Change Myths: The Professionals Guide to Separating Sense from Nonsense (Leading Change in the Digital Age)

How humans decide what to believe, in their professional and personal lives, is vital. It applies to organizational change, our interest area, but also critically to life, such as health and medical decisions, fake news, politics, and more.
Much of the sifting and winnowing of information, of separating wheat from chaff, that turns information into knowledge, however, is done subconsciously using heuristics (mental shortcuts) to decide whom to trust and what to believe. Once people decide which authorities and evidence to trust, they get on with life without returning to questions such as “how do I really know this is true?”, “how has knowledge changed?”, or “is the evidence still valid?”
Once a myth takes root culturally it sticks. Take the idea that people are “left-brained” or “right-brained.” Psychologists debunk this claim until blue in the face, yet people, including many in the change profession, still use it.
This stickiness is endemic in the organizational change profession. Many of its signature ideas are 50-75 years old yet have stuck and have done so without any re-evaluation as knowledge strengthened.
For example, the very first model Paul learned as an organizational change consultant was the Kübler-Ross “grief model” – on the very first day of PwC’s change management practitioner program in 1993. Later, he began to wonder whether the emotional experience of the dying applied to business change.
The Science of Organizational Change, first published in 2015 and revised in 2019, was the first book to identify the myths in the world of change. Each myth in that book deserved a chapter-length exploration that it did not receive.
Change Myths does just that. It takes eight of these popular and well-known change myths and gives them the chapter-length examination they deserve, applying a scientific and critical lens to their historical context and claims.
Most of these myths appear on LinkedIn, in some form, every single day to great applause.
Among the myths debunked are MBTI, learning styles, the “unfreeze” model of Lewin, change curves, linear change models, resistance to change, and more.
The authors walk their own talk in Change Myths, not claiming to be final arbiters of truth as if they were a Supreme Court of change ideas, but offer a critical thinking model, called LIAR, that comes from epistemology which they make practical for change practitioners.
Is the myth backed up by intuition? How reliable is that as a guide? What do leading authorities say? What do logic and reason tell us? And, what does the research evidence suggest?
Armed with that tool, and others, readers can choose to either reject the myth, or, should they wish to continue to use it in their change toolkit, will do so with a more solid foundation.
Now, perhaps more than ever, every professional, business leader, worker, citizen, parent, and adult need better tools to parse and discern the deluge of information they encounter daily to help make decisions armed with more factual knowledge.
Join the authors in propelling scientific and critical thinking skills to the forefront of both organisational change and the popular conscience.