You introduce a change that makes perfect sense. The problem is real. The data supports it. The new process is better.

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And yet…someone still pushes back.

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We often call this resistance to change. But what if resistance isn't really about the change itself? What if people are trying to protect something they believe the change will take away? Maybe it's their competence. Their control. Their identity. Their status. Their security. Or their sense of belonging.

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In this episode of Thoughts on Change, we're going one level deeper into the psychology of resistance and exploring what people may actually be protecting when they push back on change.

Because the same change can create completely different reactions in different people.

And understanding what someone believes they're going to lose can completely change how we approach buy-in, resistance, and change management.

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What You'll Learn

In this episode, I explore:

• Why resistance to change may actually be a protective response

• Why the same change can create completely different reactions in different people

• How perceived loss can shape people's reactions to organizational change

• Why people may be protecting their competence, control, identity, security, belonging, or status

• Why loss can feel more significant than an equivalent gain

• How the behavior we see on the surface can point to something deeper underneath

• Why giving people more data doesn't necessarily address the real concern

• How CI practitioners can accidentally make resistance worse by immediately trying to reassure or convince

• Why resistance can be valuable information about what your change may have missed

• Questions you can ask to understand what someone is really trying to protect

• How to shift from overcoming resistance to creating a future people are willing to step into

 

Resistance May Be Protective

When someone pushes back on a change, it's easy to assume they're trying to stop us. They're being difficult. They're negative. They're stuck in the past.

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But what if resistance is actually protecting something that matters to them? If someone believes a change will make their job harder, threaten their credibility, reduce their control, or make their skills less valuable, pushing back may be their way of protecting themselves from a future that feels threatening.

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The behavior is about the change. But the fear underneath it may be about what they believe they'll lose.

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The Same Change. Completely Different Losses.

Imagine you're automating a manual process. You see less tedious work, more consistency, and fewer headaches.

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Someone else might see their job disappearing, their skills becoming irrelevant, increased monitoring, or less control over how they work.

Same change. Completely different perceived losses.

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And that's one reason the phrase "people resist change" can be so unhelpful. It puts very different experiences into one bucket.

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Instead, we can start asking: What are they trying to protect?

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What Are People Afraid They'll Lose?

When we introduce change, we're often focused on what people will gain:

• More efficiency

• Better quality

• Less work

• Better tools

• More visibility

• Fewer problems

 

But the person experiencing the change may be focused on what they believe they're going to lose.

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They may be worried about losing:

• Competence — "I'm good at this today. Will I still be good at it?"

• Control — "Will I still have influence over how the work gets done?"

• Identity — "If this changes, will the thing that makes me valuable still matter?"

• Security — "What does this mean for my job, workload, or future?"

• Belonging — "Will I still fit into this team or organization?"

• Status — "Will people still respect me and value my expertise?"

 

And people don't always tell us directly which one is at stake. Instead, we see the behavior. The questions. The objections. The avoidance. The criticism.

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The insistence that the change won't work.

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Resistance Can Give Us Better Information

What if we stopped treating resistance as an obstacle to overcome and started treating it as information?

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When someone says: "This is going to create more work."

Maybe they're telling us about a future where they're already overloaded.

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When someone says: "This isn't going to work."

Maybe they're worried about being responsible for the consequences if it fails.

 

When someone says: "I don't want to do it that way."

Maybe there's something about the current way of working that they don't want to lose.

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The resistance may be telling us something about the future we're creating that we haven't seen yet. And sometimes that information can actually make the change better.

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The Question I Want You to Start Asking

The next time you encounter resistance, don't immediately ask:

"How do I overcome this?"

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Instead, get curious.

Ask:

• What do they think they're going to lose?

• What do they think is going to get harder?

• What are they afraid will happen?

• What are they uncertain about?

• What does this change mean for their role, identity, competence, control, or security?

• What are they imagining that I aren't?

 

And then ask an even more important question:

"What would have to be true for them to feel able to step into this future?"

Sometimes the answer is more information, or training, or involvement, or reassurance.

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And sometimes...It's changing the change.

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The Big Takeaway

Here's the shift I want you to experiment with:

Don't stop at the resistance. Get curious about what it's protecting.

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People may not simply be resisting your change. They may be protecting something they believe they will lose when that change becomes their reality. And when you understand what that is, you have something much more useful than another argument to work with.

