From infancy to full adulthood, there is always something to be scared of. Fear can be uncomfortable, distracting, even downright paralyzing. It can come as brief, temporary experiences, or in waves, or it can be chronic.
I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.
—Nelson Mandela
Whether by conquering it, acting through it, or by thoroughly analyzing its source, humans can overcome fear, or at least meet it and match it. But they will discover that even in the simplest of cases, the source of fear lies much deeper than we ever suspected.
In terms of human physiology, fear of any sort is processed primarily in a section of the brain called the amygdala. This is a relatively small cluster of cells forming part of the limbic system, and is located about as deep inside the brain as it is possible to go.
When humans perceive a threat, such as a dangerous creature, a car speeding toward them, an expression of horror on another person’s face, or a fear-inducing sound, smell, or sensation, the amygdala releases a stress signal to the hypothalamus, which is the “command center” for activity. This pushes the body into the well-known concept called fight-or-flight. 1
This fight-or-flight response is quite fascinating in terms of the number of things it does. It raises the heart rate and blood pressure, stimulating the release of adrenaline, an acid that gives muscle cells temporary added power – the power that gives people super strength, well beyond their normal abilities. It makes the pupils in the eyes and the bronchi in the lungs dilate, to take in additional light and oxygen, respectively. It rapidly changes blood chemistry to add more glucose, a sugar that functions as a source of quick energy. At the same time, non-essential activities, including digestion, are shut down to divert energy to handle the pressing matter of survival.2
Fear represents a complex interplay between instinct, emotion, and logic, and it uses other parts of the brain, specifically the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex for further processing and interpretation. For example, in a typical workplace situation, the sound of a fire alarm might not trigger an immediate fight-or-flight response in many people. Experience has conditioned us to interpret the noise as likely a false alarm and just an inconvenience. We make the conscious decision to expect that very soon an announcement will come over the public address system that the incident is under investigation or that it has been cleared. But if we hear the alarm and then smell smoke, that added sensory input makes all the difference. Now things are getting real, and it will likely trigger the fight-or-flight response.
At this point, urgency takes over. Dilated pupils and increased blood flow create a form of tunnel vision for a person in crisis, one that focuses solely on survival. This narrowed perspective can be a lifesaver in terms of helping us escape danger, finding strength and drive that we did not know we had, and being oblivious to pain or wounds as we run for safety.
Fight-or-flight need not be solely a selfish instinct – it can also be useful in giving aid to others. Picture, for example, the numerous scenes captured on video of people performing heroic acts without pausing to consider their own mortality, to rescue a person or an animal from a dangerous situation. Tunnel vision lets people exist solely in the moment, without thinking about the possible danger.
But that same non-thinking reaction can turn into a fatal shortcoming when high-stress situations make people forget the right sequence of instructions or actions needed to survive. During a hard landing in a plane, for example, the type where the undercarriage has failed or a sudden wind shear causes the plane to hit the tarmac, once the aircraft comes to a stop and the slides deploy, people will be in shock.
In these moments, it is not uncommon for some of them to forget how to unbuckle their lap belt for a few precious seconds. Habit, formed from years of riding in cars, makes them reach down to the side of their hip as they would when releasing a car seatbelt – an action they have performed thousands of times, and which has been burned into muscle memory. The airplane seat belt buckle is located in the center of their lap, not the side, and also, it opens with a hinge. Some passengers will fumble with this since there are very few other belts or attachments in most peoples’ lives that use such a mechanism.3
This sounds improbable, but until you have experienced the enormous stress and shock of a near-crash in a plane, it is hard to picture anyone having difficulty with their seat belt. But this is an example where the expression of “not being able to think straight” applies. The mind is overcome with the urgency, the disbelief, the horror, and the enormity of the moment, and reverts to instinct rather than memory.
This is in part why flight attendants perform their safety demonstrations with gestures, using an actual seatbelt and breathing mask, and miming the actions along with the announcement. It’s why they also implore people to watch and pay attention, which we seldom do. They can’t rely on people merely hearing the words to remember the lesson. The flight crews must physically demonstrate how to perform the actions, in an effort to visually transfer muscle memory.
This is also why cruise lines hold lifeboat drills on day one of every voyage, and why workplaces practice safety drills – to ensure everyone experiences the physical actions of leaving potential danger safely and arriving at their muster point – without having to think too much about it.
The same shock-based fight-or-flight responses occur in situations that aren’t physical so much as emotional and intellectual, such as receiving sudden news of impending layoffs, or news of the death of a colleague, or of a celebrity. These are situations where normalcy has been shaken, breeding temporary disorientation, confusion, anger, and fear.
