Leading Strategic Change: Breaking Through the Brain Barrier

Chapter 3. The Keys to Seeing: Contrast and Confrontation

If people are blinded, how can you help them see? How can you help people see what they have a hard time seeing? How can you avoid getting yourself trapped in past mental maps? You can’t just say, “See!” If people could see the shifts and needed changes, they would. The solution has two parts—contrast and confrontation.

Both come from simple facts that we know about actual vision. To see physical objects, we need some contrast in shape, light, and color. We also see best when those objects are directly in front of us, rather than off to the side in our peripheral vision. Even though, in the context of individual and organizational change, we are not talking about seeing physical objects, ...