Fundamentals of Level Three Leadership

117. The Anti-Change Bowstring

Concept

As we said earlier, people are creatures of habit.³ Most people assess in their experience that people tend to be as much as 90 percent creatures of habit. See the earlier chapter on Habituality. So when we approach the topic of understanding and managing change, we need to take this habituality into account.

Habituality is like a bowstring; when you pull against someone’s habits, they tend to want to snap back to their established way of doing things. Modern research sometimes calls this set points.⁴ If there are set points in fat carriage, perhaps also in other aspects of human behavior. The set point is the least tension in a bowstring, the straight line. When we try to change our habits, the tension ...