By Mary Ellen Normen, Leadership and Team Development Facilitator
In Why Good Teams Wobble When Things Change, we looked at the pattern good teams fall into whenever membership or strategy shifts—the predictable cycle of caution, friction, rhythm, and delivery that repeats no matter how capable the people are. This companion piece goes underneath that pattern to ask a harder question: what is the pattern protecting?
Most leadership teams do not fall back into familiar patterns because they lack commitment. They do so because commitment alone is not enough.
A team may sincerely want clearer communication, faster decisions, or stronger accountability. The team even agrees on the goal and leaves the meeting with next steps. A few weeks later, the familiar pattern returns. Information still arrives late. Hard conversations get softened. Decisions still concentrate with the same two or three people. Everyone is busy, but the structure of the work remains unchanged.
That gap between what a team intends and what it consistently does is where two methods work unusually well together: Immunity to Change™ and LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® work unusually well together. One explains why change does not take hold. The other makes the underlying pattern visible, discussable, and open to experimentation.
The Problem Beneath the Problem
When a familiar pattern persists, leaders of teams often reach for more structure—another action plan, a tighter deadline, a new dashboard, or a stronger accountability check. Those tools work when the obstacle is technical: existing expertise, information, or procedures can solve it.
Many persistent leadership challenges are adaptive. They require people to change how they operate, even though the team may already know what it should do. The harder question is why it does not do it consistently.
Immunity to Change™, developed by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, offers a practical way to address the question without labeling anyone as resistant. Their work reframes apparent resistance as a system of sincere but competing commitments, usually held in place by unexamined big assumptions.
The core idea is that a person or team can hold two commitments at once: an improvement goal they genuinely want to reach and a competing commitment that protects something important, such as credibility, harmony, autonomy, speed, control, quality, or certainty.
Consider a finance and operations team that says, “We need to raise concerns earlier.” Members can fully support that goal while also being committed to appearing prepared, avoiding unnecessary alarm, and refraining from challenging a colleague until all facts are known. Those protections are reasonable, and they may have served the team well. Together, however, they make early communication unlikely.
This is not hypocrisy or laziness. The team is working toward one goal while quietly protecting another.
Why Conversation Alone Rarely Surfaces It
Hidden commitments are difficult to reach in a standard meeting. The most confident voices may set the frame before others have processed the question. Abstract words—trust, communication, accountability—mean different things to different people. Naming a politically sensitive concern aloud can carry real professional or relational risk.
LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® changes the conditions of the conversation. It produces what is called a 100-100 conversation: everyone builds, everyone shares, and the team hears perspectives that ordinary discussion can leave out. The rhythm is simple:
Challenge → Build → Share → Reflect
The bricks are not decoration, and the process is not an icebreaker. Building gives people another way to develop and express their thinking. A wall can represent a reporting barrier. A bridge can represent the informal relationship that quietly keeps work moving. A figure standing outside the model can represent the stakeholder whose perspective is routinely missing. Distance, height, connection, and instability become usable language.
The model means what its builder says it means. This principle matters because it allows colleagues to inquire about the idea without assigning motives to the person. Instead of asking, “Why are you resistant?” the team can ask, “What is this wall protecting?” The model—not the individual—becomes the object of inquiry.
Hands-on model-making engages interconnected sensory, motor, visual, and cognitive processes. More important for leadership practice, it converts an abstract concern into something the group can see, question, connect, and revise together.
A Sequence You Can Actually Run
The two methods can be integrated through five practical steps:
- Choose one meaningful improvement goal. Select a goal that matters and requires different behavior, not simply another task. Examples include surfacing emerging financial risk earlier, delegating decisions closer to the work, or addressing performance concerns promptly.
- Build what happens now. Ask each person to model what the team currently does—or avoids doing—that works against the goal. “We need better communication” becomes concrete: reports are held until every number is verified; concerns travel through side conversations, or only a few people speak during decision meetings.
- Name what the behavior protects. If the pattern changed, what would feel at risk? The purpose is not to dismiss the concern. It is to understand how that concern shapes behavior.
- Identify the big assumption. Turn the protection into an if-then belief: “If I raise a concern before I have a solution, people will question my competence.” A model can make the feared consequence tangible enough to examine as a hypothesis rather than accept as fact.
- Design one small, responsible experiment. Gather evidence instead of demanding a dramatic leap. A leader who assumes that incomplete information causes confusion might run a two-week, three-part update: what we know, what we do not yet know, and what decision or support is needed now.
A useful experiment is small enough to protect operations and relationships, specific enough to observe, and short enough to review. Its purpose is not to prove someone wrong. It is to discover when the assumption is accurate, when it is not, and what new practice could preserve professional care without delaying action.
Questions for Your Next Leadership Meeting
Before launching another change initiative, ask:
- What improvement goal do we repeatedly endorse but inconsistently practice?
- What do we do—or avoid doing—that works against it?
- What legitimate concern might that behavior be protecting?
- What assumption makes protection feel necessary?
- What low-risk experiment would tell us whether that assumption is always true?
Ready to See Your Team’s Real Operating System?
Strong leadership is not having every answer before taking the next step. It is creating conditions in which people can tell the truth about the system and learn their way forward. Sometimes a complex change begins with a very small model and one honest question about what it reveals.
NWCFO’s Team Workshops and Team Building services bring this work to leadership groups in a facilitated, low-risk format: one goal, one honest map, and one practical experiment the team can carry forward.
Start a conversation with NWCFO.
Schedule a discovery call to design a session around the change your team keeps endorsing but is not yet consistently living. Mary Ellen Normen facilitates customized North Star Alignment Labs that integrate LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and Immunity to Change™ to help leadership teams surface hidden patterns, hear every perspective, and design responsible experiments.