The Best Way To Overcome Resistance And Defeat Doubters: Start with a Resistance Inventory
The story of Blockbuster video is one that is often repeated, but rarely understood. The CEO, John Antioco, did not, as is frequently assumed, ignore the Netflix threat but devised an effective strategy to meet it head on. However, tensions with shareholders eventually boiled over, a salary dispute led him to resign and the strategy was abandoned.
Antioco’s mistake wasn’t a lack of a market strategy, but a lack of a resistance strategy. He would later tell me, “throughout my career, I had learned that whenever you set out to do anything big, some people aren’t going to like it. I’d been successful by defying the status quo at important junctures and that’s what I thought had to be done in this case.”
Simply pushing through resistance isn’t enough, though. You need to actively anticipate and devise plans to overcome it. That’s why when we start working with an organization on a transformational initiative one of the first things we do is go through a detailed resistance inventory, identifying five major categories of resistance and how they are likely to play out.
1. Lack Of Trust
Clearly, to be successful, any change effort needs to build trust. Yet the evidence shows that most people don’t trust the…