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You can help create a future that people are actually willing to step into.

 

Links

Video

Credible Heard Used

AME Workshop Signup

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Transcript

Alright, welcome back to Thoughts on Change. In the last episode, we talked about a hypothesis I've been exploring that people don't actually resist change. They resist the future they imagine will be true when the change is implemented. And if you haven't listened to that episode yet, I definitely recommend going back to it because today's episode is the next piece of that idea. You see, once we start asking what future are they seeing, we immediately run into another question. What are they afraid that future will contain? The future itself isn't usually the thing that's scary. It's what we think we're going to lose when we get there. Maybe it's control, maybe it's competence, maybe it's status, maybe it's security, maybe it's belonging, maybe it's our identity. And maybe it's something as simple as I know how to be successful here today in this current process, but I'm not sure how to be successful in the world you're asking me to move into. And I think this is where resistance gets really interesting. Because the exact same change can create completely different reactions from different people. One person can be excited while another person is skeptical, and another person is angry, and another person is quietly checking out, and then another person becomes very, very interested in telling you all the reasons your idea isn't going to work. We might look at those different reactions and say, why are these people responding so differently to the same change? But that assumes they are responding to the change. But what if it's an imagined future? Then what if we're actually responding to different perceived losses in those imagined futures? That's what I want to dig into today. I think understanding what someone believes they're going to lose can shift how we respond to resistance. And I think this shift can lead us to better results. So, let's dive in. Welcome to Thoughts on Change, the podcast about the messy, political, emotional, deeply human side of leading change. I'm Kelly, and I believe anyone can implement lead tools until they actually have to get people to use them. Around here, we talk about how to move culture, how to build credibility, and how to influence without bulldozing. Basically, how to herd humans without losing your mind. Alright, let's start with something I think is maybe one of the most important things. When someone resists a change, we often assume they're trying to stop the change from happening. They're being difficult, they're being negative, they're stuck in the past, they're afraid of the change, or maybe they're just one of those people. And honestly, I have thought all of those things. And I'm guessing I'm not the only one. But here's a different way to think about it. What if resistance is actually a protective behavior? Not necessarily protective of the organization, not necessarily protective of the current process, but protective of something that matters to that person. Think about that. If you believe a change is going to make your job harder, you might push back. If you believe it's going to make you look incompetent, you might push back. If you believe it's going to take away control or autonomy, you've worked really hard to earn, you might push back. If you believe it's going to threaten your job, you might push back. If you believe it's going to make the skills you've spent 20 years developing irrelevant, you might push back. And suddenly that behavior looks a little different. The person isn't necessarily saying, I hate change. They might be saying, I don't know how to protect and maintain something important to me if this change happens. And something I've spent a lot of time to make true for myself might no longer exist. That's a very different conversation. There's actually research in organizational change that supports this general idea. Researchers James Bailey and Jonathan Raylen argued that when people respond to organizational change, we shouldn't just look at the change itself, but at the loss the change represents to the individual. They connect those perceived losses to things like competence, identity, and sense making. And I think that's a really useful lens for us as CI practitioners. Because we're often focused on what we're trying to gain from a change. More productivity, better quality, less waste, faster flow, more consistency. But the person experiencing a change may be focused on what they believe they're going to lose. And those two perspectives can exist at exactly the same time. So let's go back to the automation example from the last episode. Imagine we're automating a manual process. Now, from my perspective, this is fantastic. We're eliminating tedious work, we're reducing variation, we're making the process safer, we're freeing people up to do more valuable work. I see a whole list of gains. But now imagine someone has been doing that manual process for 20 years. They're probably really good at it. They know every little trick. They know what to listen for, what to look for. They can tell something is wrong before the equipment even throws up an alarm. And so that person might hear we're automating this process and then think, wait a minute, the thing I'm really good at is going away? The thing I built my value around is going away. That's not resistance to the automation. That's a threat to their competence and meaning. Or maybe they think, but if the machine does this now, what exactly do I do? That's a threat to role and identity. Or maybe even they're thinking, if everything is automated, I'm going to have less control over how the work gets done. And that's a threat to their autonomy. Or it could even be that they're thinking if this makes the process