Change doesn’t fail by itself. It fails because people resist it

Change often fails and that rarely has anything to do with whether the concept is a good one or not. As Howard Aiken famously put it, “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throat.” As the creator of the Harvard Mark, one of the very first computers, he was speaking from experience. 

The truth is that any time you set out to make an impact there’s going to be some who won’t like it. They’ll seek to undermine what you are trying to achieve and they will do it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. It’s a hard truth, but one we all need to accept: resistance is inevitable when you try to drive change.

Once you internalize that, you can begin to move forward. When we work with organizations trying to adopt and scale new ideas, one of the first things we do is work to anticipate and build strategies to overcome resistance. We start by working to understand where resistance is most likely to come from and devise a plan to address the concerns opponents are likely to exploit. 

Understanding Sources Of Rational Resistance

There are many good reasons to resist change. The status quo, for better or worse, is what people have become used to. They understand its benefits and how to work around its shortcomings. So the first barrier to change is the need to build trust in an alternative, more uncertain path.

A second source of resistance is change fatigue. We live in an era that glorifies change, where disruption has taken on an almost cult-like status. So we need to consider not only the merits and demerits of a single initiative, but also the broader context—what has come before and what else is happening at the time. Many organizations juggle too many initiatives and the ones that fail increase change fatigue, making it harder for those that follow. 

A third source is competing incentives and commitments. Incentives, both explicit and implicit, are usually designed to reflect the status quo which is why many change leaders find themselves in the awkward position of asking people to act against their own interests, In other cases, the conflict is self-imposed, such as when a manager who wants to delegate more also sees herself as a hands-on manager. 

Finally, every change faces switching costs. Change always requires some investment in time, resources, training and other areas. Opponents of change often make the case that these costs exceed the potential benefits, which puts the burden of proof on those who support doing things differently. 

The key thing to overcome rational resistance is to anticipate it, which is why one of the first things that we do when we start working with an organization is to do a resistance inventory, laying out the categories of resistance and discussing what types of resistance can be expected, hope they will most likely manifest themselves and what strategies can mitigate them.

Anticipating Irrational Resistance

Many argue that resistance to change is merely an illusion. They claim that if you’re facing pushback, it’s either because you haven’t effectively communicated the value proposition or haven’t put in the effort to understand the “root causes” behind the opposition. Surely, if your idea has value, people will embrace it. 

Now, that’s just silly.

Resistance doesn’t need a rational basis and often doesn’t have one. The truth is that humans form attachments to people, ideas, traditions and other things. When we feel that those attachments are being threatened, we will tend to act out in ways that don’t reflect our best selves. Anybody who has ever been in a romantic relationship or part of a family knows that. 

Transformation isn’t a popularity contest. It’s not consensus driven. It’s also not some heroic journey to some alternative future state about which everyone agrees (they never will). Change is always a strategic conflict between that desired future state and the status quo, which always has inertia on its side and sources of power keeping it in place. 

To overcome that resistance, you need to be clear-eyed and hard-nosed. Success or failure has surprisingly little to do with the quality or usefulness of your initial idea. Good ideas fail all the time. That’s why you need to be strategic. Slogans and gimmicks won’t help you. Change isn’t about persuasion—it’s about power and collective dynamics. 

Building Strategies To Overcome Resistance 

The first principle of building strategies to overcome resistance is to address the causes of rational resistance you’ve uncovered in your resistance inventory. Another approach you can apply at the same time is to recruit a few skeptics to form an internal red team to let you know where you’re going wrong. They’re bound to identify blind spots and can often become genuine supporters over time.

Irrational resistance, however, requires more specific strategies. The first is to start with a majority. You can always expand a majority out, but once you’re in the minority, you will feel immediate pushback. You get to decide who you put in the room, so choose wisely. You have no obligation to invite the bomb throwers in. 

A second strategy is simply to not engage with your most active resistors. Decades of research has found that you usually need only 10% to 20% participation to hit an inflection point, so you don’t need to convince everyone at once. Go to where the energy is. Find people already enthusiastic about your idea, gain traction toward that 10%-20% threshold. 

A final strategy is a dilemma action in which you identify a shared value and then design a constructive act rooted in that shared value. That creates a dilemma for your opponents because they need to either let the constructive act go forward, or to violate the shared value. Either way, your change moves forward. 

Dilemma actions have been used for at least a century—famous examples include Gandhi’s Salt March, King’s Birmingham Campaign and Alice Paul’s Silent Sentinels. One of my favorites was a Lego protest in Siberia. They are just as effective in an organizational context, using an opponent’s resistance against them.

Change Is A Strategic Conflict

Many assume that you bring about change through persuasion. They believe that once people understand the idea they will embrace it. So they work to build awareness, desire and knowledge about the idea and equip people with the skills to implement it in the hopes that the transformation will take hold on its own and become self-sustaining.

They are usually sorely disappointed. Decades of evidence show that shifts in knowledge and attitudes usually don’t result in changes in practice. There is also a large body of research that suggests providing people with the right information is unlikely to meaningfully influence their behavior. People aren’t blank slates—they bring prior beliefs and biases that shape how they respond to new ideas. 

The truth is that change isn’t some kind of hero’s journey to some alternative future state. It is a strategic conflict between that desired state and the status quo, which always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. It has sources of power keeping it in place and those sources of power have an institutional basis. 

That’s why you need to begin to think about how you will overcome resistance from the start. You can’t just wait until you encounter it and react, but must work to anticipate it and devise strategies in advance. That’s what makes the difference between successful changemakers and mere frustrated dreamers who once had an idea.