What if ‘resistance to change’ is perfectly rational?

There is a powerful belief that humans don’t like change. So, when an organisation is changing and it needs its people to change too, resistance is seen as ‘human nature’.

“There will always be people who don’t like change.”

Or the worst:

“We expect a small percentage of terrorists.”

Assumptions turn into action

If we believe people are naturally resistant to change, our response follows logically. Explain the why. Communicate more. Build resilience. Teach people about the change curve. Help them cope.

Or decide that some people simply aren’t coming with us.

But all of those responses contain the same assumption: the change is basically fine. The problem is the people’s response to it.

What if that isn’t true?

Ask questions

Even when leaders make the shift from ‘people are bad at change’ to ‘resistance means something’, they often still try to guess what it means.

And if you simply ask people, “What is making change hard?”, the answers will be predictable.

The word cloud effect

If you’ve ever been to a meeting with Slido or equivalent and been asked to share, in one word, what is making change hard, I can pretty much predict what was on it:

• Resources

• BAU

• Priorities

• Communication

We all know this word cloud.

But what if these are simply how the pain of change shows up? What if they aren’t the causes of friction at all?

Look for the core issues

The natural reaction is to tell people there’s not much you can do. You can’t give them more people and you have been super clear in your communication.

So you help them prioritise, set up the Transformation Office to coordinate activity and promise things will feel better in a while.

This is sensible. Do it. But it’s not enough.

What if a significant proportion of people’s working lives is consumed by activity that exists because of the way the organisation has learned to operate?

Reporting nobody really uses. Slide decks created because that’s how information travels upwards. Meetings that exist because they’ve always existed. Decisions made too far away from the work which never stand a chance of being effective. Duplication between functions. Time spent navigating tensions that nobody addresses. And the second job many people do alongside their actual job: managing how they are perceived.

Instead of managing resistance, investigate it

If people keep saying they’re too busy to transform, don’t immediately teach them to prioritise better. Find out what is consuming their capacity.

If people won’t take accountability, look at what happens when they make a decision without permission.

If functions won’t collaborate, look at what they’re measured and rewarded for.

If people won’t speak up, get interested in what happened the last time somebody did.

There may still be an individual issue. Someone may genuinely lack a skill, be frightened of change or simply not want to come with you.

Systemic thinking doesn’t mean pretending that every problem is caused by the organisation.

It means not deciding what the problem is before you’ve investigated it.

Resistance is data

When the same difficulty keeps appearing across people, teams or functions, that’s a reason to investigate what they have in common before treating it as a collection of individual problems.

So next time you sense people are resisting change, don’t ask:

“How do we get them on board?”

Ask:

“What is making their response make sense?”

And then go and find out.

Resistance isn’t what you need to change. It’s showing you where to look.

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If you want to discuss this approach and how it might work in your organisation drop me a line blaire@thatpeoplething.com and we’ll get a meeting in the diary.