Last week I left you with a question. If change keeps failing at the same rate it failed twenty years ago, what is the industry getting wrong about why?
Here is the convenient diagnosis. People resist change. They are fearful, irrational, stuck in their ways. Leaders are sober and forward-looking; employees are the friction. The job of change management is to overcome that friction.
It is a flattering story. It is also wrong.
A different pattern emerged. Resistance is not the cause of failure. Resistance is a symptom. The cause is stress — and a meaningful share of that stress is manufactured upstream, by the leaders running the change.
The thing we have spent two decades trying to overcome is, in significant part, a thing we are creating ourselves.
A leader insisting that employees are resisting change is like a bad salesperson trying to overcome objections — not realising that more than half of those objections are of the salesperson’s own making.
The unclear direction. The shifting timeline. The “what’s in it for me” that was never answered. The fourth restructure in five years that nobody explained.
And the effect compounds. Each failed change does not reset the counter — it gets added to it. The town hall that promised one thing and delivered another. The strategic plan that arrived with great fanfare and quietly disappeared eighteen months later. The consultant who came, presented, and left.
By the time the next initiative is announced, people are not responding to the next initiative. They are responding to the running total. And the running total is rarely in the leader’s favour. That is not employee resistance. That is reasonable people responding sensibly to bad leadership inputs.
Once you see it that way, the work changes. You stop trying to defeat the resistance. You start treating the stress. The FCTW data is unusually clear about what reduces stress under change. Three things, every time.
Not the vision-deck version — the version where employees can answer, in their own words, what is being asked of them, why, and what it means for their day on Monday.
In both directions. The leader’s expectations of the employee, and the employee’s expectations of the leader. This is the reason AlEx™ exists.
Rewards and consequences that make the expectations real. Without this, the first two are theatre.
None of this is exotic. None of it is new. What is striking is how rarely it gets done — and how reliably its absence shows up as what we then call resistance.
There are people in every organisation who are genuinely hard to move, for reasons that have nothing to do with leadership. That is real. But it is a much smaller share of what gets labelled resistance than the industry has assumed.
Some of what we read as resistance never had anything to do with this leader, this initiative, or even this organisation. It arrived through the door on the employee’s first day — carried in from family, community, and a lifetime of watching what happens when management announces that things are going to change.
Think of a town whose fathers and grandfathers lived through the Miners’ Strike of 1984–85. The memory of what institutions promised, and what they then did, is not a historical footnote in those families. It is a living instruction about what the word “partnership” means when management uses it. That is not cynicism as character flaw. It is inherited wisdom, earned the hard way by people who are not in the room.
The leader who sees this does not design a better communication strategy. They build a longer runway. They earn trust at a pace that acknowledges the full weight of what people are carrying — which is almost always heavier than the leader can see from inside the institution.
Think about the last change initiative you led, or were part of. The pushback you encountered — how much of it was the people, and how much of it was the conditions the people were responding to? Count honestly. Again.