Why I love resistance

Last week I was in a meeting with some clients talking about culture change. The thing about intentionally changing a culture is that it smacks of social engineering, which is exactly what it actually is; it is just that people don’t like to say that out loud. While we were chatting, I made the comment that “I love resistance”, which provoked some laughter, and someone said “you are the first person I’ve ever heard say that”.

Here’s why I love resistance:

  1. It means people care
  2. It means people are listening
  3. It means change is actually happening

Too often I hear clients say things like…… ‘we need to change, but we don’t want anyone to know’, or ‘what we are really doing is a huge change, but we want it to feel small to everyone’, or ‘we are packaging this as a technology change, but we are really changing the entire culture of the business’.

These elusive tactics are great for creating almost no resistance, because you aren’t actually asking anyone to do anything particularly productive in terms of change. You are asking them to carry on, but do it differently. If you aren’t willing to provoke resistance, you probably aren’t really willing to change.

Change management has created a veneer of a neat and tidy process through which people can easily step from one place to another, with predictable and manageable (and measureable) results. While this has helped to organize our approach and design of change experiences, it has had an unintended consequence of giving senior managers the idea that change can be risk free, a jaunty endeavor filled with happy smiling people, one in which bad things don’t happen, because it has all been so beautifully managed. Resistance is the inconvenient truth in all of this. If your change effort never encountered resistance from anyone, you probably didn’t really change very much. When you see or feel resistance to something you know is important to your business, lean into it. It is the best indicator that you are actually going somewhere.