“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so,” is a quote, often attributed to Mark Twain, that people like to repeat because it so captures our everyday experience. You can learn things that you don’t know, but it’s incredibly difficult to unlearn something you believe to be true.
There’s real science behind this. Things we experience are packed away in our brain as the connections called synapses, which form and evolve over time. These connections strengthen as we use them and degrade when we do not. Or, as neuroscientists who study these things like to put it, the neurons that fire together, wire together.
That’s why leaders pursuing change often default to a manager’s mindset instead of a changemaker’s mindset, because that’s what they know and what they’ve been successful with. Yet just like in that famous quote, those same assumptions can undermine a transformational initiative. Here are three beliefs that sabotage change and what you can replace them with.
1. Transformation Is Persuasion At Scale
For 35 years, psychologist Robert Cialdini researched which types of communication were effective and which were not. He found that influence is based on six key principles: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. More recently, Wharton’s Jonah Berger has used data analysis to come up with his SPEACC framework. Others emphasize using emotional rather than analytical arguments.
Salespeople trained in these techniques find them effective. They qualify the customer by asking good questions, do a needs analysis and then tailor their pitch to a unique value proposition. When they encounter resistance they use proven techniques to overcome objections and close the sale.
Most leaders have some familiarity with these techniques so they naturally apply them to transformational initiatives. The problem is that changing mindsets and behaviors isn’t a one-time decision and the best indicator of what we think and do is what the people around us think and do and this effect extends out to three degrees of influence, so it’s not just people we know personally, but the friends of our friends’ friends that shape our opinions and actions.
The truth is that change isn’t about persuasion, but collective dynamics. Decades of research has shown that change spreads through peer networks rather than communication campaigns. Or, as network science pioneer Duncan Watts once put it to me, ideas propagate through “easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people.”
Instead of trying to shape opinions, we’re often better off shaping networks. That’s why we advise our clients pursuing transformational change efforts to start with a majority, even if that majority is only three people in a room of five. You can always expand a majority out, but once you’re in the minority you’re going to get immediate pushback. You need to go where there is already energy and enthusiasm around an idea, not try to create and maintain it yourself.
2. Transformation Is Like A Product Launch
Anybody who’s ever taken a marketing course is familiar with Phillip Kotler’s ideas about marketing. The legendary professor advised us to differentiate our product or service, analyzing customer needs and building awareness about how what we’re selling meets those needs. He also showed how these same concepts apply to nonprofits and government agencies.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that change leaders often take a similar approach. They create a big launch event to create awareness about their idea’s differentiating values, endlessly promote and drive their message home. The aim is to reach and convert enough people fast enough to make change seem inevitable.
This is a terrible approach for a number of reasons. First, a product is targeted at a particular segment and everybody else can ignore it. But an organizational change affects everybody. Inevitably, there are going to be some people who aren’t going to like it and they will resist, seeking to undermine your efforts in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive.
That’s why in our change workshops we help clients design a Keystone Change, something with a concrete and tangible goal, involving multiple stakeholders that they can work on with their core team of early enthusiasts. This isn’t a quick and easy win, often they can take months or even years to achieve. But it paves the way to the larger change.
Every idea starts out weak and unproven. Pixar’s Ed Catmull called them ugly babies. They need to be protected and nurtured so that they can mature and grow. Exposing them to hostile forces early on will only get them killed in their cradle.
3. Once People Understand Change, They Will Embrace It
When we’re passionate about an idea, we want others to see it the same way we do, with all its beautiful complexity and nuance. We want people to share our devotion and fervor. It seems obvious that once everyone else understands the idea the way we do, they will embrace it. Yet the simple truth is that’s almost never true.
This assumption, sometimes known as the information deficit model, emerged in the 1930s, as electronic media gained traction and scientific advances reshaped our understanding of the world. The logic was simple: More public engagement would lead to greater scientific literacy. But the evidence doesn’t back that up. One study found that information about agricultural science didn’t change opinions, and an NSF survey showed that many who understood evolution still didn’t believe it
Even when we do shift knowledge and attitudes, behavior often remains stubbornly unchanged. For example, a 2009 study found that rising concern about climate change did not lead to meaningful action. In the business world In studying corporations, Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton found consistent gaps between what executives know and what they actually do.
At any given time, people are navigating a tangle of competing influences—prior beliefs, ingrained habits, social pressures, and noise from all directions. That’s why ideas spread most effectively through peer networks, not top-down campaigns. We’re social creatures. More often than not, people don’t adopt ideas because they’re convinced by arguments—they adopt the ideas they see working around them.
Adopting A Changemaker Mindset
People become successful managers by adopting a manager mindset. They treat transformational initiatives as if they were just a scaled-up sales process. They focus on persuasion to try and build consensus. They plan a big launch event as if they were unveiling a new product and create top-down informational campaigns to evangelize the idea.
Yet adopting a changemaker mindset starts with letting go of the illusion that change is simply a matter of better messaging, bigger launches, or more information. Those strategies might work for selling products or ideas, but transformation runs deeper. It’s not about convincing people to think differently—it’s about creating the conditions that allow them to act differently.
That requires a shift in how we see our role as leaders—not as promoters or persuaders, but as architects of influence and weavers of networks. The beliefs that sabotage change persist because they work in other contexts. We’ve seen how persuasion techniques can win over a client or how a well-timed product launch can drive adoption.
But transformation isn’t a transaction—it’s a journey. It’s messy, social, and nonlinear. Leaders who succeed in driving meaningful change understand that what matters most isn’t how persuasive they are, but how effectively they can empower others to bring in others, who can bring in others still.
You don’t need to convince everyone all at once—you start with a local majority that can build traction. Change spreads not through force or logic alone, but through people witnessing others like them doing things differently—and succeeding. Ultimately, transformation isn’t about getting people to embrace your idea—it’s about helping them make it their own.
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