Resistance to change is usually a rational answer

A new planning tool goes live. The training is done, the communication plan has run, the sponsor has recorded a video. Six weeks later the planners still keep their spreadsheets and copy the numbers into the new system at the end of each week, so that it looks used. The programme diagnoses resistance to change and schedules more training.

The planners do not need more training. The new tool cannot handle the last-minute changes that make up a good part of their week, and the spreadsheet can. They noticed in the first two days. Nobody asked them.

The real cause

“Resistance” is a label for behaviour the plan did not expect. Treating it as an attitude problem — fear of the new, attachment to old habits — turns it into something to be managed with messaging. In practice, most resistance is a reasonable response to something the change really does cost the person resisting it.

That does not make every objection right. It means every objection carries information about the change, and it is the cheapest information a programme will ever get.

The label matters because it decides what happens next. Call the behaviour resistance and the response is persuasion: more training, more messages, a firmer sponsor. Call it feedback and the response is investigation: what exactly is harder now, for whom, and is that cost necessary? The first response is cheaper this week. The second is the only one that changes the outcome.

What resistance is usually telling you

Something does not work. The new process or tool fails at a case that matters to the people doing the work. They found it within days because they meet that case every day; the designers did not, because they met it in a workshop.

Somebody loses something. Status, autonomy, a skill that made them valuable, the informal power of being the person who knows how the old system works. These losses are real, rarely acknowledged, and they explain most of the quiet resistance from experienced people.

The extra work lands on them. The change saves time in management reporting and adds data entry for the people at the front line. They do that arithmetic before anybody else does.

They have seen this before. People who have lived through two failed programmes have learned that waiting is a sensible strategy, because the previous ones went away. That is not cynicism; it is experience, and the article on change capacity describes what it does to an organisation.

Nobody told them why. Sometimes it really is communication — but the missing piece is usually the reason for the change and what will happen to them, not another walkthrough of the features.

What to do instead

Go and look before you explain. Sit with the people who are not using the new thing and watch what they do instead. The workaround is a specification: it shows exactly what the new system fails to do.

Name the losses out loud. If a role loses autonomy or a skill loses value, say so, and say what is offered in return. People cope far better with losses that are acknowledged than with losses that are denied.

Separate the objections. Some point to real defects: fix those first, and say publicly that they were fixed because somebody raised them. Some are about losses: address those directly. Some are plain disagreement: decide those and close them. Lumping all three together as “resistance” handles all three badly.

Give the loudest critics a role. The person who knows every reason the new system will fail is often the best person to test it. Bring them into the pilot instead of routing around them.

Budget for it. This is not a communication workstream tacked onto the end of the plan. It is a large share of the work, and the share that decides whether anything changes. That is why change work runs alongside the build in how VUCALE works, not after it.

A test you can run this week

Pick one change your organisation rolled out in the last year that people were said to resist. Find three people who resisted it and ask each of them one question: what did it make harder for you?

Write the answers down without arguing. If even one of them describes a real problem the programme never heard about, the resistance was information — and there is probably more of it waiting in the change you are planning now.