Harnessing Change Inertia

How agile are you? How agile would you like to be?

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

“An object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion”

- Newton’s First Law of Motion

Newton’s First Law describes inertia in objects, but the same principles apply to our mental capacity to effect change in our lives. 

Emotionally, physically, financially, and socially, we constantly feel the double-edged sword of inertia. 

In the micro sense, mental inertia holds us in bed as the snooze alarm rings again, pushes us to watch “just one more episode” instead of leaving the couch, and quietly insists we stick at jobs we no longer want rather than update our resumes.

On the macro side, we have been pulled by incredible inertia in just the last few years, like a global financial crisis in 2008, heavy political pendulum swings in 2016 and 2020, a national reckoning with race relations and police reform, and more light-hearted instances like a Reddit thread gaining enough momentum to spike GameStop’s stock value and bring a massive hedge fund to its knees.

Mental Inertia

Internally, inertia comes down to our natural reluctance to confront habitual thinking. When things start to move or to feel immovable, we nurture the assumption that the situation is permanent. 

“People have always rented videos, they won’t stop now.”

- Someone at Blockbuster, probably

Inertia provides us with an easy excuse: that forces are moving too fast or are too heavy for us to move, so why try? We understand the power of momentum, so how can we use this to our advantage?

Forming Habits

Challenging assumptions is difficult - physically difficult. A key function of the brain is to conserve energy when possible. Critical thinking requires burning calories whereas relying on habits and mental shortcuts (known as heuristics) requires very little effort. 

Training a new habit requires diligent practice. Like learning to go to the gym consistently, we have to condition ourselves through repetition. 

Habits grease the wheel of change, allowing efforts to move faster and gain momentum unto themselves. As more of our effort becomes habitual, we are freed up to consider new and more complex facets of our goals. Once going to the gym is a routine, we begin to consider other measures to increase output - changing the type or intensity of a work out, our diet, etc. As new aspects become habitual themselves, our routine becomes so powerful we would not have believed it possible in the beginning.

There are many proven paths to creating better habits for ourselves, from attaching new habits to existing routines to creating situational nudges for ourselves to enact the desired behavior, like taking a route home from work that passes the gym. These strategies are well articulated in books like James Clear’s “Atomic Habits”  or Charles Duhigg’s “The Power of Habit.” 

When we reduce the friction involved in taking on new habits, we are more likely to act with the repetition required to solidify the behaviors we want. As habits reduce resistance to action, momentum joins our side and, to borrow a phrase, the force is with us.

Designing Resistance

Habits dramatically decrease resistance to action, and we can apply the same philosophy in reverse to change destructive mindsets. If creating habits is about removing friction, we can break unhelpful patterns by introducing it. 

A common example is removing social media apps from our phones so we are forced to log in through a browser. It seems small, but the tiny increase in clicks, wait-time, and difficult user experience can be enough to slow or even break a habit. 

As a bonus, if we can pair repetitive friction with repetition of a habit we are aiming to start, we can double our impact.

Small changes can remove us from the grip of momentum, allowing us a chance to regain our autonomy. 

Start Small

Big goals are daunting. We often feel we are staring at a summit so far away it is unreachable.

The goal may be to start our own business, or grow it, or a difficult internal feat like establishing better boundaries in our lives. When we are out of practice or have never done something before, we have no memories to tell us that what we want may be possible. It can even feel like our lack of experience implies it is impossible.

When we start small, we prove change is possible. Like moving a giant boulder just an inch, we understand that something previously thought immovable can budge. 

It is possible to experience this initial budge in a seemingly unrelated arena. If we want a raise, for example, but do not feel confident enough to ask, we can boost our confidence with practice in other areas of life. It may even be as small as asserting an opinion when asked “What do you feel like eating tonight?” or jumping into a new hobby.

When we practice making small changes, we learn they are not fatal and that we have the power to effect change. From there, the dominos begin to fall.

Scaling Up

Beyond our personal lives, teams, companies, and even nations can experience the benefits of purposeful inertia. 

Creating momentum for an organization requires changing habitual mindsets. To become more agile, we have to get used to changing directions. We can speed change by encouraging communication, enhancing feedback, avoiding shame, and generally growing trust within a team. When we ingrain these mindsets, we change culture, diversity, agility, and creativity within a team. These intangibles begin to fuel the flywheel of change.

Similarly, we can create resistance to those behaviors we want to change. We could add guardrails on project management workflows, encourage a desk-swap day to break down silos, etc.

On a national level, it may seem that small steps could not start anything meaningful, but in fact it is believed that only 3.5% of a population needs to be involved in a change to truly push the needle. Protests, petitions, and social media campaigns may feel small, but each can push a movement towards a tipping point.

Life sometimes snowballs out of control, but what if we got to choose our snowball and where it lands? What could we do with enough of the right momentum?