Immunity to Change: Only Old People Go Downstairs Slowly

I developed a habit, without ever deciding to, of going down my own stairs at home as fast as I possibly could. It became something of a private game. How quick could I get from the top to the bottom without missing a step? My wife Pam commented on it more than once, in the way you comment on something a bit silly, and potentially dangerous, that someone you love keeps doing anyway.

One day I did it wearing my walking shoes instead of my usual soft house slippers. The heel of the shoe caught, and I went down properly this time. I went head over heels, and badly twisted my ankle. Nothing broken, thankfully, but a proper sprain, the kind that takes months rather than days to heal.

For a long time afterwards, I found going down the stairs slowly almost unbearably boring. I did it anyway, because I genuinely didn’t want another accident. But there was a definite irritation sitting underneath the sensible behaviour. It took about six months before I finally understood why.

I see a version of the same pattern constantly in leaders I coach, usually around performance management. They’ll tell you, quite genuinely, that they want to hold their people to clear standards. They want to deal with underperformance early, and properly invest time in developing them. I believe them when they say they want this, the same way I wanted my ankle to heal properly.

What we actually do

What they actually do, quite often, is let a difficult conversation slide for months. One more chance extends well past the point it was earned. A development conversation that would take real time and real honesty keeps getting pushed to next week, then the week after.

This shows up especially in businesses where skilled people are hard to find and even harder to replace. I see it a great deal in professional service firms with underperforming technical experts or project managers. Often, the market for good people is tight and everyone knows it.

With my own stairs, the undermining behaviour was simpler but the deep underlying pattern was identical. My body kept the sensible pace, but the rest of me resented every step of it, and it took months to understand why.

What we’re really protecting

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, two researchers at Harvard, spent years studying exactly this kind of pattern, where someone sincerely wants to change and consistently doesn’t. They called it an immunity to change. It’s not a failure of willpower, but a second, competing commitment sitting underneath the stated one, never named out loud, and usually winning.

For the manager who won’t hold someone to account, the competing commitment often sounds something like this: I need to be seen as a supportive manager who doesn’t lose good people in a market where I can’t easily replace them. That’s not a cynical thing to protect. It’s a genuinely reasonable thing to want, and it’s exactly what makes it so hard to see as the problem.

For me, on the stairs, the competing commitment turned out to be something like: I need to move through the world like someone still capable and full of energy.

The assumption nobody tested

Underneath the competing commitment sits what Kegan and Lahey call a big assumption, a belief that makes the competing commitment feel entirely necessary rather than optional.

For the manager, it usually sounds like this: if I hold this person properly to account, I will lose them, and losing them will be worse than the underperformance I’m currently tolerating. Nobody says this out loud in a board meeting. Most managers would probably deny it if you asked directly. But watch what they actually do, and the assumption is unmistakable.

Mine was almost embarrassingly simple, once I finally let myself see it. Only old people go downstairs slowly. I’m not old. That was it. That was the whole engine behind a habit that had already damaged my ankle for two months and was a near-miss for something far more serious.

Testing the assumption anyway

Neither of these assumptions gets dissolved just by naming them, and it shouldn’t be expected to happen that quickly. What naming them does is turn an invisible pattern into something that can actually be tested.

With my ankle, the test wasn’t really a choice, the injury forced it on me. I had to go slowly whether I liked it or not. It was precisely in that forced state, month after month, that the assumption eventually surfaced through nothing more dramatic than boredom, irritation and a curiosity about why it felt so uncomfortable.

For the manager who’s afraid of losing someone they can’t easily replace, the test usually needs to be more deliberate. Hold one person to a clear, fair standard on one specific thing, and see what actually happens. Most managers who finally do this find that the person doesn’t storm out the same afternoon. Some people rise to the clarity. A few genuinely do leave, and it’s worth being honest that this can happen. But the catastrophe that the big assumption predicted rarely arrives in the shape it was feared in, and the cost of tolerating underperformance indefinitely is usually far higher than the cost of finally testing the fear.

Somewhere around the six month mark, walking normally again, it properly clicked for me why the slow pace had bothered me so much. I told Pam, and she laughed, the good kind of laugh, the one we sometimes share about how strangely our own brains are wired. Something that looks completely ridiculous once you say it out loud in daylight can still be running your behaviour quietly for years while it stays unspoken.

Two questions to sit with

What’s the one thing you keep telling yourself you want, that your actual behaviour has been quietly working against for months, or longer?

If you finally tested the assumption underneath it, properly tested it rather than just worried about it, what do you think you would actually find?

Remember, when it comes to the habits we don’t examine . . . stay curious.