Change Management professionals are fond of pointing out humans’ many cognitive biases, which contribute to people’s supposed resistance to various kinds of change. Reference is also often made to the fact that most categories of human emotion are negative, and that change is threatening to people for a long list of emotional reasons related to things like status, or the feeling of insecurity that comes with having to learn to perform tasks in a new way.
It’s easy to come away from these messages with a picture of change resisters as damaged, fragile victims, who respond to change only with irrational defensive emotions, and who need to be “managed“, “dealt with“, “addressed” (and compared to toddlers!), and “overcome“.
In my career I have listened to countless people within various organizations tell me about workplace changes they resisted. In every single case these accounts centered around specific, often tangible negative impacts and interactions the changes were causing: doctors were forced by a new electronic records system to interact primarily with screens instead of patients; accountants had to do double entry in a new piece of software that was confusing and error-prone; engineers found their new ordering tool required them to enter extra, redundant search information while producing results that were unhelpful and irrelevant.
Without talking to people like this and hearing their stories, one could get the impression they were just being pulled along by their familiarity bias, or that they were simply fearful of the loss of status that the newly implemented systems represented. Their condition, one might think, is unfortunate, but ultimately they need to (in the words of one change leader I overheard) “get over it.”
In reality, people seem to usually resist change for good reasons: the new thing is flawed; the new thing is incomplete; the new thing is not communicated about effectively or truthfully; the new thing is not needed; the new thing is not the right solution; the new thing provides a worse interaction experience than the old thing; no training on the new thing was provided, or it was provided at the wrong time, or the training was of low quality; no support for the new thing was offered; etc.
Furthermore, over my years of interviewing people, everyone I’ve asked about workplace change has expressed some variant of this realistic and positive attitude: “Change is inevitable, and I do my best to adapt to it even if I don’t always like it.” Most people I’ve talked to could name both positive and negative workplace technology changes they’d experienced, as well as both technology changes that were forced on them and ones they undertook of their own will.
Pathologizing change resistance is especially damaging because it gives managers and executives the idea that they ought not to question or challenge the latest trends, lest they be found to be suffering the same pathologies as their Luddite employees. This contributes to a kind of Emperor’s New Clothes problem. In the end it’s everyone — not just the “emperor” — who bears the brunt of the bad decision to adopt the change.
The way to avoid this problem is to stop treating change resisters as obstacles, and instead use them as a front-line resource. Some texts give only the merest lip service to seriously engaging change resisters (for example, the 100-page book “The Eight Constants of Change” devotes exactly one paragraph to it) and even then, it is typically done as an afterthought. That is a backward approach.
The people identified as change resisters are really the ones who have the answers to questions like:
- “What change does our organization actually need to make?”
- “What are we doing well and should keep doing?”
- “What makes this organization a place where people want to work?”
- “What factors go into a successful change?”
These are the kinds of questions that need to be answered before any significant workplace change is considered, which means the so-called change resisters should be engaged right at the beginning, and their considerations taken seriously.
If nothing else, giving employees the impression they are not heard is a way to ensure that a workplace change will fail.
Nadav Zohar 