28 October 2026 · 12 min read

Resistance to change: information, confidence and a say

The word "resistance" is a verdict. It puts the problem inside a person, and it closes the conversation that would have shown what the person was actually saying.

The studies below point at three ordinary things instead: what people were told, whether they think they can cope, and whether anyone asked them.

The three questions Marek asked

Sophie runs operations at a company of about a hundred and twenty people. On Monday she announced that from the first of next month every job moves into a new tracking tool. She chose it herself, and it is a good one.

Marek, the senior planner, asked three questions in the meeting. Does it handle part-deliveries? What happens to the supplier codes? Who decides when the old spreadsheet is switched off? Sophie said all of that would be covered nearer the time.

By Wednesday Marek has not mentioned the tool again. His spreadsheet is open on his screen, updated as usual. In the rollout tracker, Sophie types "Marek: resisting" in the status column.

Marek built that spreadsheet over several years and knows exactly where it bends. Nobody asked him before the tool was chosen. He has no idea whether the new reports will give him what a customer's order needs on the first Friday. He is not against the tool. He is waiting to learn whether it will hold his work, and he is keeping the thing that does in the meantime.

Sophie calls it resistance. Marek would call it prudence.

Do most change initiatives really fail?

Marek is invented. You have probably heard that most change fails. My reading is that the line makes resistance sound like weather, something that always arrives and that nobody can question.

A critical review of five published instances of the claim that 70 per cent of organisational change initiatives fail found no valid and reliable empirical evidence for it (Mark Hughes, Journal of Change Management, 2011).

There is a counterweight. Analysing 200 organisational change case studies, Jones, Firth, Hannibal and Ogunseyin found that the majority of the initiatives were considered successful (Evidence-Based Initiatives for Organizational Change and Development, IGI Global, 2019). That is not a success rate. The abstract does not say how success was judged or by whom. It is a reason to doubt the gloomy figure, and it offers no cheerful one to put in its place.

The gloomy line does a quiet job for the person using it. If failure is the natural state of change, nobody has to look at how this one was run.

What causes resistance to change?

Wanberg and Banas followed employees in a reorganising workplace over time. The information they had received about the changes, their confidence in coping with them and their participation in the change decision process were each predictive of higher openness to the changes (Wanberg and Banas, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2000). Lower acceptance of the changes went with less job satisfaction, more work irritation and stronger intentions to quit. These are associations, not proof that any one of the three causes openness.

Shaul Oreg studied 177 employees facing a large-scale change. Both personality and the organisational context were significantly associated with their attitudes towards it, and those attitudes were in turn associated with job satisfaction, organisational commitment and intention to leave (Oreg, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 2006). So some people are warier of change than others, and the study says so. But context counted as well, and Oreg treated resistance as several attitudes, not one trait. It was one organisation, and the abstract does not say which features of the context mattered.

Lay Marek's Monday over the three. His questions were the information he lacked. He had no way to judge whether he could cope on the first Friday. And he had no part in a decision about his own work. Calling that resistance describes how it looks from the sponsor's desk.

The change on a lot of desks this year points the same way. Culture, manager support and talent practices explain 67% of the impact AI actually has at work - more than twice individual mindset and behaviour (32%) (Microsoft, Work Trend Index 2026, 5 May 2026). That is 20,000 knowledge workers who use AI at work, in 10 markets including the UK, and it is about AI, not about resistance. It is still the same shape: somebody went looking for what decides whether a new way of working lands, and the surroundings outweighed the person.

One caution on the other side. Being open to a change is not the same as the change working: in the Jones analysis, using Kotter's change model, or a democratic or participative leadership style, did not necessarily mean success. The research ties a say to openness. It promises nothing about the result, and neither does Kotter's model.

The signs of resistance, before anybody argues

Most of it is quieter than an argument, and every sign below tells you something about the change before it tells you anything about the person. Any two together are worth a look.

• "We tried that years ago" ends the conversation. It is usually a memory, and it may be an accurate one.
• The new tool is live and the old way carries on underneath it. Marek's spreadsheet, open and up to date.
• A change is announced to silence, and then the workarounds appear. Nobody objected, and nobody moved.
• The same few people carry every rollout. Everyone else has learned that it will be done without them.
• Missing the old way takes the place of a reason. "It was just better before" is often a real objection that has not found its words.
• The next team along is surprised. A change on your side lands on theirs, and they say nothing until it gets in the way of their work.

The person who says nothing

On Thursday Hana, who books the carriers, finds that the new tool drops the second line of a delivery address. It will matter on the first Friday. She watched Marek ask three questions on Monday and get "nearer the time" for his trouble, so she writes it on a sticky note, puts it on her monitor and carries on.

Marek at least asked. 45% of UK employees feel unable to raise a mistake or a risk at work, and 15% say they have made a preventable mistake because they felt unsafe speaking up (Mental Health First Aid England, The cost of workplace silence, 2 February 2026). That survey of 2,000 UK working adults is about speaking up in general, not about rollouts. My reading is that a rollout is where it bites first, because a change produces a fresh crop of risks in the same week it teaches people whether raising them is welcome.

