Six months into a change, the pattern is familiar. The objections are specific, well argued and repeated by the same small group. The support is warm, general and offered by people who then go back to their own work. Most people agree the change makes sense. It is losing anyway, and the owner is puzzled, because the case for it is good.
The puzzle comes from assuming support and opposition are symmetrical: if most people favour a change, the favourable majority should be the stronger force. In practice it is often the weaker one, for structural reasons. Machiavelli noticed this five centuries ago, observing that a reformer has “enemies in all those who profit by the old order”, and only lukewarm defenders among those who would gain from the new. People who lose from a change usually lose something specific, know exactly what it is, and lose it soon. People who gain usually gain something general, uncertain and later.
This article explains that imbalance, how to uncover what the current way of working quietly gives people, why resistance is often information about the design rather than attitude, and how to design a change so that it has real support when it needs it. It is general information for owners and managers leading changes in how their business works.
Losses are concentrated; gains are diffuse
Compare what each side experiences:
| Those who lose | Those who gain | |
|---|---|---|
| How specific | A known role, routine, budget or freedom | A general improvement |
| How certain | Certain: it is in the plan | Uncertain: it depends on the change working |
| When | Soon, often at the start | Later, once the new way is running |
An interest that is specific, certain and immediate produces sustained effort. One that is general, uncertain and later produces goodwill, and goodwill does not turn up to meetings.
Timing makes it worse. Losses usually land early, because restructures, retired systems and changed routines come first. Gains land late, because they depend on the new way working and people becoming competent at it. So there is often a period, several months long, in which all the costs have been paid and none of the benefits has appeared. During that window, the only visible evidence supports the opposition. Many changes fail there, and the post-mortem blames poor communication.
What the current way quietly gives people
A business case for change usually makes two arguments: what the business gains by changing, and what it loses by standing still. A fuller view has four:
- Gains from changing: the benefits.
- Costs of changing: what the move costs the people making it, in effort, risk and temporary loss of competence.
- Costs of not changing: what happens anyway if nothing changes.
- Gains from not changing: what the present arrangement gives people, every day, that the new one may not.
The fourth is the one almost never written down, and it is often what is holding the current way in place. It usually consists of informal controls, absorbed variability and unwritten skill: a supervisor’s ability to swap jobs late in the day, a long-standing phone relationship that fixes problems the formal process cannot, a spreadsheet that copes with exceptions the new system does not handle. None of it was ever recorded, so the new design simply removes it.
The helping people accept change article uses the same four quadrants to understand individuals. Here, use them to examine your own plan, and ask three questions:
- What does the current way give people that the new way must reproduce?
- What are we deliberately removing, and how will we compensate?
- Are our benefits new, or already partly delivered informally? If the present arrangement already produces some of the value the plan claims, the change formalises it rather than creates it, and the true benefit is smaller. The what would have happened anyway article covers setting a realistic base case.
Ask someone other than the change’s champion to gather the answers, through conversations with the people doing the work. A champion asked to list what the old way does well will tend to list very little.
Resistance is often a design signal
When a change stalls, “resistance” is a convenient explanation, because it places the problem in people’s attitudes and leaves the plan unexamined. Often the resistance is pointing at something real:
- A loss nobody acknowledged: status, autonomy, a valued relationship, skill that no longer counts.
- A structural barrier: the new process adds steps, conflicts with how people are measured or paid, relies on unreliable data or needs skills people do not yet have.
- Overload: several changes landing on the same people while they keep customers served.
- Low trust: past changes that promised much and delivered little.
Fix the structural barriers first. Removing an extra step or a conflicting target often achieves more adoption than any amount of persuasion. The stakeholders you do not control article covers treating resistance as information.
One caution in the other direction. The fact that opposition is louder than support says nothing about whether a particular objection is right. Record each substantive objection in the objector’s own words and judge it on its merits, regardless of who makes it or how often. Well-informed objections from people closest to the work are often the best evidence available about whether the plan holds.
Redistribute certainty
More argument does not fix the imbalance, because it addresses neither cause: supporters’ exposure and everyone’s reasonable doubt about a future nobody has seen. Design responses work better:
- Reduce supporters’ exposure. If backing the change is risky for someone, because the person who controls their workload or review is losing from it, open support will not appear. Give visible cover, and remove the ability to penalise supporters.
- Make something real early. People believe what they have experienced. A small working example that people can see and use converts more support than a complete plan, even if building it early is less efficient.
- Create a near, specific gain. Find a group that can gain something concrete and soon, and design it in. That group then has the same kind of interest as the opposition.
- Hold people harmless during the transition. If people will be measured on figures the change disrupts, adjust those measures for a defined period, so nobody is punished for the change’s teething problems.
- Put the costs and the proof closer together. Where possible, sequence the change so a visible benefit arrives before the second wave of costs.
Involve those who lose, early
The people who lose most from a change usually know most about what the current way does well. Bring them into the design rather than presenting it to them finished. Ask them to help design how the new way will reproduce the hidden value they currently provide, and give them a genuine say in the details. Not everyone will be won over, and some losses will remain. But people who helped shape a change are far less likely to fight it, and their knowledge makes the design better.
