9.2 Resistance as a Part of Change

Change often fails due to bad planning or bad execution. But what if you have taken the time to carefully plan the change effort and have worked hard to execute it? The process you put in place still can flounder. It may never reach its full value or, worse, fails entirely. The critical factor may be resistance to change, a condition present in every change effort and in every work environment. In spite of your good ideas, many people will see them in a different light. They believe that the change is not in their own best interest or that of the company’s. They then act on this belief, doing whatever they can to stop the change from happening.  

Some people who are involved in developing change initiatives have the attitude that their position of power, or even the simple obvious value of their idea, will outweigh those resisting; there- fore, in the end, the change will take place. This opinion is often held by site management or even the consultants who are hired to help develop and deploy the initiative.  

Yet this approach is extremely dangerous. Resistance, if ignored, can potentially destroy even the best idea. At the least, it will severely undermine the effort and its potential value. If, however, you understand what is going on, you can take preemptive action to address it as part of the process design and, thereby, minimize the problems that unaddressed resistance can provide.

9.3 Why Do People Resist?

Why do people resist change? The simple answer is that they do not view the change as an improvement, even if you and your team do. Often, if asked, people will tell you they see it as a step in the wrong direction and not in either their best interest or the best interest of the company.  

Sometimes they are correct. But often their feelings are clouded by their emotional response to a perceived mismatch between the new environment (what you are trying to do) and their comfort zone (the area in which they operate on a daily basis and in which they feel a certain degree of comfort). Within this comfort zone, they do not feel threatened by either the work or the environment. This state is often called the status quo.  

Take people out of their comfort zone and they not only feel uncomfortable. They also do whatever they can to restabilize their environment. Sometimes this is easy for them to do. But at other times, protecting their environment can be difficult or outright impossible. At these times, an individual’s level of stress increases; they try even harder to restore the status quo. Thus, a critical component of this comfort zone model is that the further you take people beyond this zone, the more that stress levels increase to the point where they become unbearable. The stress can become so severe that people try to restore the status quo by resisting the change.  

Consider the four examples at the beginning of this chapter. In the first, the planning and scheduling initiative failed because the operators and maintenance foremen involved didn’t like the new process and simply refused to do it. In the second example, the mechanics did not like the idea of a structured preventive maintenance program directed by a foreman vs their existing process directed by the operators. Furthermore, they did not like having to perform scheduled preventive maintenance. They found much more enjoyment in doing the tasks that they were asked to perform in order to keep the production line running. Unlike the first example, they did not feel that they could simply refuse to take on the new job tasks. Their experience was one of punishment accompanying refusal to do work. Nevertheless, they still resisted by doing the work poorly in hopes that management would become dissatisfied with the initiative and allow them to return to their status quo.

In our third example, which focused on operators doing minor maintenance, the operators also did not feel that they could simply refuse. Yet they still had a strong desire to resist this new initiative. Their solution was simply to get rid of the tools needed to do the work. After all, without the correct tools, they could not perform minor maintenance and could return to their status quo. The fourth example, work materialization, was also resisted by those given the materialization assignment. Their resistance took the form of a low-key refusal. Instead of outright refusal to do the work, they went through the motions so that those looking in from the outside would think the work was being done when, in actuality, it was not.