Elephants (and Employees) Never Forget. But They May Change Their Minds

As AI supercharges the pace and scale of change, leaders need to strike a difficult balance between maintaining trust and motivation while enacting needed technology-driven improvements. People are notoriously resistant to change and this challenge will only compound as public skepticism towards AI grows. And yet, leaders need their employees’ help to adopt these tools – not only to identify priority use cases for AI, but also to effectively embed the models into existing and/or new workflows. How, then, should leaders create followership as they navigate towards an unknown and potentially uncomfortable destination?

One approach may be to speak to employees’ Elephants (yes, Elephants).

Elephant > Rider

In his seminal book, The Righteous Mind, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt asserts our emotions and intuitions carry far more weight in forming our beliefs than logic or reasoning. Our minds make snap judgments based on emotions and prior beliefs; this is our “Elephant”. The Elephant has a (much smaller) human “Rider”, which is a metaphor for our rational mind. Upon hearing something new, the Elephant reacts first and viscerally. The Rider, by contrast, works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying the Elephant’s reaction. The Rider goes along with the Elephant, even though it may believe it is in control.

The upshot is that people cannot be reasoned out of their beliefs. Reasoning is an attempt to convince the Rider alone and will almost certainly fall flat. The Rider is too small to steer the Elephant. (Case in point: a leader I once supported asked her team to “find her the facts that supported her narrative”).

To change behavior, you must convince the Rider AND steer the Elephant.

Convincing the Rider

When managing signficant change, leaders should explain the desired outcome clearly, encourage questions and discussion, and allow time for people to understand and digest the change. While we are all subject to our emotions and instincts, we still require intellectual fuel to support changes.  Investing this extra time up-front may seem inefficient when confronting urgent change; however, it will lead to more lasting behavior change. As a leader, the best practice is frequent and honest communication about what you are seeing and how you intend to make decisions along the way, starting well before you anticipate the actual changes will occur. 

Elephants motivate Elephants

When attempting to dislodge deeply-held beliefs, leaders must appeal to their team’s emotions. People tend to believe what they feel, often despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary. A leader needs to recognize not only people’s emotional attachment to their own beliefs, but also that the group itself often carries collective emotional judgments and norms.

As such, a leader would be wise to identify “change champions”: employees who believe in and can authentically articulate the merits of the impending change. People rarely change their own Elephants’ opinions, but they can be swayed by other people’s Elephants if they respect and trust that person.

A word of caution on this point: trust takes time to build and cannot be manufactured for an opportunistic moment. Leaders/team members who can build and maintain trust with others are worth identifying and investing in now, as their ability to motivate others will pay dividends for you and your team in the long run. 

Moving Forward, As One

As the leader, you must chart the course for your team, both their Riders and Elephants, removing obstacles so they arrive willingly at the new destination. Be proactive in sharing what you now expect from your team. Provide ample opportunities for employee feedback throughout the change. Listen for additional support needed or aspects of the process that cause unnecessary friction. Create structure to respond to suggestions along the way, publicly acknowledging what you heard and what you are doing to improve the overall experience. 

In Closing

Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “When we have to change our mind about a person, we hold the inconvenience he causes us very much against him.” We all become wedded to our firmly-held beliefs, and even if we manage to divorce ourselves from them, as Nietzsche said, we resent that we were forced into doing so. For organizations, this can pose a central leadership problem. By understanding how our brains work with the simple heuristic of the Elephant and the Rider, leaders can ready their teams for new realities, while avoiding apathy, distrust and resentment along the way.