Origins

Immunity to change is the work by Lisa Lahey and Robert Keegan - both on the faculty at Harvard Grad School.

It is based on 30 years of research around adult learning and development to better understand why it is we sometimes struggle to make change, even when we know the change is the right thing for us.

What is it?

Immunity to change is a framework to better identify the competing internal forces that sometimes keep us stuck, and to experiment with change.

At a high level, the framework involves a series of steps:

1. Identify the change goal
   • This should ideally be something that you really want
   • It should implicate you to solve it
   • It should be impactful if it were solved
2. Describe the behaviours that you’re doing or not doing that work against that goal
   • These should be as specific as possible
3. Identify competing commitments
   • What’s the one behaviour you’d want to change if you could?
   • As you imagine yourself in the act of doing that thing (changing the behaviour), what is the biggest worry or fear that comes up?
   • What’s the worst thing for you (personally) about that? [Keep repeating to get to the core]
   • When you get to the heart of it, frame it as a competing commitment
4. Outline your big assumptions
   • What are the big assumptions you are making that reinforce the immunity to change?
   • What are the things that you’re holding to be true?
5. Experimenting with change
   • How might your assumptions be wrong?
   • What would you need to see, in terms of evidence, to view it differently?
   • What is an experiment you could run to test your biggest assumptions?

Example

How is it useful?

Immunity to change can be used as a key to unlock change when someone feels motivated to change but has been unable to make the change stick. Often this comes with a lot of frustration towards themselves, rooted in misunderstanding around what might actually be going on. In this scenario, immunity to change can provide a really accessible, structured approach to identifying competing internal forces as a new lens to explore change.