Most discussions of change management start somewhere comfortable — a framework, a model, a sequence of steps. Mark Jaben's session starts somewhere else. He starts with the experience nearly everyone in the audience has lived through. You propose a change. The data supports it. The metrics back it up. The logic is sound. And people push back anyway. Or you find yourself on the receiving end of a proposal that the data appears to support but that you still don't believe. Either way, the analytical case isn't producing the response the analytical case was supposed to produce.
This webinar isn't about that gap as a soft skills problem. Jaben is an emergency physician who spent 20 years in a single hospital group and the following 13 years as an independent practitioner working across hospital systems, Indian Health Service facilities, office practices, and EMS services. He learned Lean leading implementation at a hospital in Taupo, New Zealand in 2008. When he came back to the US and kept applying these methods across emergency departments, clinics, and regional collaborations, he watched the same change efforts succeed in some contexts and stall in others — using the same methodology, run by capable people, with comparable resources. Something else was determining whether change took hold.
His book, "Free the Brain," is what he wrote after going into the neuroscience literature to figure out what that something else was. The session is the working summary. The central claim is that good ideas, supported by data, fail to drive change because the brain doesn't make decisions the way most change management frameworks assume it does. Opinions form before analysis. Resistance is rational, not emotional. And the part of change management most leaders skip — the human interaction inside what Jaben calls the fundamental unit of change — is where the entire effort either succeeds or doesn't.
Jaben's tone throughout is calm, clinical, and direct. He's not selling enthusiasm. He's describing how the system actually operates and what that means for anyone responsible for leading change inside it.
Mark Jaben, MD is a residency-trained, board-certified emergency physician with over 35 years of clinical experience. After 20 years in a single hospital group, he has spent the past 13 years in independent emergency medicine practice in the community setting, working in emergency departments ranging from 5,000 to 75,000 annual visits, with experience in hospitals, Indian Health Service facilities, office practices, and EMS services. His initial immersion into Lean came in 2008 while living and working in Taupo, New Zealand, where he led implementation efforts at the local hospital. He has continued to apply these concepts in emergency departments, hospitals, clinics, and regional collaborations, with particular focus on how Lean informs individual work. He was featured in Dan Markovitz's Shingo-winning book "A Factory of One." His own book, "Free the Brain: Overcoming the Struggle People and Organizations Have With Change," draws on neuroscience research to explain why organizations do or don't function well, why people resist change, and what it takes to genuinely engage them.
Jaben's argument starts with a structural claim: the fundamental unit of change is the interaction between two people. Not the policy. Not the plan. Not the rollout. The conversation in which one person is asking another person to do something differently — and the response from the second person to that ask.
This unit shows up everywhere in an organization. Senior leaders ask middle managers to change. Middle managers ask frontline staff to change. Frontline staff sometimes ask each other or their managers to change. In larger initiatives, the unit replicates thousands of times across the organization, and the success of the overall initiative is determined by what happens in those individual exchanges.
Each exchange revolves around the story each person holds about what's going on. Not the data each person has. The story. The data may be the same. The story diverges. And the story is what drives the response.
Jaben used a political example to make the divergence visible — not to push a position, but because political examples carry enough charge that the dynamic shows up clearly. Ask whether the economy is better now than at some prior point in time, and people will reach for evidence that supports the opinion they already hold. The stock market is up. Unemployment is down. Or the predecessor's economy was the real engine and this one is coasting on it. Whatever the framing, the data is being assembled in service of the conclusion rather than the conclusion being assembled from the data.
The diagnostic question Jaben asked the audience is the one that opens up the whole session: when you formed your opinion about that economic question, did you study the data first and form the opinion as a result, or did you form the opinion first and then look for data that supported it?
For most people, most of the time, on most issues, it's the second. And once you recognize that pattern in yourself on a question where you can see your own reasoning, you can recognize it everywhere else.
The neuroscience Jaben drew on for the rest of the session is well-established. Shankar Vedantam popularized the term "hidden brain" to describe the processing that happens before awareness — the work the brain does to form impressions, weigh options, and make value judgments without any of that work surfacing into conscious thought.