Fear Is Contagious
Imagine yourself standing in an elevator in a tall building with ten other people, and you’re traveling downward, heading to the ground floor. The elevator lurches to a stop between floors. Much like the smoke alarm example of earlier, you are most likely not going to panic, because somewhere in the back of your mind is the awareness of the safety features built into elevator technology. You also know you can talk to someone at the Security desk by way of the help button. These are things you know as logical facts. This factual knowledge helps you to stay calm as you patiently wait for the car to start moving again.
That is, until someone in the elevator shouts out, “Oh my god, we’re all going to die!” At that moment, waves of fear instantly radiate through the small space of the elevator, quickly tipping the collective mood from calm to discomfort, pushing the needle slowly toward panic. It’s no longer the facts of the situation that are in charge, it’s the feeling.
During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, before masks and vaccinations became the primary focal points of disagreement, there was a rash of hoarding activities in grocery stores. People started purchasing excessive amounts of cleaning supplies and sanitizers. These activities were often initiated by individuals who already possessed a permanent bunker mentality, but then other people joined the mania – people who originally had no intention of doing anything more than buying regular groceries in regular amounts. But the sight of seeing others load up on these products triggered their own instinctive fears and pushed them into actions they had never previously considered.
The contagion of fear carries itself quickly across and through groups, carrying an unspoken yet extremely clear warning: there is danger ahead. We observe or hear someone expressing fear, and we immediately fall back to it as our default setting.
When an individual feels fear and then expresses it through words, actions, or even subtle facial expressions, it automatically becomes a shared fear. When a shared fear becomes broadcast through an ever-growing number of people, it can become a movement, and when something becomes a movement, it has the ability to stop progress in its tracks and sometimes even reverse it.
Why Does Fear Seem Larger at Night?
Fear can strike at any time of day, of course, but for many, it seems even larger and worse at night, especially around 3:00 a.m. or so. This is traditionally, and appropriately, called the “dead of night.” People who wake up at this time – due to a noise, or simply the conclusion of a sleep cycle – will often find themselves wracked in restless thought, with the concerns of life – family, career, money – seeming larger and even more scary than before.
The reason every thought and worry seems bigger at this time of night is because we humans are, by comparison, a little bit weaker, colder, and more vulnerable at that time, compared to the rest of the day. The body has an internal clock of sorts, called the circadian rhythm, (Latin for circa – around, and dian – the day) which is regulated by the presence of the sun, both in terms of sunrise, which stimulates body chemistry for action, and sunset, which starts the process of releasing melatonin, the hormone chiefly responsible for sleep.
The dead of night is intended for rest and repair. It is a time when the body directs energy toward fixing up the wear and tear of the day before, and it is also the time when children do most of their growing. Basically it’s our all-night body shop.
If you have ever worked a night shift, and you are not a night-owl by nature, you might notice that you will feel a little chilly at 3:00 a.m., even in a normally-heated room. This is because your body is seeking to lower your internal temperature by a degree or so, as part of the temporary “shut-down” and energy redirection process.
This is also the time when many mistakes are made, including highway and industrial accidents, and in the world of cyber sabotage, the dead of night is a great time to release a damaging payload, since most people just will not be at their best at that time.
Consequently, we are a little weaker, if only in terms of being more physically vulnerable while our body focuses more on itself, and therefore it tends to magnify the perceptions of danger, fear, and worry, due to this vulnerable state. As difficult as it may be, one of the best ways to defeat the fears of the middle of the night is to simply recognize that self-same fact; that you are, indeed currently in a physiologically more vulnerable state, and that 3:00 a.m. fear is appearing disproportionately large and out of context. These fears will be better dealt with in the morning in the light of day. Just knowing this is helpful for some people to put them aside for a few more hours.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Retrieved from www.agileleantransformation.com/articles.html Creative Commons license – used with permission
The hierarchy is beautiful in its simplicity, and though it does not discuss fear directly, basically, all of the fears we experience tie back to it. Basic mortal concern tends to out-prioritize every other type of need, which is why it connects most directly to the bottom-most layer of this chart. But to be human means that we must take the whole package.
As we look at the immediate impact that digital transformation has on fear and vice versa, it will be easy to see how individual fears connect with the levels on this pyramid, sometimes with more than one level at a time.
This is important to keep in mind, especially if these fears are already making themselves evident within your at-work community. Sometimes, even the most lugubrious and negative individual, the person who is steadfastly standing in the way of your organization’s progress, might be doing so not because they are a technology-hating Luddite, but because, deep inside, they are terrified of being found out as a fraud, or as incompetent in some way, and the fear they feel stretches up through the entire pyramid, from the realization of not being able to achieve self-affirmation right down to the most profound fear of all: that this change will somehow lead to the death of their livelihood, and with it, the life they have grown used to.
The bands are self-explanatory for the most part, but they are worth a brief description here in order to fit them into the context of this book: How human reflex stands in the way of digital transformation.
