OCG - Reflections from our work life

Cognitive Dissonance and the Art of Changing Your Mind

Written by Harald Korn | Feb 16, 2026 8:47:57 PM

The real threat to transformation is not external resistance but the leader's personal narrative that leads them to believe change is unnecessary.

We view leaders as rational decision-makers who weigh evidence, adjust course, and guide organisations through change pragmatically. Reality is more complicated — and more human. Every leader holds deep beliefs about themselves, their strategy, and how the world works. When new evidence clashes with those beliefs, discomfort arises.  Psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term cognitive dissonance to denote the mental tension that arises when two conflicting ideas are held simultaneously or when actions clash with values. Instead of sitting with discomfort, our brains rush to resolve it—often by rationalising, deflecting, or ignoring inconvenient truths, rather than changing our minds. This psychological process is not a minor barrier; it is often the main, unseen obstacle preventing leaders from making real change.

The Fast Brain Problem

Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow helps explain why cognitive dissonance is hard to spot. He describes two thinking systems: System 1, which is fast, intuitive, and automatic, and System 2, which is slow, deliberate, and analytical.  When a leader encounters information that conflicts with a deeply held belief or a public commitment, System 1 kicks in first. It generates an immediate emotional response — discomfort, defensiveness, irritation — and seeks the nearest available explanation to resolve the dissonance. This happens before System 2 even has a chance to properly evaluate the evidence.  Leaders often believe they've carefully considered a challenge when their fast brain has already dismissed it. Rationalisation passes for reasoning. Snap judgment masquerades as analysis. This makes cognitive dissonance so insidious in leadership: those who pride themselves on critical thinking are often the last to notice when it's gone. Kahneman's concept of WYSIATI — "What You See Is All There Is" — is particularly relevant here. System 1 constructs the most coherent story it can from immediately available information and treats that story as the whole truth. A leader surrounded by confirming signals and carefully curated dashboards can construct a highly coherent narrative that is also highly incomplete. The coherence itself becomes the trap.

What Cognitive Dissonance Looks Like in Leadership

Cognitive dissonance grows with status, identity, and public commitment. For leaders, beliefs aren't just opinions—they're tied to authority, competence, and the consistency followers expect. Reversing a position risks undermining self-concept, credibility, and the value of all that has been invested. So leaders defend outdated views longer than the evidence warrants—not from stubbornness, but because their brains protect something deeper than strategy. Here is how that plays out in practice:

  • Selective hearing after commitment: Once a stance is declared, contradictory evidence is unconsciously filtered and reframed as implementation issues.
  • Redefining success to avoid admitting failure. When an initiative underperforms, the goalposts shift: it was always about "building capability," the timeline was "aspirational," and the real value will come in the next phase. Each reframe is plausible. Together, they form a pattern.
  • Promoting loyalty over dissent: Pride in a team can block honest evaluation—admitting gaps means questioning your own judgment.
  • Mistaking consistency for integrity. A long-held position hardens into a principle. When the evidence shifts, updating the view feels less like learning and more like admitting you were wrong all along — so the evidence gets reframed as noise.
  • Strategy becomes identity: A chosen strategy turns into "who we are." Challenging it feels personal rather than strategic.
  • Weaponising past success: Old playbooks are reused despite mismatches; poor results are blamed on external factors, not the approach.

None of these leaders is being dishonest. They are experiencing the collision between new evidence and an identity that depends on the old evidence being right. The dissonance is resolved not by updating the belief, but by protecting the self, and the higher the stakes, the more sophisticated the protection becomes.

Cognitive Dissonance and the Failure of Transformation

Organisational transformations often fail not only because of execution or resource constraints, but also because leaders' unresolved cognitive dissonance prevents honest, effective adaptation. A leader who cannot reconcile "I am a good leader" with "this approach is not working" will unconsciously steer the organisation away from honest assessment. They will surround themselves with people who agree with them. They will interpret setbacks as temporary. They will shift goalposts. None of this is malicious. All of it is damaging.  Transformation demands that leaders hold dissonance without immediately resolving it. It requires sitting with the discomfort of "I believed X, and the evidence now points to Y" long enough to actually change course — rather than finding clever reasons why X was right all along. In Kahneman's terms, it requires forcing System 2 to overrule what System 1 has already decided.

A Practical Guide: Moving Through Dissonance Without Losing Face

This is the part that matters most for practitioners. Knowing about cognitive dissonance is useful. Knowing how to work through it — without the political and personal cost of a dramatic public reversal — is what actually changes outcomes.

