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Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore Resistance to Change
One of the most puzzling things that I’ve come across in speaking and writing about change is the denial that resistance exists. While I never hear this from leaders that I coach, who face resistance every day, there is a cadre of consultants and pundits who insist that resistance to change is some sort of illusion.
This should be ridiculous on its face. Certainly, the resistance we encountered during the Orange Revolution was very real. In Lou Gerstner’s account of his historic turnaround at IBM, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance, he’s very clear and candid about the resistance he faced. I can’t recall any major transformation that hasn’t had opposition.
Yet when you look at popular change management models such as Kotter’s 8 Steps or Prosci’s ADKAR, they have little to say about overcoming resistance to change and, wittingly or not, promote the idea of transformation as a communication and skills problem, as if you just give people the right information and training they will embrace change. They will not.
How We Built The Cult Of Disruption
In the 1990s, a newly minted professor at Harvard Business School named Clayton Christensen began studying why good companies fail. What he found was surprising. They weren’t failing because they lost their way, but…
