Why Is It So Hard To Change Our Behavior? ------ Brett Steenbarger
Early last year, I met with a team that was managing a large portfolio for a hedge fund. The team reviewed its recent performance and decided that it needed to make improvements in its research, its communications among team members, and its risk management. I was impressed by the meeting: each team member seemed highly invested in making these improvements. Even more impressive, the team actively implemented the changes and racked up a very profitable start to the year.
Several months later, I heard back from the team leader. The profits were gone and so were the changes they had made. The portfolio manager lamented that they had fallen back into bad habits. When I met with the team, it seemed like a different group of people. They were clearly demoralized. They had made changes, but had not been able to sustain those changes. Changing was not their problem; relapse was.
The challenge of relapse is more common than is commonly recognized. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that most attempts at change fail, not because they don’t make progress, but because they cannot keep that progress going.
Jesse Lyn Stoner recently wrote a perceptive post on why most change efforts fail within organizations. She cited surprising figures from a 2013 study that found only 25% of changes undertaken are actually sustained. This, she observes, is often a function of how change is pursued. If the need for change is not clear and compelling, if stakeholders are not actively involved in the change process, and if change efforts aren’t seamlessly integrated into daily work, the odds are great that attempts at change will die on the vine. It seems as though motivation–wanting to change–is not enough. We have to feel that we need to change. If change is not an urgent priority, it quickly yields to the status quo.
Research in psychology supports Stoner’s idea that it is difficult to sustain change. The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that 40-60% of people who are treated for drug and alcohol problems experience a relapse of their problems. Similarly, research into psychotherapy finds that about 40% of patients treated for depression experience a relapse within the next five years. When I ran a counseling program for medical students, I found that about one-third of all successful completions returned for counseling within a year’s time to address recurrences of the initial problems.
In the case of the counseling program, relapse was so prevalent that I abandoned the notion of “termination” of counseling and instead encouraged a shift from regularly scheduled sessions to meetings held “as wanted, as needed.” Instead of success talk at the end of seemingly successful counseling, we engaged in relapse talk–anticipating that progress would always be “two steps forward, one step back.” This framework, common in the substance abuse treatment community, views relapse as a natural part of the change process, not as a failure of that process.
One of the greatest barriers to our own change efforts is that we fail to plan for setbacks. We plan to make changes, but we do not plan for expectable occasions of relapse. Once we make changes, there is a need to work on cementing and maintaining those changes, so that they become truly parts of ourselves. Research on the transtheoretical model of change, which emphasizes maintenance as an essential step in the change process, finds that people who stop smoking for a full year still have a greater than 40% rate of returning to active smoking. It isn’t until five years of abstinence is achieved that the relapse rate drops below 10%.
Are you trying to change a problematic pattern in your trading of financial markets? In your marriage? In your patterns of diet and exercise? In your work productivity? All of these are examples of changes we commonly seek, sometimes as parts of resolutions in a new year. The motivation and progress last for a time and then drop off. We view relapse as a sign of failure and with the discouragement of failure comes a loss of the drive that led us to seek the improvements in the first place.
Yes, achieving change requires a sense of urgency and active involvement in change efforts. It also requires something else: a plan for relapse. Once relapse is accepted as part of the change process, the step backward can become a learning opportunity for the next two steps forward. The portfolio management team I worked with gave up on their changes once they deviated from their path. The successful change agent views is on the lookout for relapse and is motivated to learn from it and use it to strengthen their commitment. We sometimes hear that “failing to plan is planning to fail.” In the case of making changes–in the workplace and in life–planning to fail is essential to success. For successful change efforts, relapse poses opportunity, not threat.
Brett N. Steenbarger, Ph.D.