The hidden brain looks at every situation as a problem. A problem has a solution. The preferred solution is one the brain already has stored from previous experience, because reusing a stored solution costs less energy than constructing a new one. So the hidden brain searches its catalog of patterns for one that matches the current circumstances. It doesn't need a perfect match. Close enough is good enough.
Jaben used Wheel of Fortune to make this concrete. A contestant doesn't need to see every letter on the board to know the phrase. They need to see enough of a pattern. The pattern triggers recognition, and recognition produces the answer. Most of the time the answer is right. Sometimes — as in the actual 2019 episode Jaben referenced, where "A streetcar nameD desire" went unguessed by a contestant who chose to spin the wheel instead — the brain misses something obvious. The pattern-matching is fast and usually accurate, but it isn't analytical, and it's not infallible.
Several stored patterns might apply to any given situation. The brain doesn't deliberate among them like a panel. It picks the one whose voice is loudest. The other voices don't disappear. They're still in there, just drowned out by the one that won this round. Which is why people do change their minds — usually not because they generated a new opinion, but because a previously drowned-out voice became louder when conditions shifted.
What determines which voice gets to be loudest? Two things. The person's worldview or ideology — how they believe the world works and what rules they use to navigate it. And what Jaben calls the sorting criteria — the potential benefits if successful and the possible risks of failure for this specific issue. The worldview is deep, genetic, and shaped by upbringing and experience. The sorting criteria are situational. Together they decide which story gets selected.
Once selected, the story moves from the hidden brain into awareness. It arrives as a feeling, because emotions transmit faster than words. Then the analytical functions get to work. But they don't work the way most people assume they do. They work as press secretary, not as analyst. The story has already been chosen. The analytical functions' job is to find the facts, memories, and experiences that justify the story, defend it against challenge, and provide the certainty needed to act on it.
This is the trap Jaben spent most of the session unpacking. When you present data and metrics in support of a proposal, you are speaking to the analytical functions of the other person's brain. But those analytical functions aren't deciding anything. The hidden brain has already decided. The analytical functions are constructing the case for whatever the hidden brain selected — and if the hidden brain selected against your proposal, the analytical functions will marshal every piece of evidence available to defend that selection. The other person will sound rational. They'll cite data. They'll counter your metrics with their own. The whole exchange will feel like a debate. It isn't. It's two press secretaries defending two pre-formed conclusions.
Jaben pointed to a study by Gregory Berns and colleagues that made the underlying mechanics visible. Participants with strongly-held views were placed in a functional MRI and asked to describe those views. The amygdala lit up — the brain's fight-or-flight center, the structure that secretes adrenaline. Adrenaline shunts blood from the digestive system to the muscles, narrows visual focus to the threat directly in front of you, and prepares the body for action. It is not the chemistry of considering alternatives.
The researchers then offered participants $100 to change their stated view on a survey. Some refused. Some accepted. The participants who accepted were put back in the MRI. This time the activity wasn't in the amygdala. It was in the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for deliberation, comparison, and analytical thought.
The takeaway is clinical, not metaphorical. When you are talking to someone whose view is strongly held, you are not talking to someone whose prefrontal cortex is active on the topic. You're talking to their amygdala. The amygdala is not in a frame of mind to consider alternatives — its job, neurochemically, is to defend against threat. And what your proposal looks like, to that amygdala, is a threat.
This is why presenting better data to someone with a firmly-held opposing view almost never works. The data is being heard in fight-or-flight mode. The data is being interpreted as an attack on something the person feels they need to defend. The data is, in that moment, more evidence that you are the threat the amygdala already identified.
The implication runs deeper than communication tactics. Your great idea — the one you've worked on, validated with data, prepared to present — is itself the product of the same process. Your hidden brain selected it. Your analytical functions assembled the case for it. You experience it as obviously correct because your press secretary has done its job well. But your opinion is still an opinion. Your story is still a story. Your great idea is, in Jaben's framing, a hypothesis. A theory. The best version your brain could come up with given the conditions it considered and the criteria it prioritized.
That hypothesis may be excellent. It may also be inadequate to the situation, because the conditions your brain considered may not include conditions the other person's brain is considering, and the criteria your brain prioritized may not match the criteria the other person's brain prioritized. The two of you are not disagreeing about facts. You are disagreeing about which facts matter, in what order, and what success would look like if the decision goes either way.
