Change Resistance is a Myth!

Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown

A common refrain in many conferences or conversations about Change Management is “people don’t like change.” On the surface, this is understandable. Change Management Professionals and Change Leaders will encounter people who actively push back on a Change or quietly ignore the Change, occasionally even sabotage the Change. Change Management Professionals can experience this and readily conclude that these people are resisting the change. This leads to scores of talks at conferences titled something like, “How to handle Change Resistance.” Often, these talks put the burden on executive sponsors and include exhortations to get them to engage by “pushing” people past the resistance. After years of these conferences, we seem to be no further in our collective ability to manage what we term "change resistance".

Get Curious

On the surface, these people can be viewed as resisting. After all, they are clearly not adopting the change, sometimes not adopting quite unabashedly, and in full view of everyone in the organization. But perhaps there is something beneath the surface that tells a more full story. A strong starting point is to reframe our thinking by applying one of the four philosophies we espouse in our training classes and our consulting work.

“Everyone’s point of view is valid, even if I disagree or don’t understand it.”
-The Change Decision

The power of this philosophy is that it converts you from a Mental Model focused on accusation and blame to a mental model that encourages curiosity. This curiosity can help explore possible reasons for what presents as resistance to change. We have encountered a myriad of reasons:

• Previous changes have gone poorly
• Changes announced in the past did not happen
• Promises of Change with big outcomes were made, but fell short of expectations
• People feel like the impact is not understood; they don’t know how to make that clear and what they’re empowered to do about it
• People are annoyed because they now must think about how to do their work rather than optimizing it
• People feel like beginners rather than the accomplished professionals they’ve worked to become

Given all these, you could create a mental model of people who have become cynical about announcements of Change. Thinking of people as cynical toward Change may be a more useful view than believing people innately dislike Change, but that is still a fairly negative view of the human condition. The meaning of cynical is that a person believes that most people are only interested in themselves and are not sincere or genuine. The word comes from the Cynic philosophers of ancient Greece. The name is derived from the building where they taught. It was a structure located outside of Athens called Kynosarge, meaning "The Gray Dog," which was created for those considered not fully Athenian. Not a good way to generalize the people you wish to engage in a Change.

Get a better Mental Model

Certainly, some people are cynical, but creating a mental model that all people are is not likely to get a Change Management Professional very far in helping people to adopt a Change. That negative mental model will impact how a change is managed. People will know if they are thought of in a negative light.

What if, instead, people were thought of as skeptical? The origin of the word skeptic also goes back to a school of philosophy in ancient Greece, the Skeptics. The root of the word is related to skeptesthai, meaning “to reflect, look, view." This is a far more generous view of people. If any of the above reasons are in play, like “changes announced in the past did not happen,” it is no wonder that people might want to wait and view the situation to see if the change is even going to go forward. They are not necessarily resistant to Change, they are skeptical.

With a better mental model, the application of any change management framework will have more success. The Change Decision’s framework describes four phases of change that people tend to go through on the path toward adopting Change.

This framework is notional and not a prediction, meaning it helps guide thinking about change, but every person will move through each phase at their own pace. They may even move backward through the framework or take a long time to get on the framework. The real value of the model is the questions that guide a Change Management Professional or a Change Leader in understanding where people are in their progress through the model toward adoption of Change.

Get Joy at Work

The model provides a way to test where groups of people are in their progress by asking questions that begin with “How will you know…”. These are questions that come from curiosity instead of contempt. They expect that people are rational in their decision-making, not irrational or mercurial. A question that begins with “how will you know…” also invites measurement. Better still, it provides a guide to what the measurement should be because an answer to the question is the measurement. Instead of thinking about what data is available or easy to get, the Change Management Professional or Change Leader can think about what data will be useful. It is this distinction between interesting data and useful data that can drive a data-driven change management approach.

There is still an opportunity here to do something even more valuable than land Change well. Certainly, leading change is difficult enough, but that should not deter us from the greater good that can also be done.

“Every Change is an opportunity to grow Joy at Work”
-The Change Decision

For those who might see vast groups of people as change resisters, the idea of creating Joy at Work through the management of Change might seem fantastical, and the pursuit of Joy at Work foolish.  It is not. An experience years ago was the spark that eventually led to our creating The Change Decision and made clear that our mission should be to grow Joy at Work. We regularly encounter organizations that have an appetite for Joy at Work, but there is no stronger appetite suppressant for Joy at Work than considering people as resistant to Change. After all, without Change, how else could Joy at Work grow?