faster, management is going to expect more from us. And that's a threat to security. Or they could think the people I've worked with for 20 years are going to be doing something completely different. That's a threat to belonging. Right? Same change, same automation, but completely different perceived losses. And this is why I think the phrase people resist change is so incredibly unhelpful. Because it collapses all of those different experiences into one bucket. Resistance. But resistance isn't one thing. It's a behavior, and underneath that behavior might be this whole range of very different fears. There's another reason I think this matters. When something feels threatening, our brains don't just sit there and calmly say, Well, interesting. Let's gather some more information and make a perfectly rational assessment of the situation. Wouldn't that be nice? Instead, we react. We start looking for evidence that our concern is valid. We start noticing everything that could go wrong. We start telling stories about what this means. We start defending our position. And sometimes we start defending the thing we're afraid of losing before we've even clearly identified what that thing is. Think about someone who says, we've tried this before. Right? We probably hear, oh, they're just being negative. But maybe they're actually thinking, I don't want to go through another failed initiative. That's a totally different concern. Or somebody who says, we don't have time for this. Um, or someone who says, this isn't going to work, right? We might be hearing they're just resistant or they don't want to do it. But maybe they're really thinking, if this doesn't work, I'm the one who's going to have to clean up the mess. That's risk. Or maybe they're even thinking, if this works, everyone is going to realize the way I've been doing this wasn't actually the best way. That's identity. Or what if they're really thinking, if this changes the way we work, I'm going to lose the influence I've built over the last 10 years? That's status. And suddenly, the resistance makes a whole lot more sense. And it feels a lot more human. There's another piece of research that I think is especially relevant here. You might have heard of loss aversion. It's one of the ideas associated with the late Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's prospect theory. The basic idea is that people tend to experience loss as more significant than an equivalent gain. So, in other words, losing something we already have can feel more and matter more than gaining something of the same objective value. And that's really interesting when we think about change. When we introduce an improvement, we often frame it in terms of gains. You'll have more time, you'll have better information, the process will be easier, we'll eliminate this frustrating task, you'll have a better tool. But the person may not be comparing current situation versus better future. They may be comparing what I have today versus what I might lose tomorrow. And in their minds, those are not equivalent comparisons. Imagine I told you we're going to give you a new responsibility that will give you more visibility with senior leadership. You might hear, great opportunity. But imagine you already have a role where you're highly respected. You know exactly what you're doing. People come to you for answers. And now I tell you, we're changing your role. You might hear, I'm going to lose the thing that makes me valuable. The objective opportunity hasn't changed, but your perceived loss has. We're answering a question they didn't ask. And this is where I want to come back to a story I told many episodes ago about implementing an hour by hour. If you recall, there was a bottleneck in a process I was supporting, and I had to try to figure out how to fix it so that we could get out of back order and get product back to customers. And my investigation led me to understand that we didn't know what the problem was. And so my plan was to put up an hour by hour so that we could learn more about what was happening and fix the problems for the people running that line. Right. So I was talking about the hour by hour as a gain, right? A gain of solving their problems and a gain of their work becoming easier by not having to deal with those problems. And thinking back on that now with this new lens of imagined futures and loss aversion, you know, I wonder if they were actually thinking about the potential loss of their autonomy, the potential loss of their competence and identity, because they had found ways to make this process work, even despite so many problems. And I know, right, when I preached the gains and the benefits of this hour by hour, I realized now all I was doing was pushing them away. But instead, if I had addressed the losses, everything would have gone so much smoother. So now I want to offer this to you. I want to offer a framework, not necessarily as a like a formal model yet, but as a way to help you start listening differently. So when someone is resisting a change, first I want you to come in with curiosity. I want you to start wondering what they might they believe they're going to lose. And I think there are at least six really common categories for this. The first is competence. This is where people think I'm good at this today. I know how to do this. People trust me because I'm good at this. And now you're asking me to do something I've never done before. Right? That's scary. Because competence isn't just about performing the task. It's often part of how we understand our own value. Alright, so one, competence. Two, control. Right? I know how this works, I have influence over what happens, I know how to navigate the current system. And now someone else or some new system is taking that control away. This is especially interesting in CI because many of our improvements are designed to reduce variation, which is fantastic operationally, but sometimes the variation