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 organizations they work for. To take just one example, Edelman’s 2022 Trust Barometer found that only 41% of employees trust their managers to tell the truth about what is going on in their organization. Only 25% trust the CEO.

Even high performing organizations run into trust issues.  As General Stanley McChrystal describes in Team of Teams, when he took over Special Operations Command, he found that although he led some of the most elite units in the world, they often failed to integrate effectively, in large part because they didn’t trust each other.

One pitfall change leaders often fall into is by communicating differentiating values. When we believe passionately in an idea, we want to talk about how it’s unique and different. Change management gurus often suggest coming up with a distinct “value proposition,” to help people understand how wonderful and disruptive the initiative promises to be.

But the truth is that people don’t like to be disrupted and promising to undermine what is safe and familiar subverts and weakens trust. You are much better off focusing on shared values and creating a sense of safety around the change conversation. It is only through shared values that you can create shared identity and a shared sense of purpose and mission.

This was a big part of the problem Antioco had at Blockbuster. The franchisees, who owned about 20% of the locations, were suspicious of the changes and initiated a resistance campaign. To avoid that kind of rearguard action, you need to start by thinking about where you lack trust, and design strategies to create it.

2. Change Fatigue

One of the dumbest things anybody ever said about promoting change is that you should start with a sense of urgency. Today, we have people calling for change in every facet of our lives. We’re told we live in a VUCA world, where things are more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. We need to disrupt or be disrupted, that robots will take our jobs and that our children won’t be able to compete.

The notion that transformation can be challenging is nothing new. What managers often fail to account for, however, is that change never happens in a vacuum. It must be seen in context of everything else that’s going on in people’s lives. Adding histrionics to already stressful lives is of limited utility will only undermine what you’re trying to achieve.

Consider that research points to a dramatic increase of anxiety and depression since the start of the pandemic. Another study reported in Harvard Business Review found that 76% of employees in 2021 reported at least one mental health symptom, up from 59% in 2019 and 50% have reported leaving a job due to mental health concerns, compared to 34% two years earlier. Those are dramatic increases on already high levels.

Yet even before the pandemic there were signs of trouble. A 2014 report by PwC revealed that 65% of respondents in corporations cited change fatigue, 44% of employees complained they don’t understand the change they’re being asked to make, and 38% say they don’t agree with it. Should we be surprised that so many change initiatives fail?

3. Competing Incentives and Commitments

A Fortune 500 executive once told me about his first CIO job. His bonus was based on the systems he could get installed and adopted in each division. Yet each of the division heads had their compensation based on increasing margins, which would obviously be diminished if they invested in new systems.

We often design incentives we fail to fully understand. Conditions shift and demands change over time and it’s easy to get caught in the trap of asking people to do one thing and paying them to do another. Also as Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey explain in Immunity to Change, we are often conflicted by our own commitments, such as when a leader wants to delegate more but still wants to see herself as a “hands-on manager.”

The truth is that we’ve known for decades that financial incentives usually backfire. Nevertheless, when I sit down with leaders to define a change strategy, they invariably want to start by devising a complex system of “carrots and sticks” to engineer the behavior they want to see. They’re often disappointed when they are told that’s a bad idea.

You never want to have to incentivize people to drive change. If an initiative has real value, you should be able to find people who are enthusiastic about it and want to make it work. Even a small initial cadre should be enough to deliver a successful keystone change and get the ball rolling. After that, the issue has more to do with scaling change than anything else.

4. Switching Costs

The Library of Congress Classification, developed in 1897, is similar to the Dewey Decimal System that many of us know from our community and school libraries, but is used for large research and academic libraries. Both provide basic, pre-Internet standards so that people can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.

Amazingly, despite it’s obvious utility, Princeton’s library took 120 years to adopt it! The problem wasn’t that it didn’t understand the value of a classification system, but that it had developed its own seven years earlier. To say that switching classification systems would be a headache is an enormous understatement. So Princeton’s library muddled through for over a century until the situation just became to untenable to ignore.

There are a number of reasons why switching costs can become a roadblock. The first is our innate bias for loss aversion. First identified and documented by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, we have a tendency to avoid losses rather than seek out new gains. The comfort of the status quo can be more powerful than the mysterious promise of transformation.

Another important force is the availability heuristic, which reflects our tendency to overweight information that is most easily accessible. What we experience in the here and now always seems more tangible and concrete than the more distant benefits of change, which many will suspect will never come.

5. Identity, Dignity & Sense of Self

Gary Starkweather’s idea for change involved using lasers to print documents for computers. His boss at Xerox, however, saw himself as a copier guy and threatened to fire anyone who worked with him on the printer idea. Gary, for his part, saw himself as an inventor and didn’t really care what business category he was building technology for.

Gary got so frustrated that he went over his boss’s head.  He walked into the Senior Vice President’s office and threatened, “Do you want me to do this for you or for someone else?” In the stuffy corporate culture of Xerox, it was unheard of behavior, but he was so convinced in the potential of his idea that he was willing to lose his job over it.

Luckily, for Gary and for Xerox, the new Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)’s mission was to create computers and Gary’s laser printer not only perfectly fit in with the ambitions there, it likely saved the company. What seemed like heresy to one identity fit perfectly with another.

Humans form attachments to people, ideas and other things. When those are threatened, we tend to act out in ways that don’t reflect our best selves. That’s why anytime we ask people to embrace change, there will always be some who will seek to undermine what we are trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. We can ask people to change what they think or do, but we can’t ask them to stop being who they are.

Dick Shoup and Alvy Ray Smith found that out the hard way. Much like Starkweather, they went to PARC to invent. Yet their SuperPaint graphics technology didn’t fit in with the office computers being developed there and the two were largely shunned. Disappointed and frustrated, they both left. Smith would later team up with Ed Catmull to build a company around the technology.

It would eventually be called Pixar.

Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, and bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change. His previous effort, Mapping Innovation, was selected as one of the best business books of 2017. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.

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