Managing The Hidden Forces of Organizational Behavior

Creating meaningful and enduring organizational change is much more than executing a top-down mandate of new processes. Organizational change is hard and complex, so we need to use a variety of tools to help the organization iterate and evolve toward new behaviors and better outcomes.
In this session, we’ll explore how organizations really change.

Drawing on helpful metaphors such as homeostasis, immune systems, and activation energy, you’ll learn why traditional change approaches fail and what leaders and change agents should do instead.

Participants will walk away with practical tools for shaping system conditions rather than dictating them, and creating environments where new ideas can incubate and take root.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognize the systemic forces — such as homeostasis, incentives, and information flow — that drive organizational behavior and cause change efforts to stall.
• Apply complexity-informed tools (activation energy, co-creation, Overton windows) to introduce change in ways that the system can actually absorb.
• Shift from pushing change to shaping conditions, enabling new behaviors to emerge organically rather than through top-down enforcement.
• Design interactions and containers that accelerate idea diffusion, reduce friction, and help teams move from stability to adaptive learning.