Jaben's word for this is "dueling solutions." Each person has constructed a solution. Each person is convinced their solution is right. Each person's analytical functions are defending that solution with everything available. Neither person is actually examining the other's logic, because their hidden brain has already decided what to defend. The conversation can go on indefinitely without producing any movement, because the conversation isn't where the decision is being made.
The chance that two people's hidden brains, working from different worldviews and different sorting criteria, will independently arrive at exactly the same notion of success is — Jaben said — a four-letter word starting with Z. The overlap, when it exists, is partial. When the overlap isn't enough, the stories diverge, and the dueling begins.
The hidden brain's notion of success is the load-bearing piece of this whole framework. Success, in Jaben's framing, is a representation of the world as I want it to be. It's not an analytical equation. It's a value judgment about what matters and what doesn't, what's worth pursuing and what isn't, what counts as a win and what counts as a loss.
The analytical functions can identify whether something works. They can measure throughput, count defects, calculate ROI. What they cannot do is decide whether something is workable — meaning whether it fits with what the person needs to be successful in their responsibilities, given their context, their constraints, their relationships, and their judgment about what matters. Workability is a value judgment. It happens in the hidden brain.
Inside the fundamental unit of change, both people are making this judgment simultaneously and independently. Each person is asking, at a level below awareness: does this proposal help me be successful, or does it threaten my ability to be successful? Each person's answer depends on their worldview, their sorting criteria, their current circumstances, and what they understand to be at stake.
When the answer is "this threatens my success," resistance follows. Resistance, in Jaben's framing, is not stubbornness, not laziness, not emotional reactivity. It's a rational response — the appropriate response — to a perceived threat to one's ability to succeed. People are not wired to resist. They are wired to succeed. They resist proposals that they perceive as making it harder for them to succeed.
This single reframing changes the operational shape of change management. If resistance is information about a mismatch between proposed success and perceived success, then the response to resistance is not to overcome it. The response is to understand what the resistance is telling you about the gap between your story and theirs.
Jaben offered certainty as a red flag — a signal that the brain has settled on a story prematurely, and that further inquiry has been foreclosed. When you feel certain about your great idea, you are operating in press-secretary mode. The hidden brain has selected. The analytical functions are defending. The conversation is over, internally, before it has begun externally.
The opposite of certainty in this framing isn't doubt. It's ambivalence — the feeling that the current story might not be the best version, that something is missing or weighted wrong, that there's room for the story to be re-examined. Ambivalence is uncomfortable. The brain doesn't enjoy it. But ambivalence is what activates the non-preferred pathway in the brain — the one that uses the prefrontal cortex rather than the press secretary, the one that genuinely analyzes rather than rationalizes, the one that feeds new information back to the hidden brain so the story itself can be reconsidered and possibly replaced.
The discipline Jaben asked the audience to practice is the discipline of recognizing certainty in oneself and treating it as a cue to pause. Not because certainty is wrong. Because certainty closes the door to information that might produce a better answer. And in the fundamental unit of change, the better answer is usually the one that emerges from a story neither person started with — one that incorporates concerns and criteria both people bring, in a configuration that delivers enough overlap for both people to commit.
None of this works without trust and credibility. Jaben pointed to British philosopher Onora O'Neill's work on what those words actually mean operationally.
Trustworthiness, in O'Neill's framing, is a track record of demonstrated reliability. It accumulates through behavior over time. It cannot be claimed. It can only be earned, demonstrated, and either confirmed or undermined by subsequent action.
Credibility is more specific. Credibility is the perception that a person, on this particular issue, is operating without deception or coercion. The data they're using is honest. The metrics they cite are valid. The framing they present isn't strategically distorted to produce a desired conclusion. Credibility can be undermined inadvertently — by data that looks cherry-picked, by metrics gathered in ways that don't quite match what they claim to measure, by framings that exclude information the other person knows is relevant. The intent doesn't have to be deceptive. The perception of deception is enough.
When trust is low or credibility is suspect, the analytical functions of the other person's brain don't even get to consider your proposal. The hidden brain has already filed you under "threat" or "manipulation." Your data is interpreted as evidence of the manipulation, not evidence of the case you're trying to make. The conversation can be perfectly polite and still go absolutely nowhere.
