Stop Managing Resistance!

As I delivered a key note on developing organisational change capability, a visitor from another gathering at the venue interrupted during a break. "Is your session about change?" he asked. "I noticed your slide on resistance. I just wanted to say, that's an outdated concept. Resistance doesn't exist, all those change management books are completely outdated."

Initially caught off guard by his directness, I felt a reflex to defend or counterattack. But then, I realized that there are no single truths, only individual realities. The truth likely lies somewhere in between. So, let's explore, I decided.

"Why?" I asked. He explained: people resist change because they perceive flaws in the ideas presented, they sense that what we're doing isn't right, or better solutions exist.

I couldn't agree more. “That's exactly how I view resistance and how I define certain forms of it. Let's involve people more in change and use the wisdom of the group, create ownership, engage them in defining and developing solutions for opportunities and challenges, and initiate dialogue rather than merely communicating what we're doing and why."

"That's what I think too," he replied.

That sparked a conversation; we found common ground.

People don't just resist change; they resist bad ideas. So, why not leverage the group's knowledge, expertise, and experience to generate better ideas? And that sometimes takes a little courage if it feels uncomfortable to give up control. Then realise, ultimately change happens with every individual who engages and participates. So, at the end you have to involve people, better do that up front.

And sometimes, the amount and pace of change overwhelms people and they feel change saturated. It can be hard to adopt and use all these new ways of working at the same time, especially when feeling unsupported. Perhaps we should better support, equip en help people during change or focus on developing change resilience.

And sometimes, learning new behaviours can be tough and takes time. Try writing your signature with your non-dominant hand for a change. The resistance you feel isn't because you don't want to; it's because learning and adapting take time. And the next time you sign, your automatic response might be to use your dominant hand again. So reinforcement is needed for behaviour change.

And sometimes, people just need a little bit of time and acknowledgement to deal with what they loose during change. Change is not always just about what you gain or what gets better, it is often also about losing something. We must pay attention to both sides of the change impact. So let’s not try to convince people over and over again what the benefits are, when they first need time to let go of what they (need to) leave behind.

The key is not to manage resistance as a sort of marketing approach to persuade people to engage and participate. You cannot dictate desire to change. There might be better ways, however you need to first understand what the root cause is and what type of resistance someone experiences.

You can find many tactics to support people with the resistance they experience, to be effective they probably all should start with: listening. Trying to understand the root cause (don’t fight symptoms!), acknowledge and trying to remove barriers. It gives you an opportunity to truly understand. And the person you listen to feels heard and recognized, which sometimes is all this person needs.

My initial reaction during the break of my key note, might have been a form of resistance. But fortunately, having a conversation, a genuine will to listen and trying to understand was all we needed.