Understanding your immunity to change can be a life-changing experience for many people. Such awareness has often been reported as a pivotal ‘AHA’ moment, after which people feel and behave fundamentally differently, that somehow the awareness alone was enough to shift the patterns they were in that kept them immobilised and frustrated, ineffective in their organisational life.
Sometimes too, this initial expanded understanding fades, and a more familiar pattern of feeling frustrated and blocked returns, feelings of personal effectiveness decreasing over time. The previous pattern may be reasserting itself.
So for these others, mere awareness may not be enough to move them into action, they require a more energetic response to this new knowledge about themselves and how they interact in their worlds.
Still others are not certain that their Big Assumptions are not, in fact, correct. The truth is, not all monsters are imaginary. Psychopathology is alive and well in organisations and often the world is not a safe or happy place.
The practice of conceiving and committing to small, graded experiments to test the assumptions you are (now) holding is the way of moving to mobilisation, to practically applying the insights the Immunity to Change process has revealed.
A series of small graded experiments
A graded experiment is one where you test a small part of the assumption you have about yourself and your place in the world, and what will happen if you don’t think, feel, act or behave as you normally might.
Once you have completed the first small test, and if it resolves itself differently than your expectations, then you can try a further, experiment, with a more powerful person for example, or in a specific work context. This activity is about safely testing the boundaries of your assumption.
You may find that these experiments in fact proceed quite quickly, as the substance of your big assumption proves to be not in fact how the real world is working.
Conversely, you might find that your fear is quite justified, in which case you have a great source of information about the environment you are in. In that case, your next environmental experiment might then be to experiment in a new environment...!