Somewhere in your organisation this week, a behaviour is being labelled resistance. Somebody is slow on the new system, or quiet in the town hall, or missing from the working group — and by Friday, a status report will call it resistance. This week I’m asking you for one story: the time that label was wrong. The time what got called resistance turned out, on closer inspection, to be something else entirely.
When you move house, somebody packs the boxes and somebody writes the labels. Weeks later, you open the box marked KITCHEN and it’s full of winter coats. The label wasn’t a lie. It was a guess, written in a hurry, by someone who had forty more boxes to pack.
In most organisations, resistance is that label. Written in a hurry, by people under pressure, onto behaviour nobody had time to open.
For twelve weeks now I’ve been making claims in this space — about who creates the resistance, about what trust does to it, about what your people remember and what your supervisors never said out loud. Every one of those claims started the same way. Not with a survey. With a moment in a room where the label and the behaviour didn’t match. So this week I’m not making a claim. I’m asking for yours.
Tell me about the box. The time something in your organisation got labelled resistance and turned out, when you actually opened it, to be something else entirely.
What was the label? What was inside? And what tipped you off?
I’m not asking what the textbooks say it might have been. I’m asking what it was. In your building. On your watch.
The research can tell me how often this happens. It can’t tell me what it looked like on a Tuesday afternoon in your operations review — the meeting where the label got written, the face of the person it got written on. Only you can tell me that.
Some ground rules, because the stories that matter are the ones people hesitate to tell. No company names needed — role and sector are plenty. Composite the details if you must; keep the mechanics true. And if the honest answer is that you wrote the label yourself, say so. You’ll be in good company. I’ve written a few.
One more thing, so you know this isn’t engagement bait. I’m asking now for a reason. In two weeks I’m going to put a name to what I believe is inside most of those boxes — something I’ve been circling all summer without saying out loud. Before I do, I want your evidence on the table, next to mine. And if what you’ve seen contradicts what I’m about to argue, I want that on the table most of all.