit and my internal clock tells me that it’s coffee time.  Before I know it consciously, I’m heading to the coffee pot and brewing that black elixir.

This misunderstanding of the power of habit makes change harder for us in an unexpected way.  Because we believe we have conscious agency, then we think that our willpower is the key ingredient in our ability to change.  We find change difficult, so we reason that we lack the strength of mind to change.

Actually, it’s just that we’re in the habit of acting one way, and we need to establish a new habit in order to be able to change.  We humans persistently underestimate the power of habit in our lives because of the way we think about change and agency.  As a result, we make change harder than it needs to be, and ascribe an unnecessarily moral element to our failure (and others’).

A study that was purportedly about online memory work in fact was simply training subjects to use either the left or right hand to respond to questions.  Then, at the end of the study, the subjects were asked whether they would be willing to help further with additional efforts.  They of course thought that their opinion was what guided the choice, but analysis of the results compared to a control group showed that the habit of using one hand or the other was more important in their final vote.

Our lives are governed by habit, and we don’t do change very well.  How then should speakers, writers, and other communicators propose change most effectively?  This line of reasoning suggests that removing any moral element and simply encouraging people to establish new habits should work at least as well as the usual effort to convince people with lots of emotion, argument, and moral suasion.