Today, the Catholic Church begins a tradition that dates back over eight centuries: the papal conclave. Inside the Sistine Chapel, 133 cardinals will deliberate on who will serve as the 267th Pope.

The Church’s process for selecting its new leader is mysterious, contentious, and highly ritualized. But its goal is a familiar one to all business owners: ensuring a smooth succession.

Today, Kellogg’s Matthew Allen highlights what the papal conclave can teach companies about increasing their odds of a successful transition.

Plus, how even the deepest unconscious biases can change over time.

The succession watched around the world

When Pope Francis died on April 21, it set in motion a procedure the Catholic Church has followed for almost a thousand years. Within 20 days of a Pope’s death, the College of Cardinals must assemble at The Vatican, where they enter seclusion and vote until a supermajority has selected the new supreme pontiff.

Beneath its ornate trappings, the papal conclave reflects several best practices for any business facing a change in leadership, says Matthew Allen, the John L. Ward Clinical Professor of Family Enterprises at Kellogg.

“For business leaders, observing this long-standing ritual can lead to real insights on what makes a succession more likely to resonate with as many stakeholders of their company as possible, without the dissatisfaction and discord of a more reactive, opaque succession,” he says.

Allen singles out the Catholic Church’s well-defined interim leadership plan, electoral rules, and efficiency for creating a transparent succession process that avoids harmful “scrambling, confusion, and power plays.”

He also commends the tradition of releasing white smoke from the Sistine Chapel when a Pope is elected for clearly and rapidly communicating the outcome of the conclave.

“Moreover, introduction of the new Pope—‘Habemus Papam!’—within hours of sending up the white smoke decreases potential agenda-driven speculation,” he says.

Read more in Inc.

The malleability of gut feelings

In an era of deep polarization, it can sometimes feel impossible to change minds on social issues. But new research from Kellogg’s Tessa Charlesworth finds that people’s unconscious attitudes do shift over time—even if they don’t always match what people say out loud.

With data from 1.4 million people in 33 countries, Charlesworth and colleagues at University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign and Harvard University found that implicit attitudes toward sexual orientation and skin tone drifted significantly over a period of 11 years.

The researchers used a test where subjects view photographs and quickly pair them with positive or negative words to measure unconscious preferences between groups, such as old and young people or individuals with lighter or darker skin. The studies showed a 36 percent decrease in implicit bias based on sexual orientation and an increase of 20 percent for skin-tone bias, with no substantial changes to views on age, body weight, and race.

Intriguingly, those results clashed with people’s response to survey questions about their beliefs, which showed decreasing explicit bias across all five categories. The difference suggests that implicit “gut feelings” evolve more slowly than societal norms—but that they are still malleable.

“So often in the business community we believe that unconscious biases are inevitable, ingrained, or unchangeable,” Charlesworth says. “But now we know that that is simply not true. We’ve seen evidence that change is possible—not just in the U.S., but everywhere we’ve looked. And so, as business leaders, we now have to do the work to change them.”

Read more in Kellogg Insight.