Physiological needs form the bottom layer. These are primarily food, air, water, warmth, and rest, since these are the forces that keep us alive. For example, every time you enter a room, a part of you automatically scans the space and smells the air to make sure this is a place that you can enter. If you find yourself outside in extremely cold sub-zero weather without proper protective clothing, as might happen when dashing across the street between office buildings on a windy winter day, you might hear an inner voice saying, “get inside.” It’s not an actual voice, but it is your instinct telling you that this outdoor situation does not satisfy even the basic level of Maslow’s Hierarchy and must be dealt with.
If you are dining with a colleague at a restaurant in which the wait staff bring you your food – as compared to a buffet where you serve yourself – you might notice, if you pay attention, that your colleague’s face will freeze for a millisecond, even in mid-conversation, as instinct takes over and assesses the food placed before them, to decide if it is safe for consumption. I call this food face and it is great fun to watch this happen.
Both the inner voice and food face are examples of automatic responses to the environment around us. We need to determine that things are not life-threatening before we can move forward into any situation.
The next level of Maslow’s Hierarchy is Safety, and this questions whether an environment is safe, and that there is no danger of harm. Stepping into an elevator will trigger this type of automatic safety assessment, especially with regard to the physical condition of the elevator car, and the number of people already in it. Walking down a street and mistakenly turning into a darkened alleyway will make most people turn around and walk back out again without a second thought.
Once the basic priorities of life and safety have been satisfactorily addressed, we turn to the middle band which speaks to the desire for belonging and love. There is the intimate love of a life partner and the love of family, of course, but this band also addresses the sense of acceptance in a tribe, which includes workplace teams.
Humans for the most part want to feel part of something, and a great deal of office life seeks to support this need through formalized and informal activities, including meetings, birthday celebrations, team-building events, casual days, and even simply hallway conversation. Much of this has, up until recent times, been based on people being in the same physical space at the same time. How we will be able to replicate this in a virtual or hybrid working world is a profound digital transformation-related workplace fear for managers and employees, not just from a productivity standpoint, but from that of being able to keep hold of this belonging and love level.
The Esteem level represents a need for self-comfort, which comes from generally feeling OK or even good about oneself in terms of work skills, being able to socialize with colleagues, being able to relate to managers and being comfortable in one’s own skin.
Finally, the top layer of the pyramid looks to self-actualization – the pursuit and achievement of goals, which would include career goals, life goals, and personal achievements, such as further education, promotion, better work–life balance, or all of these.
It is easy to see how the changes put forward by the prospect of digital transformation must pass through the filter of Maslow’s Hierarchy, and it is also possible to see how such changes might snag on quite a few corners as they do so. Everything that we question and assess about change and transformation is voiced in defense of our own selves, from the most basic to the most ambitious, from the most welcome change, to the least.
Those who are in charge of leading people through a digital transformation must be careful to establish a process of comfort, using awareness, exposure, and reinforcement. They must take care to anticipate pushback and fear, and proactively place small interim wins on par with the grand end goal of change. They must prepare and share the emotional nutrients that are vitally needed to keep going. They must communicate and listen with equal amounts of energy, and they must understand that very often, the fear behind resistance to change lies much deeper than we think.
There are exceedingly few areas in life – if any – in which change is welcomed with open arms. Even those life events that are traditionally described as the best of all – for some, this might mean getting married or having a child, rescuing a pet, getting a promotion, or winning the lottery – come with their own share of reservations and doubt. How could they not? The very urges that demand that we stay safe will always have a voice at every significant juncture along life’s path.
Managers and leaders who are in charge of introducing change must seek to do so carefully, thawing the ice of complacency with visions of a better future state. They must keep in mind the reality that emotion dominates the human self, and the emotions of fear, doubt, and negativity are the default state. In your back pocket, you must carry the facts that can be presented at the right time – the descriptions and demonstration of the new techniques. But this should not happen first. First must come the thawing period, in which comfort with the norm starts to be awakened or guided toward a vision of a better state. A vision is a concept, an idea, a representation of betterment. Only after this thawing has begun can the facts of the change be introduced.
Once the facts have been introduced, you can still expect pushback and rejection, as the humans confronting the change pass through their phases of grief, in a pattern you might already know as the Kubler-Ross model.
The Kubler-Ross Grief/Change Model
One of the most profound responses to known fears is denial. The social psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross is among the most famous illustrators of the power of denial, especially in her 1969 work, On Death and Dying, in which she introduced the world to the five stages of grief, also known as the Kubler-Ross model.
She describes the five stages as happening in the following order: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and this pattern is applicable not only to the trauma of death, but to many other changes that can occur in a person’s life.
