Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore Resistance to Change

One of the most puzzling things that I’ve come across in speaking and writing about change is the denial that resistance exists. While I never hear this from leaders that I coach, who face resistance every day, there is a cadre of consultants and pundits who insist that resistance to change is some sort of illusion.

This should be ridiculous on its face. Certainly, the resistance we encountered during the Orange Revolution was very real. In Lou Gerstner’s account of his historic turnaround at IBM, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance, he’s very clear and candid about the resistance he faced. I can’t recall any major transformation that hasn’t had opposition.

Yet when you look at popular change management models such as Kotter’s 8 Steps or Prosci’s ADKAR, they have little to say about overcoming resistance to change and, wittingly or not, promote the idea of transformation as a communication and skills problem, as if you just give people the right information and training they will embrace change. They will not.

How We Built The Cult Of Disruption

In the 1990s, a newly minted professor at Harvard Business School named Clayton Christensen began studying why good companies fail. What he found was surprising. They weren’t failing because they lost their way, but rather because they were following time-honored principles taught at Business schools like his, such as listening to their customers, investing in R&D and improving their products.

As he researched further he realized that, under certain circumstances, a market becomes over-served, the basis of competition changes and firms become vulnerable to a new type of competitor. In his 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, he coined the term disruptive technology to describe what he saw.

It was an idea whose time had come. The book became a major bestseller and Christensen the world’s top business guru. Yet many began to see disruption as more than a special case, but a mantra; an end in itself rather than a means to an end. This wasn’t, to be fair, what he envisioned, but things took on a life of themselves.

As the cult of disruption took hold, it was no longer enough for leaders to be responsible stewards, they had to be disruptors who “move fast and break things.” While managers got to feel like swashbuckling heroes pushing the envelope, the rank and file bore the brunt. In 2020 Gallup reported that 76% of employees were reporting some form of burnout.

Research undertaken by PwC shows the inevitable results. In a survey of more than 2,200 executives, managers, and employees located across the globe, it found that 65% of respondents cited change fatigue, 44% of employees say they don’t understand the change they’re being asked to make, and 38% say they don’t agree with it.

Designing Our Own Echo Chambers

A big part of our everyday experience is seen through the prism of people that surround us.  Our social circles have a major influence on what we perceive and how we think. In fact, a series of famous experiments done at Swarthmore College in the 1950’s showed that we will conform to the opinions of those around us even if they are obviously wrong.

It isn’t particularly surprising that those closest to us influence our thinking, but more recent research has found that the effect extends to three degrees of social distance. So it is not only those we know well, but even the friends of our friend’s friends have a deep and pervasive effect on how we think and behave.

Our social networks not only deeply influence the information we receive, but also what we share. A team of researchers at MIT found that when we’re surrounded by people who think like us, we share information more freely because we don’t expect to be rebuked. We’re also less likely to check our facts, because we know that those we are sharing the item with will be less likely to inspect it themselves.

Our social networks define what feels normal for us, so we tend to see contrary opinions as aberrations, the product of some deficiency in those who see things differently. That’s how the notion arises that resistance is not really a thing, but a privation—a lack of something—and the best way to correct the situation is to replace nothing with something.

The Information Deficit Model

The idea that resistance to change is due to a lack of knowledge is known formally as the Information Deficit Model. Originally developed for science communication in the 1980s, the model assumes that people behave as they do because of the information—or lack thereof—that they possess.

If this is true, then resistance to change is simply the result of a lack of information and, once properly informed, that resistance will dissipate. Therefore change is largely a communication problem. Deliver the right information in the right way and everyone will get on board. Resistance is an illusion, simply a failure to communicate effectively.

Yet decades of research have shown that shifts in knowledge and attitudes don’t necessarily result in a change in practice. We might know that we shouldn’t eat the brownie, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not going to indulge ourselves. In a similar vein, there is a well documented knowing-doing gap in organizations in which executives are fully aware of best practices but don’t implement them.

There’s also just something arrogant about assuming that the reason someone doesn’t agree with you is some lack of knowledge or understanding on their part. The truth is that you first need to create a sense of safety around the change conversation and that means listening to how others see things, rather than trying to force your views on them.

You can’t expect people to listen to you unless you show an authentic interest in what they think.

Rethinking The Change Gospel

My friend, the global activist Srdja Popović, once told me that the goal of a revolution should be to become mainstream, to be mundane and ordinary. If you are successful it should be difficult to explain what was won because the previous order seems so unbelievable. Yet today’s cult of disruption demands that we constantly change and pivot only to change and pivot some more.

The simple truth is that every change initiative starts out weak and vulnerable, without a track record of success. People are bound to be suspicious. They already have everyday struggles and don’t want someone else’s idea to add to their burden. Leader’s who ignore this simple reality are abdicating their duty to be responsible stewards of their organizations.

As innovation expert Stephen Shapiro explains in his book, Pivotal, the answer isn’t always something different, but something deeper. That’s why we need to take resistance to change seriously, because not every change is a good one. We need to make wise choices about the stress we put on our enterprises and its stakeholders.

Then when we make the decision to pursue change, we need to anticipate resistance and build strategies to overcome it. Perhaps most of all, you need to accept that resistance is part of change and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, skeptics can often point out important flaws in your idea and make it stronger.

The difference between successful change leaders and mere dreamers is that those who succeed anticipate resistance and build a plan to overcome it.

Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.

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