The human brain is sensitive to threat. Loss in Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness – SCARF – is considered threatening. Threat creates a stress response and stress impairs cognitive functions as problem-solving, decision-making, learning and emotional control. The purpose was to identify differences between well-functioning and non-well-functioning change processes and their relation to SCARF. A total of 55 change processes were investigated. The result indicated a correlation between stress, productivity and quality. The result also showed that 20 out of 25 measured items had a significant mean value difference between “good” and “bad” processes. A multiple regressions analysis indicated that a high degree of Certainty predicts a high degree of Change Process Efficiency with 50 % of the variance possible to explain by the variance in Certainty. More research on SCARF factors and how to measure those in change processes is needed. The area is important since it can create more efficient change processes.