Like many popular psychologists, including Abraham Maslow, her work has also been critiqued and refuted over the years, some suggesting it lacks scientific rigor, does not take into account cultural diversities, and that the sequence of the five steps is artificial, and may even influence peoples’ behavior or the judgement of those who care for them. Some of this may be correct now, given the half-century we have had to both analyze her work and evolve socially, but there are still many components in her process that ring true.
To me, the five phases and their predictability remains a useful guide, even if the relative severity and duration of each changes from person to person, and even, too, if some people (like myself) seem to pass through this cycle more than once during a protracted grieving and recovery process.
Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing
This is a sequence that is similar to the Kubler-Ross model in that it is expectable and predictable. As coined by Bruce Tuckman in his 1965 paper, Developmental Sequence in Small Groups, it describes the phases that people go through when coming together as a team, which is a type of change unto itself. A group of strangers will behave politely and superficially when they first get together. The formality and novelty of the situation generates a type of curious energy. But this quickly gives way to storms, as peoples’ true personalities start to emerge, the Type-As, the alphas, the peacemakers, extroverts, introverts, creative, and analytical types, all struggle to find their place within the pressure of an evolving working group. This is the storming phase, and it often leads to dysfunction, confusion, and disillusionment.
This is until the players all find their place, start to work together, and normalize their relationships, which ultimately leads to performing or even outperforming expectations as the capacity of the whole team surpasses the sum of its parts.
Despite the fact that the four terms, forming, storming, norming, and performing, rhyme so conveniently, there is a predictable line of group behavior within this principle that is similar to the path outlined in the Kubler-Ross grief/change model and Maslow’s Hierarchy. This gives leaders comfort in knowing that even when things look desperately bad, there is an expectable path that humans will follow.
This has a double benefit for those leading others into digital transformation. First, there is the comfort of knowing that humans will most likely respond in the manner described by Kubler-Ross, Maslow, and Tuckman. This makes the arrival of pushback and rejection at least a little easier to take, given that it’s not a total shock.
Secondly, it becomes a useful roadmap for extending that same comfort and guidance to those who will be facing the change.
Managing the Fear of Change
Most successful change management strategies involve some sort of acclimatization process, in which people get used to an idea emotionally before accepting the facts and following a transition plan. As mentioned already, emotion always dominates the human psyche, and to overcome the fear of change, facts must be brought in to meet the fear. But this must be done at the right time and in the right way.
Closing the Gate
Experiencing change is like passing through a gate. As such, it is vital to take the time to close the gate behind you as you pass through. Many departments or organizations that are embracing digital transformation tend to focus exclusively on the newer, greener pasture that lies ahead, the one with the new technology, the better processes, and the faster everything.
The single biggest reason changes fail is that no one has thought about endings or planned to manage their impact on people.
—William Bridges, Managing Transitions
The gate is a physical place that stands between the past and the future, between normalcy and novelty. It is not a pencil-drawn line on the ground; it is instead a structure, with some width and presence through which people must pass.
As you help people look toward the future, it is vital to help each individual identify what they are losing, exactly, and to acknowledge the loss as part of the grief process. Expect that their work performance might alter somewhat during this time. Treat the past with respect, but at the same time, make sure to identify what is not changing.
For example, if the change being experienced is a shift from a traditional office layout to a hoteling or hot-desking zone in which employees’ cubicles have been replaced by desks that are to be reserved by the day, you can be very sure that there will be some resistance. But although the office layout might have been replaced by a hot desking zone, other life constants, perhaps like the boardroom and the downstairs coffee shop are still there.
People will often say “the only constant is change,” but you can also say, “in change, there are still constants: some things change, but others remain the same.”
Bring the Facts Up to Meet the Fear
Most fear can be allayed by facts. When you give someone some knowledge about the situation or object that is causing fear, that knowledge has the potential to not just cover up but actually eliminate the fear. Whatever causes the fear, there is usually a way to fix it, understand it, or handle it. But to do this, we need to manually introduce facts and bring them up to the level where fear already exists.
Fear exists by default. It already has a substantial presence in the mind of the individual. It is driven by emotion and instinct, and will thus dominate. That is at least until we are able to bring facts into the picture to level things out.
When a child fears the monster under the bed, a flashlight, paired with a parent/caregiver’s calming reassurance, can do wonders to demonstrate that there is no monster under there. When a person lies awake at 3:00 a.m., as discussed above, the knowledge of why this seems so large may help in getting back to sleep. When a person agonizes over having to learn a new software application, some clear hands-on training will give them the experience they need to see how easy it is. When a manager procrastinates over a meeting with an employee which involves bad news, that manager will need to discover how they can actually help with the next steps and become part of a more positive outcome. If a person fears going to the dentist, they need to be shown that there are still activities in that day that will happen after the dental appointment is done. Things will continue. Life goes on. In all of these cases and so many more, the monster of fear is a figment of instinct and emotion. Facts will help to slay it.