Stephen Billing’s Blog

People understand the world in terms of their concerns. What threatens the concern threatens the person. Which is why people can react strongly to proposed change.

This is the third in a series of posts about Patricia Benner’s work described in her book The Primacy of Caring on how people deal with growth and loss as they are lived or experienced.

Benner proposes that humans grasp situations directly in terms of their meaning for the self. This ability to grasp the meaning of situations is made possible by four aspects of our humanness:

• Embodied intelligence
• Background meaning
• Concern
• Situation

Earlier posts discussed embodied intelligence and background meaning, which help life go smoothly without effortful conscious attending.

Embodied intelligence and background meaning explain how a person can be in the world.

Benner’s third attribute of concern explains why. We are involved in the world through a context, and things and people matter to us. Because they matter, we become very involved in the world. This concern accounts for why people do things, but is not about people being motivated by either internal needs fulfilment (e.g. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) or external prodding (carrot and stick) which are two common ways of seeing motivation.

Rather, through concern, each person is involved with the other and certain things matter more than others. In other words, some things have more meaning than others, and that meaning is given by one’s concerns.

Although concerns can change over time, rather than the person owning the concerns in a possession kind of way, the concerns are part of the person. In a sense they also define the person.

The person understands the world in the light of their concerns. This means that what threatens the concern threatens the person.

Benner prefers the term concerns rather than commitment because of the tendency to see commitment as a measurable scale from high to low. She prefers to use the term concern as a way of getting to the meaning of the concern in the person’s own terms. Instead of describing ‘commitment to the change’ or similar, which predetermines what the concern or commitment is, she suggests that we explore what the person is concerned about, in their own terms.

This is a helpful insight when it comes to thinking about resistance to change, and why people can sometimes react strongly to proposed change. Their concerns are part of their identity, and change that challenges people’s concerns is threatening to their identity.

This suggests that understanding the concerns of your people is important in change situations.

When expressed this way, it sounds like no more than a platitude. But this idea is different from listening to resistant employees with a view to working out how to change their minds, and the difference becomes clearer after considering the fourth of Benner’s attributes, which is the situation itself.

This is discussed in the next post.