Jaben's argument here connects directly to why Respect for People is the equal pillar of Lean alongside Continuous Improvement. Continuous Improvement gets most of the attention because it's defined, structured, and attractive to the analytical mind that wants to engineer the world as it wants it to be. Respect for People is harder to articulate and easier to skip. But without it, the analytical work has nowhere to land. Without trust and credibility, the great idea doesn't matter. It cannot be heard.
Jaben offered a working definition of respect that goes beyond the usual phrasing. Respect, in his framing, is how each person in the fundamental unit of change responds to the resistance the other person surfaces.
This is the operational form of respect. Not politeness. Not deference. Not unconditional agreement. It's the willingness to treat the other person's resistance as information rather than as obstruction. It's the discipline of asking what their story is, what their notion of success is, what they're protecting, and what your proposal looks like from their position. It's the curiosity to discover the criteria you may have missed or dismissed, and the willingness to incorporate those criteria into a revised story.
Resistance has many faces, and Jaben listed several worth recognizing. Silence in a conversation that should have produced disagreement. Failure to follow through after apparent agreement. Variation in how the standard work is performed. Suggestions about alternatives. Open pushback or conflict. Some of these are obviously resistance. Others — silence in particular — get misread as agreement or as nothing at all. They aren't nothing. They're the most common shape resistance takes when the person resisting doesn't feel safe enough to make it visible.
The response in each case is the same: curiosity. What is this resistance telling me? What do they see that I'm not seeing? What about my proposal is making it harder for them to be successful? What about their definition of success isn't in my current story? These questions don't challenge the other person's sacred values, which would activate the amygdala. They invite the other person into the prefrontal cortex — into ambivalence — where the story itself becomes available for revision.
A practical limit Jaben named directly: you cannot make another person open to reconsidering their story. You can create the conditions in which a catalyst might land. You cannot create the catalyst itself, because you don't know what would be meaningful enough to that specific person to make them willing to challenge their own sacred values.
What you can do is operate in a way that doesn't close the door before any catalyst can reach them. Be trustworthy. Be credible. Practice respect as defined above — meet resistance with curiosity rather than with more pressure. Surface their notion of success and bring it into the conversation alongside yours. Look for the overlap. Build the shared outcome before debating the countermeasures.
This is also why the left side of the A3 has to be done before the right side. The left side is where the shared outcome gets constructed. The right side is where countermeasures get proposed. If you skip the left side and go straight to countermeasures, you're proposing solutions to a problem you and the other person haven't agreed exists. The countermeasures may be brilliant. They will not be adopted, because the hidden brain on the other side hasn't been given any reason to want them.
Mark Graban added a useful framing during the session: the left side of the A3 is largely about facts — observable, measurable, knowable conditions — while the right side is largely about uncertainty, hypotheses about what might work that have to be tested. Jaben affirmed the connection. The left side is where two people's stories can be compared against shared facts. The right side is where two people's hypotheses get tested against shared criteria. Without the alignment in the left, the right is just dueling solutions made formal.
The structured practice Jaben offered for working inside this framework is what he calls the engagement kata. It has three R's: recognize, respond, reconcile.
Recognize is the discipline of noticing resistance when it appears. Because resistance often takes quiet forms — silence, lack of follow-through, suggestions — recognizing it requires actively looking for it rather than waiting for it to escalate into open conflict. Most resistance dies in silence before anyone notices it was there.
Respond is the practice of meeting resistance with the right questions. Not questions designed to overcome it. Questions designed to understand it. What does this work for you? What doesn't this work for? What am I missing? What about your situation am I not accounting for? How might I be inadvertently making this harder rather than easier? The questions invite processing in the prefrontal cortex rather than triggering defense in the amygdala.
Reconcile is the work of agreeing on a next step that's acceptable to both people. Not the final solution. The next step. The increment that closes the gap a little bit and produces enough new information that the conversation can continue from a slightly more aligned position. Reconciliation is not capitulation by either party. It's the working agreement that lets the process continue.
When change efforts struggle, Jaben said, it's often not because the methodology failed. It's because the methodology never had a chance to be deployed in a way that could work. The engagement kata opens the door so the methodology can get through. Without that door open, the methodology is being presented to a room that already decided to refuse it.