we're removing is also where someone has learned to exercise judgment and control. Alright, three, identity. So this is who I am, right? This is what I'm known for. This is what makes me valuable. Think about the person who's been the go-to expert for 20 years. If the new system makes their expertise less necessary, i.e., think about standard work, right? That's not just a process change, it's an identity threat. Research on organizational change has increasingly examined identity threat as a mechanism through which change can generate resistance. And this one can be especially sneaky because people don't always just say, I'm afraid this change is going to threaten my identity. Right? They they don't say that. They do say, I don't think this is a good idea. So definitely examine that for if we are potentially getting into identity territory. Alright, number four is security. Right? This is will I still have a job? Will I still have a place here? Will my workload increase? Will my performance expectations change? What happens if I can't keep up? So this one is probably the easiest for us to recognize, but we often make the mistake of assuming that if the organization has no intention of creating a security problem, then the person shouldn't feel insecure. But unfortunately, that's not how uncertainty works. The absence of an intended threat doesn't mean the person isn't experiencing one. So even if there is no explicit reduction in labor or anything like that, the implication is still there. Alright, five, belonging. Right? Will I still be part of this group? Will my relationships change? Will I still fit in? Will the people I trust still be here? This one is also easy to miss when we're focused on processes and performance, which is a lot of what we focus on. But work is social, right? People build relationships about the way, around the way work gets done. And so if we change the work, like creating new cells or flow lines, then sometimes you change the social environment around the work. Alright, number six, last but not least, status. Will people still respect me? Will I have influence? Will my experience still matter? Will I still be the person people come to? And this one can produce some really interesting resistance. Because status is rarely something people announce they're protecting, just like identity, right? They don't say, I'm currently defending my position in the informal organizational hierarchy. But they do say, I just don't think we should do it that way. And then they're going to proceed to give you 17 reasons why. So again, just like identity, be cautious that there is a hidden status element underneath all of this. So this is where I think we can start connecting this back to the behaviors we see. So let's say someone keeps asking for more data, right? We might think they just need more information. But what if they're actually protecting competence? They don't want to support something they're not confident will work or that they will be successful in. Or maybe they're protecting their identity. They don't want to be associated with a change that fails, so they need to confirm that the data really shows it will be successful. And maybe they're being negative, or maybe they're protecting control. If they can identify every problem, they can maintain some influence over what happens next. Or if someone keeps saying we've always done it this way, maybe they're stubborn. Or maybe the old way represents their status. Right? This is how we do things here. This is what I know, this is where I belong. And if someone avoids participating, right, maybe they're just disengaged. Or maybe they're protecting their security by thinking if I don't get involved, I can't fail publicly. And then there's the someone gets angry. And this is where I want to be really, really careful. Because anger doesn't automatically mean fear. Sometimes someone is angry because something genuinely isn't fair. Sometimes the change really is a bad idea. Sometimes they're angry because they've been ignored. So we should not turn this into every angry person is secretly afraid. That's not the point. The point is don't stop at the behavior. Get curious about what the behavior might be protecting. Because once we understand the thing someone is trying to protect, we have something we can actually work with. And here's where I think we as CI practitioners can again accidentally make resistance stronger. We hear the concern, the fear of loss, and we immediately try to remove it. Oh no, no, no, you're not going to lose your job, you're not going to have more work, you're still going to be important. This isn't going to affect your role. You're going to love this. And our intention is good. We're trying to reassure them. But sometimes we're actually doing something else. We're actually telling them your concern is not valid. And now we've added another problem. Now they don't just feel threatened by the change, they feel misunderstood by the person trying to lead it. And that can erode trust and the relationship. So again, instead of immediately reassuring, what if we got curious? Tell me more about what makes you worried about that. What do you think will be different for you? What part of this feels most concerning? What are you worried you might lose? Or even what would have to be true for you to feel confident that you can be successful in this future? Now that last one is a particular favorite of mine, because now we're not just Asking how do I convince you? We're asking what would make this future feel livable. Now, there's an important caveat here. Sometimes we discover something someone is afraid of losing. And we cannot give it back. Maybe the role really is changing. Maybe the old process really is going away. Maybe the person really will have less autonomy. And maybe the technology really does make some skills less necessary. And maybe the organization really is asking people to work differently. And