1. Name It Privately Before It Names You Publicly

The first step is internal honesty. When you notice yourself rationalising, minimising contradictory evidence, or feeling defensive about feedback, pause. Ask yourself: "Am I evaluating this evidence on its merits, or am I protecting a prior commitment?" You do not need to announce this reflection to anyone. But you do need to have it. This is essentially the practice of engaging System 2 when System 1 is steering. It is simple to describe and genuinely difficult to do, especially under pressure.

2. Run a Pre-Mortem

Gary Klein's pre-mortem technique is one of the most effective structural tools for surfacing cognitive dissonance before it causes damage. The method is disarmingly simple: before a major decision is implemented, the team imagines that it is twelve months in the future and the initiative has failed. Each person then independently writes down what went wrong.  The power of the pre-mortem lies in its psychological effect. It gives people explicit permission to articulate doubts and risks that social pressure would normally suppress. In a conventional planning discussion, expressing reservations about a leader's chosen direction can feel like disloyalty. In a pre-mortem, the assignment is to imagine failure. This reframing makes it safe to surface the very concerns that cognitive dissonance would otherwise bury. For leaders, the pre-mortem also serves as a personal dissonance check. If the exercise reveals risks you had not considered — or had considered and dismissed too quickly — that is valuable data about the quality of your own reasoning.

3. Reframe Evolution as Strength, Not Retreat

The fear of "losing face" stems from viewing a change of mind as a sign of weakness. Effective leaders reframe this — for themselves and their organisations. Language matters. There's a notable difference between "I was wrong" and "Our understanding has evolved as we've gathered more evidence." Both are honest; the second invites others to join rather than framing it as a failure. Phrases that work in practice: "The data is telling us something different from what we expected — and I think we need to listen." or "I've updated my thinking on this based on what we've learned." These signal intellectual rigour, not indecision.

4. Build Dissonance Into the System

Do not rely on willpower alone. Create structural mechanisms that force contradictory information to reach you. This can include appointing a formal devil's advocate in strategy discussions, commissioning independent reviews of major initiatives, regularly engaging with people outside your immediate professional circle, and establishing metrics agreed in advance and reviewed honestly—not retrospectively reinterpreted to fit the desired narrative.

5. Separate Identity From Position

Much of the pain of cognitive dissonance in leadership comes from fusing identity with strategic positions. "I am the person who championed this strategy" becomes "If this strategy fails, I fail." Decouple them. Your value as a leader is not defined by the correctness of a single decision — it is defined by your ability to navigate complexity, learn, and adapt. This is not just a trick; it is a better description of good leadership.

6. Use Transparency Incrementally

You do not need to hold a press conference. Gradual, honest communication is more effective and more sustainable than dramatic pivots. Share emerging evidence with your team as it comes in. Involve others in the sense-making process. When the eventual course correction happens, it will feel like a shared conclusion rather than a personal admission.

An Apropos for All of Us: Dissonance in the Age of Echo Chambers

Everything discussed so far applies to leaders navigating strategy and transformation. But it would be incomplete — and somewhat ironic — to frame cognitive dissonance solely as a leadership problem.  We all live with it. And the conditions of modern life have made it harder to notice. Festinger published his theory in 1957. The phenomenon is timeless. But the environment in which it operates has changed. We now spend much of our lives in algorithmically curated information spaces — social media feeds, news apps, professional networks, messaging groups — that are optimised to show us content we are likely to engage with. In practice, that means content we already agree on.  The result is that the natural corrective mechanism for cognitive dissonance — encountering perspectives that challenge our own — has been significantly weakened. We are all, to varying degrees, living in echo chambers that reinforce what we already believe and filter out what we do not want to hear. This matters well beyond the boardroom. It shapes how we form opinions on public issues, how we relate to people who hold different views, and how willing we are to update our views when evidence changes. The same psychological dynamics that cause a CEO to cling to a failing strategy cause the rest of us to dismiss inconvenient facts, double down on positions we have publicly defended, and mistake the comfort of agreement for the presence of truth. Kahneman's work reminds us that this is not a character flaw — it is how our brains are wired. System 1 craves coherence. Echo chambers deliver it on tap. The combination is powerful and, left unchecked, quietly corrosive.  The antidote is the same whether you are leading an organisation or simply trying to think clearly about the world: deliberately seek out perspectives that challenge your own. Notice when you are rationalising rather than reasoning. Treat the discomfort of contradiction not as a threat, but as a signal that there is something worth examining. The ability to change your mind — thoughtfully, transparently, and without drama — may be the most undervalued capability of our time. Not just for leaders. For all of us.

This article draws on Leon Festinger's foundational work on cognitive dissonance (1957), Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Gary Klein's work on pre-mortem analysis, and contemporary research on confirmation bias and organisational change management.