Why Change Stalls: What Leaders Get Wrong About Resistance

Every change effort reaches a moment when someone says the word.

Resistance.

It sounds like a diagnosis. It feels like one. Once it's been said, the plan quietly changes shape. The goal is no longer to make the change work. The goal is to overcome the people who are slowing it down.

That's where a lot of change efforts start to stall.

First, set aside the 70% statistic

You've probably heard that 70% of change initiatives fail. It shows up in board decks, consulting proposals, and keynotes.

When Mark Hughes went looking for the evidence behind that number, he reviewed five published sources that cite a 70% failure rate and concluded there was no valid and reliable empirical evidence to support it.¹

That matters for more than accuracy. A dramatic failure rate makes change feel like a battle against long odds, and a battle needs an enemy. Resistance is the easiest one to name.

What research says about resistance

Jeffrey Ford, Laurie Ford, and Angelo D'Amelio argued that the usual view of resistance is one-sided. It treats resistance as an irrational reaction located in the people being changed, and it quietly favors the leaders driving the change. They argued instead that change agents contribute to resistance through their own actions and inactions, and that resistance can be a resource for change.²

In other words, "resistance" is often a label leaders put on something they haven't diagnosed yet.

Same sign, different source

Pushback is a sign. It can come from very different sources:

• Confusion. People don't understand what's changing, why, or what it means for their work. They're asking for clarity, and it reads as opposition.
• Overload. The change is reasonable. It's also the fifth one this year, on top of a full job. People aren't against it. They're out of room.
• History. Sometimes the room isn't responding to this change or this leader. It's responding to the last one. Teams remember the reorg that wasn't supposed to happen, and the leader who asked for honesty and then punished it. That memory is still in the room.
• Loss. Change ends something. A way of working, a team, a leader people trusted. What looks like resistance can be grief.
• A real flaw. Sometimes the people closest to the work can see a problem with the plan that leaders can't. Their pushback is the most valuable information you'll get.

Each source needs a different response. More communication helps confusion and does nothing for overload. Reassurance helps loss and insults people who've spotted a real flaw. Pushing harder makes history worse, because it confirms what the room already learned about how change works here.

I've misread this myself

I once sat with a senior leader who had taken over a team that had been described to her as "stuck." The first session was quiet. I read the silence as fear: a team that had learned not to bring anything to a leader until they knew the cost of being wrong. I was confident in the read and helped her design around it.

But the silence wasn't fear. It was grief. The previous leader had been someone the team had grown around for eight years, and they hadn't yet decided how to be a team without him. I had read the surface and called it the cause. The recovery took twice as long as the original work would have.

Nothing in that room was resisting her. They were losing someone.

How to diagnose before you push

Describe what you see before you name it. Not "they're resisting." Instead: three people raised the same concern, the pilot team stopped sending updates, attendance at the working sessions dropped by half. Facts come first.

Ask what's driving it, and generate more than one answer. Then ask what would tell them apart. Confusion shows up as questions. Overload shows up as delays with apologies. History shows up as cynicism about the process itself. A real flaw shows up as specific objections from the people closest to the work.

Ask what the room has learned from past change. It's one of the most useful questions a leader can ask. What happened the last time something like this was announced? What did people learn about what's safe to say?

Agree in advance when you'll reconsider. In cave diving, the plan gets made before you enter the water, because deep in the cave is a terrible place to negotiate it. Change works the same way. Decide up front what evidence would make you adjust, and who can call it. Then pushback has somewhere to go besides underground.

Make the smallest move that tests your read. If you think it's confusion, try one clear explanation and watch whether the questions stop. If they don't, your read was wrong. Update it.

The point

Resistance isn't the enemy of change. Misreading it is.

When leaders treat pushback as information, it tells them what the change needs: clarity, capacity, time, acknowledgment, or a better plan. When they treat it as an obstacle, they push, the room learns to stay quiet, and the real problems move somewhere leaders can't see them.

Leading a change effort? The Cave™ is Jeremiah Gardner's keynote on moving forward without the full picture, and The Read™ helps leaders diagnose what's really driving the room. See how both fit change and transformation events, or book a discovery call.

Go deeper: Why Good Leaders Solve the Wrong Problem

Notes

1. Mark Hughes, "Do 70 Per Cent of All Organizational Change Initiatives Really Fail?," Journal of Change Management 11, no. 4 (2011): 451–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/14697017.2011.630506.
2. Jeffrey D. Ford, Laurie W. Ford, and Angelo D'Amelio, "Resistance to Change: The Rest of the Story," Academy of Management Review 33, no. 2 (2008): 362–77, https://doi.org/10.5465/AMR.2008.31193235.