I don't think we should pretend otherwise. This is not about becoming better at selling change. It's not about finding the magic words that make someone feel okay about losing something important. Sometimes the loss is real. And when the loss is real, our job is to acknowledge it. Yes, you are going to lose some of that autonomy. Yes, this role will be different. Yes, you're going to have to develop new skills. Yes, this will change the way you've worked for a long time. And then we can ask, given that, what would help you move forward? That's a much more human and honest conversation. And I think this honesty is incredibly important. Because if we're trying to build credibility as change leaders, we can't promise that people aren't going to lose anything just because we want them to support the change. We have to face facts. Change changes things. And this brings me to something I think is really powerful. What if the things people are afraid of losing aren't just obstacles to our change? What if they're information about the change? If someone says this is going to create more work, instead of saying, no, no, it won't. Maybe we should ask, what work are you imagining? And they tell us, and suddenly we discover something we hadn't considered. Right? A handoff, a reporting requirement, a system issue, a training gap, a downstream impact, something we genuinely need to address. Or someone says, I'm worried we're going to lose our ability to respond to problems quickly. And instead of saying the new standard will just make everything better, maybe instead we ask, What situations are you thinking about? And then they tell us, right? And now we found an exception. The standard doesn't handle well. You see, resistance just gave us information, not because the person was being difficult, because they were seeing something we weren't. And this is why I keep coming back to curiosity. Because resistance can contain information about this future that we haven't fully imagined, but they have. Like now. Those behaviors can look completely different on the surface, but underneath them, they're often covering something that we're trying to protect. And that's where this gets really personal. Because it isn't just other people who have resistabots, my friends. No, we do too. I have mine, you have yours. And they tend to show up when something important to us feels threatened and when things feel hard. Which means the next step in becoming better at leading change isn't just learning how to respond to their resistance. It's learning how we respond when our imagined future feels threatened. And threatening. Because if we're not careful, we can end up responding to someone else's fear from inside our own fear. And that is a recipe for a pretty spectacular change leadership mess. So, in summary, here's the question I want you to take with you this week. Right, last episode, the question was, what future are they resisting? But this time, I want you to go one level deeper. What are they afraid? That future will take away from them. And then ask what would have to be true for them to feel safe enough to step into that future anyway. Right? Notice I didn't say what would convince them, I said what would have to be true. Because sometimes the answer is more information. Sometimes it's training, sometimes it's involvement, sometimes it's a change to the process, sometimes it's an honest conversation about what's actually going to happen. Sometimes it is reassurance. And sometimes it's changing the change. That's important because if someone is seeing a legitimate risk that we didn't account for, our goal shouldn't be to convince them that the risk doesn't exist. Our goal should be to reduce the risk. And if the loss they imagine is true, own that. We have a chance to do something much more useful than overcome resistance. We can help create a future that people are actually willing to step into. And here's where we're going next. Because if resistance is a protective response, and if we each have different things we're trying to protect, then why do we respond to resistance in such predictable ways? Why do some of us reach for more data? Why do some of us push harder? Why do some of us try to fix everything? Why do some of us avoid the conversation altogether? And why do those responses sometimes make resistance even worse? That's what I want to explore next. We're going to start looking at our side of the resistance equation, because leading change isn't just about understanding the person resisting. It's also about understanding what happens inside us when our change meets resistance. Until then, if all of this is landing for you, if you're listening and having one of those oh shit moments, get in touch. I help practitioners like you not only make this realization, but find ways to move forward into better, more effective change leadership that aligns with your values and style. Right? And I'd love to help you. I'm available for one-on-one coaching, or if group work is more your jam, the next round of my intimate five-month program, Credible Heard Used, launches after the new year. You can sign up for that or schedule a call to talk about if one-on-one coaching is the right fit for you. And if you're still not sure about this, but you're attending or thinking about attending the AME conference this October in Milwaukee, there is another option for you. I am running a half-day workshop on transforming resistance, and I'd love to have you there. That workshop is Monday, October 26th, from 8 a.m. to noon. And links to all of this and more will be in the show notes. Alright, that's it. Thanks for listening. That's a wrap for this episode of Thoughts on Change. If you're also out there trying to move culture instead of just installing tools, hit subscribe and share this with a fellow CI warrior. And remember, progress beats perfection, curiosity beats control, and culture beats everything. See you next time.