This is the part of resistance that should alarm a sponsor. Sophie's tracker has a status for Marek. It has none for Hana. The objection you can see is the cheap one, because it arrives while it can still be answered. The expensive one is on a sticky note.

And the bill for a change that half-lands is paid twice, once for the old way's inefficiency and again for the new way's overhead, while the people who watched it fail get a good reason to doubt the next one.

Why roadshows and change champions do not overcome resistance

There are two easy wrong answers. The first is a roadshow with a handful of change champions. The second is a bigger communication plan: a weekly email, an FAQ, an intranet page.

Both work on the first of the three, information, and only in one direction. They carry what the sender thought to include, and Marek's questions were not on the slide. A person who asked three questions and was told "nearer the time" has learned how far asking gets.

On my reading, neither touches the other two, though neither study tested a roadshow. A say needs a decision that is still open, and a roadshow arrives after it closes. Confidence in coping is not something a slide can hand over. A roadshow still does a third of the job.

How to overcome resistance to change

None of this needs a product.

Write the questions down before the announcement, and answer them in writing

What happens to my work on day one? What do I stop doing? Who do I ask when it breaks? When is the old way switched off? Where you do not know, write "not decided, you will hear by Friday" and keep to Friday. "Nearer the time" is the answer that costs the most.

Ask the person you would call resistant for their three biggest worries

Then change something because of one of them, and tell them which. The study measured participation in the change decision itself, so choose a worry you can act on while the decision is still open.

Shrink the first step to one real piece of work

Pick a job that can go end to end the new way, leave the old way in place beside it, name a person to ask, and give it a date two weeks out. Confidence in coping is something people gain by coping with something small. That is my reading: the study measured the confidence, not this way of building it.

The weak point in all three is the week the rollout lands, when the diary is full and "nearer the time" arrives.

Common questions about change at work

Is resistance to change always a bad thing?

No, and treating it as bad throws away information. A sceptic often knows where a change does not fit the work, and Marek's three questions were a free test of Sophie's plan. Some resistance is only habit, and that tends to fade once the real objections have been taken seriously.

Why do employees resist change?

Mostly for three ordinary reasons: they do not know enough about it, they doubt they can cope with it, or they had no say in it. Wanberg and Banas found that each of those predicted openness to change. Oreg found personality plays a part too, and context counted as well.

How do you handle someone who resists every change?

Ask them what breaks first, and write the answers down as obstacles the team can test. If they are right, you have saved yourself a failure. If nothing is left once the real objections have been answered, that is a conversation about behaviour, and you can now have it fairly.

What if the decision has already been made?

Say so, plainly, and do not run a consultation on it. The research measured participation in the decision itself, so a pretend one earns nothing. Give people a real say in what is still open: the order, the first job, what carries over from the old way, and when it switches off.

Where MeaningFuel fits in a change that is not landing

The daily insight

A company chooses the values and skills it holds, and each working day everyone gets one short insight on one of them. Three bear on this: Agility, which is a company changing course as conditions change; Adaptability, which is one person adjusting how they work; and Courage, which is speaking up and acting while afraid, and is Hana's week. In an ordinary week a reader might meet a line on letting go of a way of working that used to be right, and another on saying the awkward thing early.

Resistance to change is a problem, and a problem cannot be chosen for the daily culture, so none of this is aimed at your rollout. It is aimed at the months either side of one, when the words are cheap to pick up.

The module: Change, One Step at a Time

Change, One Step at a Time is the module for a team living through a change. It is a short course of daily lessons: ten short lessons across two working weeks, one each working day, for a team's named people. Whoever runs the account, or leads the team, books it, and those who join get a lesson each working day.

It takes one real change the team is working on and runs it as small experiments instead of a launch, using the Improvement Kata, a routine Mike Rother described from his research into the management routines behind continuous improvement. In one lesson, people put "what breaks first?" to the change's best sceptic and write the answers down as obstacles the team can test, not attitudes to manage. And if the experiments show a flaw in the change itself, the module has the team carry that finding upward with the results attached, and counts it as a success.

Two more lessons speak directly to Marek. One treats a workaround as an honest note from the person doing the work on where the change does not yet fit. Another asks the team to name three things the old way did well and how each carries across, and to say plainly what is being let go, because resistance often guards something real. The team lead runs two ten-minute debriefs from a written guide, and between them protects the two-day clock on each experiment from everything else that wants the time.

What Sophie could read, and what she could not

Insights shows how much of a team takes part and how the insights land, pooled, with nobody named. Sophie could see whether the team is taking part, and whether it is doing the module. She could not see who is resisting, because nobody is scored and no screen shows one person's answers or what they wrote. There is no "Marek: resisting" column, on purpose. If she wants to know what he thinks, the module's advice is the same as this article's: ask him what breaks first.

What it does not do

It promises no outcome, and it cannot rescue a change that is wrong. What it does is make raising an obstacle a habit the whole team shares, so that it does not depend on one person being brave enough to go first.

Back to Wednesday

Sophie's status column says Marek is resisting. Put his three questions in the margin beside it. Answer them, and whatever is left over is the resistance worth talking about.

• Resistance to Change
• Change Management
• Team Leadership
• Adaptability
• Workplace Culture