A useful corollary Jaben mentioned near the end of the session: if you want creativity from your organization, you have to take the non-preferred pathway in the brain seriously. Creativity, in his definition, is the connection of previously unconnected thoughts. That kind of connection is energy-intensive. The brain only does it when it has exhausted all the cheap options without finding one that works.
This has practical implications for how leaders think about innovation. Creativity doesn't arrive on demand. It doesn't respond to slogans or to mandates for innovation. It emerges when people are working a real problem, have a shared outcome they're invested in, and have run through the available conventional answers without finding one that fits. At that point, the brain will go to its creative spaces — because doing so is finally less expensive than continuing to fail with the conventional answers.
If you want innovation, foster the process. Build the conditions in which people can iterate through possibilities without being punished for the iterations that don't work. Trust that when the conventional answers run out, the brain will tap into creativity because it has to. You don't have to demand creativity. You have to make space for it to be necessary.
The argument running through this session is that change doesn't happen because of the data. Change happens — or doesn't — in the interaction between two people, shaped by their stories, their notions of success, their trust in each other, and their willingness to treat each other's resistance as information rather than as obstruction. None of that is software work. The human discipline is the discipline.
What infrastructure does in this context is reduce the structural reasons that the human discipline fails to scale. A shared outcome built in the left side of an A3 only does its work if it's visible to both people across the time it takes to actually implement countermeasures and learn from them. An engagement kata only develops as a practice if the conversations are happening regularly enough to become habitual, which means the work being engaged on has to stay present in both people's daily attention. Resistance only gets recognized if there's a venue where it can surface — and the silence form of resistance, which is the most common, only surfaces if the venue is welcoming enough that quiet pushback becomes audible.
The data point Jaben repeatedly returned to is that credibility depends on how data is gathered, presented, and used. Metrics that appear cherry-picked or strategically framed undermine the person presenting them, regardless of whether the underlying numbers are correct. Infrastructure that lets metrics be traced to their source, examined in context, and compared against the broader picture of what's happening makes credibility easier to maintain. Infrastructure that obscures the source of numbers or presents them stripped of the work they came from makes credibility harder to maintain, even when the people using it have entirely good intentions.
None of this changes the underlying argument. The work is the work. Two people sitting in a conversation, each holding their own story, deciding whether the proposed change is workable enough to invest themselves in. What infrastructure does is make the conversations findable, the resistance trackable, the shared outcomes recordable, and the iterations through the engagement kata visible enough that the discipline becomes part of how the organization operates rather than a private practice between individuals.
What is the fundamental unit of change? The interaction between two people in which one is asking the other to change something or being asked to change something. Jaben argues that all organizational change ultimately happens at this level, replicated thousands of times across the organization. The success of a larger initiative is determined by what happens in these individual exchanges, not by the quality of the rollout plan or the strength of the data behind the proposal.
What does the "hidden brain" do that the analytical brain doesn't? The hidden brain processes information before it reaches conscious awareness. It examines circumstances, searches its stored patterns for one that matches, selects the closest fit, and sends the resulting story into awareness as a feeling. By the time you're aware of an opinion, the hidden brain has already formed it. The analytical brain's job is then to assemble the facts, memories, and experiences that justify the opinion the hidden brain selected. The analytical functions can't make the value judgments about what matters. They can only support whatever the hidden brain has already decided matters.
Why are opinions formed before analysis? Because it costs the brain less energy that way. The hidden brain reaches for stored patterns rather than constructing new ones, because constructing new ones is energy-expensive and the brain has been optimized over evolutionary time to conserve energy whenever possible. The analytical functions, working from scratch on a complex decision, would consume more energy and take more time than the hidden brain's pattern-match plus rationalization approach. The result is that we feel like we're reasoning from evidence to conclusion when we're usually moving from conclusion to evidence.
What's the difference between "what works" and "what's workable"? Analytical functions can determine what works — measurable outcomes, defect rates, throughput, return on investment. They cannot determine what's workable, because workability is a value judgment about whether something fits with what a person needs to be successful in their responsibilities. Two solutions can work equally well analytically while being radically different in workability for the people who would have to implement them. The hidden brain makes the workability judgment, and that judgment determines whether the person will invest the energy to make the solution succeed.
