My Biggest Lesson About Change And Resistance
How group dynamics explain how we often create our own resistance
You can also listen to this blogpost on our podcast.
How do you deal with a team that just doesn’t want to? How do you create movement when people seem to prefer to stay where they are? How do you get people to move along with your exciting ideas, whether this is Scrum, Kanban, some technical practice, or something altogether different?
This really is the penultimate question of change management. And one I’ve struggled with since my earliest experiences in the workplace. As a fresh business informatics graduate, I quickly discovered that the best technical solution wasn’t always cheerfully embraced by the people that is designed for. Struggling to understand the human factors at work here, I found myself on a different path and eventually ended up as an organizational psychologist.
You’d think that as a psychologist, I now know what drives people and how I can bring them along in a change. This was somehow what I was expecting from it when I started. But I don’t. In fact, if there’s anything I’ve learned from that journey, it is that it is much harder than books, models and methods make us believe. The richness of human behavior can’t be captured in a four-quadrant model. Neuro-linguistic programming isn’t going to magically resolve resistance like snow under the sun. And personality-tests like Ocean, DISC, and MBTI are not accurate predictors of future behavior at all. This lack of simple answers and tools is frustrating at times, but there is also something liberating about it. In order to understand what drives people, you have to talk to them and build a relationship with them.
“In order to understand what drives people, you have to talk to them and build a relationship with them.”
I’ve always deeply enjoyed my work as a Scrum Master and what can be made possible through Scrum. At the same time, I’ve always found it deeply frustrating when I see something that others don’t seem to see, and I can’t figure out how to get people to see this too. For example, one of my teams was unwilling to come up with a single Sprint Goal. So we always ended up with two or three. In another team, where I also worked as a developer, I often struggled to get others to try new technologies and practices in favor of sticking to the familiar. I remember lengthy arguments, spirited debates, and even some sleepless nights where I mulled over ways to get my team to go along.
Through those experiences, there is one lesson that I learned that may be helpful for other Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches too: if you want to change something, start with the people that are eager to change that too.
Let me explain how I learned this lesson. In my earlier experiences with what I then perceived as “resistance”, I (sometimes automatically) put most of my energy into the people that appeared most skeptical to me. So I would start sending them blog posts and books that I hoped would convince them. Or I gave them a lot of time during Sprint Retrospectives to dig into the reasons for their objections. My hope was that by taking away their worries and reasons to “resist”, I could move everyone along. But instead of overcoming resistance through debates and passionate arguments, I made it worse by essentially putting them on the spot. In what is actually a great example of group dynamics, the group as a whole became more hesitant because most attention was going to those who were skeptical. I was implicitly encouraging social conformity around the objections, where people that were on the fence initially eventually became skeptical because they saw that others were skeptical too. In a paradoxical way, I created my own resistance — like most change agents seem to do.
“In a paradoxical way, I created my own resistance — like many change agents seem to do.”
There was not one moment of insight where I discovered this pattern. But over time, I noticed how it seems better for everyone when I focus my energy on the people who are eager to change something too. This group may be small initially, even one other person. But the same group dynamics where you create your own resistance by pushing harder actually reduce it here. When people see at least some of their peers going along in a change, it lowers the threshold for them to join. Over time, you can draw in the people that are still on the fence, followed by those that are more skeptical. One example of this is when we tried to do pair programming in one team. Most developers weren’t eager from the start, but I and one other eager developer started pairing with the developers that were not super skeptical about it. Since those sessions turned out to be very helpful, and we had a lot of fun while doing so, more skeptical developers eventually started to accept our invitations to pair (with some reluctance). Because everyone — including the skeptical developers — discovered how well pair programming works in certain situations, it quickly became the norm.
The point here is not to ignore people who are less eager to join in trying something new. They usually have good and understandable reasons for not wanting to. As I mentioned before, you have to build a relationship with people to understand what drives them. When people feel heard, seen, and respected, it is so much easier for them to come along. At the same time, the more you focus on “convincing them”, the more likely it is that resistance will spread. So focus your energy on the people that are willing to try. The rest will likely follow. And sometimes they won’t. Or you discover that their objections were totally justified. There are no simple answers.
Hopefully, my lesson is of benefit to you. It certainly saved me and my teams a lot of frustration. And I think we did much better because of it.
Helpful tips
- When people who were initially skeptical decide to give something new a try, celebrate with an inner cheer. It takes huge courage for someone to try something that they initially doubted, and you’ll just push them away when they see you gloat (“see, told you so!”, “look who finally came around”). Appreciate their willingness to try and openly debrief what it was like afterward.
- I’ve always found value in a lighthearted approach to people who are skeptical. Listen to their worries, invite them along in your experiment, and don’t make it a big deal out of it when they don’t want to.
- Although the examples in this post are from teams I was part of, the same group dynamics surface in organizations at large. There too, you gain more by focusing on the people who are eager to join. For one client, we experienced significant doubt about the usefulness of Scrum in two teams. So we simply focused on three other teams and made sure that their experiences were shared in an approachable manner. Soon after, one team approached us to help them make the leap too. And one team never did.
- A Liberating Structure like Conversation Cafe is excellent to explore how people feel about a change. Afterward, you can make an open invitation for anyone who wants to join, to join you.
