The 3 Brake Blocks when Starting Up any Transformation
Chapter II: Fear

Arantxa García Fernandez 
Danone South Europe Transformation Manager

Let’s assume that we have been able to get off the hamster wheel and realize that something needs to change.

The second paralyzer of a transformation that comes our way is fear.

When faced with a perceived threat, three possible responses occur in animals and people: fight, flights, and paralysis.*¹

Zebras are well known for their flight in the face of predator attacks, but in fact they are prepared for both flight and fight. Thus, they can become savage biters that in captivity injure more zookeepers than even tigers.*²

Zebras panic when they feel alarmed, so they are much less docile than their equine relatives, horses or donkeys, and that is why it has hardly ever been feasible to saddle a zebra. They are practically impossible to capture even for champion rodeo cowboys who lasso horses. Their excellent eyesight and ability to spot the end of the rope and avoid it prevent them from being caught. These characteristics, together with the fact that they are animals that roam with the rainy season, make them almost impossible to tame.

In all companies there are zebras, people who are seemingly docile, who we would assume will react with paralysis when faced with threat, but to everyone’s surprise, when they feel threatened, they respond by fleeing or fighting.

And in a context of transformation, fear in the face of a threat can be one of the most important paralyzers for organizations, even if people do not respond with paralysis but with fight or flight.

However, unlike zebras, people respond with stress not only to a real threat, but also to the imagination that such a threat might occur, even if it is extremely improbable. This is excellently described by Robert M. Salposky in his book “Why Zebras Don´t Get Ulcers”: a zebra only gets stressed when faced with a predator, i.e. a real threat. In contrast, humans, just by imagining that predator, although it does not actually exist right now, shoot up their levels of cortisol, the stress hormone.

 The “zebras” in our organizations are highly dangerous. They seem tame, almost harmless creatures, but when confronted with a threat (real or imagined), they are likely to respond with rage to prevent change.

What are the main threats that “zebras” see in organizations? The fears that each person perceives or imagines can vary widely depending on their position and personality, but among the most common are the following:

• Fear of the unknown: Very few people naturally like to leave their comfort zone for fear of not knowing how to handle a new situation or not mastering it.
• Fear of loss: The greater the sense of loss perceived in a change, the more some people will resist it. In this light, people in positions of power (formal or informal) are the ones who are more likely to feel threatened by change.
• Fear of failure: Fear of making a mistake, of our reputation being compromised or that we will end up spoiling the situation is one of the causes that paralyzes us the most.
• Fear of uncertainty: Few things are worse for people than uncertainty. The feeling of losing control, of not knowing what is going to happen, is one of the main causes of stress for people.

References:

*¹ First described by the American physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon.

*² Described by the American biologist Jared Diamond in his Pulitzer Prize-winning publication “Guns, Germs and Steel”