Why is resistance a rational response rather than an emotional one? Because people are wired to succeed, not to resist. When someone resists a proposed change, they are responding to a perceived threat to their ability to be successful — given their responsibilities, their context, their constraints, and their definition of success. That perception may be accurate or inaccurate, but the response to it is rational. Treating resistance as stubbornness or emotional reactivity misses the information the resistance is actually carrying about a gap between the proposer's notion of success and the resister's notion of success.
What are "dueling solutions"? The condition in which two people in the fundamental unit of change have formed different stories and different notions of success, and each person's analytical functions are defending their respective story. Both people sound rational. Both cite data. The conversation can continue indefinitely without producing alignment, because neither person's hidden brain is actually open to revising its position. The methodology — A3, root cause analysis, whatever — never gets a chance to do its work, because both people are operating in press-secretary mode rather than analyst mode.
Why is certainty a red flag rather than a strength? Because certainty indicates that the hidden brain has selected a story and closed the door to alternatives. The press secretary is on duty. The analytical functions are defending rather than analyzing. Any new information that contradicts the selected story gets reinterpreted to fit it. Certainty feels like strength because the brain has stopped expending energy on doubt — but that energy savings comes at the cost of the brain's ability to consider better answers. Ambivalence, while uncomfortable, is the state that opens the prefrontal cortex and makes story revision possible.
What did the Gregory Berns fMRI study reveal? That strongly-held views activate the amygdala — the fight-or-flight center — while willingness to consider revising those views activates the prefrontal cortex. Participants describing strongly-held political views showed amygdala activation. The same participants, when offered $100 to change their stated view, split into two groups. Those who refused showed continued amygdala activation when retested. Those who accepted showed prefrontal cortex activation instead. The implication is that you cannot reason someone out of an amygdala-driven view by presenting better data — the data is being heard in fight-or-flight mode and interpreted as a threat, not as analysis.
Why does the left side of the A3 need to be completed before the right side? Because the left side is where two people construct the shared outcome that the right side's countermeasures are meant to deliver. If you skip the left side, you're proposing countermeasures to a problem that hasn't been jointly defined. The other person's hidden brain has no reason to want your countermeasures, because no shared notion of success has been established. The right side becomes dueling solutions instead of shared problem-solving. Jaben's framing is that the A3 structure mirrors what the brain has to do to make a decision well — agree on the direction before debating the means.
What is the engagement kata? A structured practice for working through resistance in the fundamental unit of change. Three steps: Recognize (notice resistance in all its forms, including silence, lack of follow-through, and quiet suggestion), Respond (meet resistance with curiosity rather than pressure, asking questions that surface the other person's notion of success), and Reconcile (agree on a next step that's acceptable to both people, building incremental alignment rather than demanding immediate full agreement). The kata invites processing in the prefrontal cortex rather than triggering the amygdala, which is the necessary condition for the other person's hidden brain to consider revising its story.
What's the difference between trust and credibility, and why do they matter? Trust is a track record of demonstrated reliability across time. It accumulates through behavior and cannot be claimed. Credibility is the perception that on this specific issue, the person is operating without deception or coercion — that the data is honest, the metrics are valid, the framing isn't strategically distorted. Both have to be in place for the analytical functions of the other person's brain to even consider your proposal. Without trust, you're filed under threat. Without credibility on this issue, you're filed under manipulation. Either filing makes the data irrelevant.
Why can't you manufacture a catalyst for someone else's change? Because you don't know what would be meaningful enough to that specific person to make them willing to challenge their sacred values. The catalyst has to come from inside their own experience and processing. What you can do is create the conditions in which a catalyst can be effective — be trustworthy, be credible, practice respect, surface their notion of success, look for overlap with yours, build the shared outcome before proposing the countermeasures. The catalyst itself is not yours to deliver.
How does this framework relate to creativity and innovation? Creativity, in Jaben's definition, is the connection of previously unconnected thoughts. It happens in the brain's creative spaces, which are expensive to activate. The brain only goes there when it has run through cheaper options without finding one that works. The implication is that innovation can't be demanded — it has to be necessary. Leaders who want innovation should build conditions in which people are working real problems with shared outcomes they care about, and trust that when the conventional answers run out, the brain will tap into creativity because it has to.
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