The Real Reasons People Resist Change (But Won’t Tell You)
And 3 change management whiteboard exercises to help.
Imagine this — You’ve come up with a brilliant new idea, technology, or way of doing things that has the potential to do tremendous things for the team, the business, and the company.
You jump up and exclaim, “Great news, everyone — I found a better way!” expecting the team to applaud your innovative thinking and rally around you to make your idea a reality.
Instead, you’re greeted with blank stares and variations of, “No.” Why?
- “Now’s not a good time.”
- “It’s been done before.”
- “That’s not the way we do things around here.”
- “It’s complicated.”
Jason Clarke, founder of Minds at Work, presents this exact scenario in his “Embracing Change” TEDx Talk.
“The first thing you need to know,” Clarke says, “ is that these aren’t real reasons.”
“No one will tell you what the real reasons are, but I’ve been collecting them.”
Clarke, who works in the innovation space, goes on to say that he has focused his research on “trying to figure out what this wall is made of and how do we get past it? And, if we can’t get past it, go under it, go around it, or just smash through it.”
Here are 3 of the real reasons people resist change accompanied by whiteboard exercises you can use to help your team embrace change.
1. “I’m too full of emotions and fears to think straight.”
Have you ever slowed down long enough to notice what happens in your brain when you’re presented with a new idea or change?
The instant you are made aware of the idea, your brain evaluates and labels it as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ before you’re even conscious of what’s happening.
In cognitive psychology, this is called “categorization.”
So when your team is faced with a change, you can bet that at least a few of them have categorized it as ‘bad’ before you’ve even finished explaining it.
At that point, the idea’s ‘badness’ has them too full of emotions or fears to think clearly.
But, as children, we have a third category at our disposal when we observe or learn new things; the ‘interesting’ category. Parents know this category well as they watch their children take in newness at every turn.
Clarke says, “As we get older we compress that space and we see everything in terms of this dichotomy between good and bad. Our default is to rate every change as being bad.”
But what if you, as a leader, create space for your team to examine the ‘interesting?’
To do this, pull the team together, grab a whiteboard (virtual or otherwise), sketch out these three columns, and simply ask “How do you feel about the change?”
Clarke shares that most teams will start with the negative. “I’d write them down and I say, ‘Have you got anything new?’ After 15 minutes they’re exhausted. There was nothing else to say about the negativity.”
From there, they will start to explore the positive and interesting. Clarke says, in his experience, that they will get there all by themselves. “They’ll say, ‘Gee, this is unusual. What can we do with this?’”
Clarke says, “this interesting space is where the artist is, it’s where the innovator is, it’s where the inventor is.”
“All I was doing was ratifying their feelings. I was just listening to how they felt. And then before I knew it, they were here. They were saying, ‘This is great.’”
2. “I don’t know how big a deal this really is.”
Have you ever started a project that felt so big and overwhelming that you didn’t even know where to start? This is how change can feel, too.
To address this one, Clarke suggests using the ‘4 door’ whiteboard exercise to give the change “some edges.”
To do this, work with the team to write a list of the following 4 things:
- What are the things we used to be able to do and still can?
- What are the things we couldn’t do before and still can’t?
- What are the things we used to do but can’t now?
- What are the things we couldn’t do before but can now?
Doors 1 and 2 encompass everything that won’t change and represent ‘business as usual.’
Door 3 is the stuff we have to let go of. We do that for the sake of door 4.
Door 4 has just recently opened. It is full of potential and presents us with an opportunity to bring the change to life by exploring new ways of doing things.
“Suddenly everybody calms down. They can see the change has got edges to it,” Clarke says.
3. “I don’t see how I fit into any of this.”
Clarke explains that the third reason people resist change highlights the difference between ‘ownership’ and ‘authorship.’
He says that too often leaders say, “‘Here’s why we’ve got to change. Here’s what has to change. Here’s how it’s got to change. You report to me and by the way, I want you to own it.’ It doesn’t work. What works is authorship.”
To do drive authorship, Clarke recommends what he has coined as the ‘renovator’s delight’ using the 4-box matrix below.
“Have you ever renovated a house?” Clarke asks.
- What did you keep?
- What did you chuck?
- What did you change?
- What did you add?
These are the only 4 questions.
Start by telling the team why they have to change and some specific things that will have to change.
But then ask them to tell you what they think is the best way to get to the end goal. Ask them to tell you how they’re going to make it work.
Then have the team jot down their thoughts into each of the 4 categories.
By doing this, Clarke says, “You empower them to design the change for themselves. Suddenly they’re not responding to change, they’re taking control of change.”
This is what it means to give them authorship.
Clarke closes his TEDx Talk by saying,
“You can keep things the same or you can make a difference. You cannot do both. That is the choice you’ve got to make.”
As a leader, your job is not to keep things the same.
Your job is to help your team realize their potential by making a difference. And you can only make a difference by making a change.
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