Two people sit in the same all-staff meeting on a Tuesday morning. The same slide goes up: the team will be restructured by March. One walks out and starts drafting questions for their manager. The other goes back to their desk, closes the laptop and barely speaks for the rest of the day. Same words, same room, same leader. Most of us have sat in that room, on one side of it or the other.
The usual explanation is personality. One is resilient, the other is not. It is a convenient explanation, because it places the whole problem with the person. It is also incomplete.
Something happened between the slide and the reaction. That is where the difference was made, and leaders shape more of it than they realise.
A+B=C, in plain terms
A+B=C is the framework I use to explain how a reaction (or response) is created.
A is the activity or event. The announcement, the email, the restructure slide. It is what happened, and on its own it does not decide what happens next.
The plus (+) is the engine room. Between the event and the reaction sits a thought, usually fast and unexamined. "I am going to lose my job." Or, "this might finally fix the bottleneck." The thought produces the feelings, emotional and physical. Those feelings are feedback. Restrictive or negative feelings are like a yellow card in soccer: a warning that something needs attention, not yet a penalty.
B is the behaviour or reaction, and C is the consequence. B is where it becomes costly. The withdrawn afternoon, the sharp email, the resignation drafted that night. That is the red card. C is what follows, for the person, the team and the work.
Why the same slide lands differently
Psychology has described this for decades. Lazarus and Folkman's transactional model of stress (1984) proposed that how stressful an event feels depends on how a person appraises it: as a threat, a challenge or neither, and whether they believe they have what they need to cope.
It is worth being clear about the limits. Appraisal is a model of how stress works, not a test, and it does not say the event is harmless or that stress is "all in the mind". A restructure can be genuinely threatening. The model says the thought shapes the reaction. It does not say the threat is imaginary.
The thought is the only lever a person can pull
Of everything in the equation, the thought is the only part a person can directly change. They cannot unsend the announcement. They cannot simply decide not to feel anxious. But they can notice the thought, question it and choose a different one, and when the thought changes, the feeling changes with it. That is the difference between a reaction and a response.
It is a capability, and like any capability it can be practised. It is also something most people were never taught, leaders included. In The mind is not the brain, I described the mind as the part of us that interprets. A+B=C is what that interpretation looks like given any activating event.
Where the leader comes in
A leader cannot change the thought for someone else. They can change two things around it.
The first is A. Poor organisational change management is one of the psychosocial hazards named in ISO 45003 as well as Safe Work Australia's model Code of Practice (2022), alongside the others in The hazards most leaders cannot name. What is said, what is known and unknown, and when people will hear more, all shape the event people are trying to make sense of. An announcement that leaves a gap invites the worst available thought to fill it.
The second is the space between the yellow card and the red. A leader who notices the quiet colleague that afternoon, and asks, catches it at the warning rather than the penalty. That is not counselling. It is noticing, and knowing what to say next.
Everyone in that meeting had a plus sign. When the whole team shares the same language, the leader is not the only person who can name what is happening. "That was a yellow card for me" is the kind of sentence that changes a team meeting. The A+B=C Formula is free in the Academy Resource Library.
Worth asking
1. When we last announced a change, what did we leave unsaid, and what thought might have filled the gap?
2. Do our leaders and teams share a language for the difference between a reaction and a response?
3. Who notices the yellow card in our teams, and what do they do when they see it?
4. Are we putting different reactions to the same change down to personality, when some of it was shaped by how we designed the announcement?
The point
Same announcement, different day. The difference was made in the plus sign.
A leader cannot reach inside it. But they can shape what goes in, and notice what comes out, early enough to matter.
Personality is part of the story. It is rarely the part a leader can do anything about. The announcement, and the afternoon after it, are.
Stay Curious,
Genevieve
A leader cannot change someone else's thoughts. They can learn to shape the event and catch the yellow card before it becomes red.
This article is general information about work design and leadership capability. It is not legal advice, work health and safety advice, or clinical advice.