Do not stack changes on the same people
Resistance is sometimes nothing more than overload. When the same team is asked to adopt a new system, a new process and a new structure in the same quarter while keeping customers served, slow adoption is a rational response to too much at once. Sequence changes so each group has one significant change in progress at a time where possible, and give people time to become competent before the next one arrives.
Know which levers you hold
Before starting, ask a plain question: which of the conditions that shape behaviour can we actually change, and which must we request? Changing what people are measured on, how work is scheduled, who decides what and what tools they use are levers. Explaining why the change is good is not. A change that must request every lever from someone else will be negotiated person by person, and the person leading it should know that before they begin.
A worked example
This is an illustration. A 40-person precision engineering business is moving production scheduling from shift supervisors to a central planner using scheduling software. The case is strong: better on-time delivery, less overtime and clearer information for customers.
Three months in, adoption is slow. Supervisors keep adjusting the schedule by hand. The owner’s first reading is that the supervisors are resisting.
The owner asks the office manager, who has no stake in the project, to talk with each supervisor about what the current arrangement lets them do. The conversations reveal that supervisors have been quietly absorbing machine breakdowns, absences and rush jobs by swapping work between machines late in the day. That flexibility is a big part of why on-time delivery is as good as it is. The new schedule, fixed the evening before, removes it. Part of the benefit the plan claimed was already being delivered informally, by supervisors.
The owner maps losses and gains. Supervisors lose control and a skill they are proud of, immediately and certainly. The gains, better delivery and less overtime, are spread across the business and arrive later. The supervisors’ monthly output figures are also likely to dip during the transition, through no fault of their own.
The design changes:
- Reproduce the hidden value. The schedule now keeps a daily flexible slot on each line that supervisors control, so they can still absorb breakdowns and rush jobs.
- A near, specific gain. Supervisors no longer rebuild the next day’s schedule late on Friday afternoons, which they all disliked.
- Hold them harmless. For three months, supervisors’ output figures are reported but not used in performance reviews.
- Something real early. The new approach runs fully on one line first, and the other supervisors spend a shift there.
- A realistic benefit. The forecast improvement in on-time delivery is reduced, because part of it already existed.
Within two months, two supervisors are asking for the approach on their own lines. Overtime falls, and on-time delivery improves, by less than the original plan claimed but by a real amount.
How this applies to a small Australian business
- Map losses and gains by how specific, certain and soon they are.
- Ask what the current way gives people, and design to reproduce or compensate for it.
- Check whether claimed benefits are already partly delivered.
- Fix structural barriers before adding persuasion.
- Judge objections on their content, not their volume.
- Create early, specific gains and a small working example.
- Hold people harmless on disrupted measures during transition.
- Know which levers the change actually controls.
Signals worth watching
- Specific objections and only general support.
- Workarounds growing after a change.
- Benefits that rely on removing informal flexibility.
- Costs front-loaded and benefits undated.
- People penalised by measures the change disrupts.
- Objections dismissed because of who raises them.
- The same team carrying several changes at once.
Common mistakes
- Treating resistance as attitude rather than information.
- Writing a business case without the gains from not changing.
- Responding to stalled change with more communication.
- Removing informal controls without replacing them.
- Front-loading all the losses and back-loading all the proof.
- Using the imbalance as a licence to ignore valid objections.
- Presenting a finished design to the people who know the old way best.
Frequently asked questions
Doesn’t this just slow change down? It usually speeds adoption, because the change is designed to work for the people who must use it. The extra time is spent early, where it is cheapest.
Should we compensate everyone who loses? Not necessarily. Some losses are the point of the change. Acknowledge them, explain why, and support people through the transition.
What if the opposition is simply wrong? Then show it with evidence, ideally a working example. Dismissing it without evidence tends to strengthen it.
How do we find what the current way gives people? Ask the people doing the work what the present arrangement lets them do, and what they would miss. Conversations work better than surveys.
What if the change has no group that gains anything soon? Then it has no natural supporters during the hardest months. That can be a conscious choice, but make it knowingly, and plan extra support and patience for that period.
Who should lead those conversations? Someone trusted and independent of the change’s champion, so people feel free to describe what really works.
Questions to ask
- Who loses what, how certainly and how soon?
- Who gains what, and when?
- What does the current way give people that the new way does not yet reproduce?
- Which of our claimed benefits already exist informally?
- Which levers that shape behaviour do we control?
- What small, real example could people experience early?
Bringing it together
Change often stalls not because the case is weak but because its losses are specific, certain and early while its gains are general, uncertain and late. Map that imbalance, then design around it: find what the current way quietly gives people and reproduce or compensate for it, check whether your benefits are really new, fix structural barriers before persuading, and judge objections on their content. Create a near, specific gain, hold people harmless while measures settle, and make something real early so people can believe what they have seen.
Source: KEVOS notes, drawing on teaching material on change leadership and resistance, the decisional balance sheet associated with I. Janis and L. Mann (1977), and a passage from N. Machiavelli’s The Prince used in change management teaching. Examples and figures in this article are illustrations. This article is general information.
