After 25 years in change management consulting, Change Leadership Coach and Top10 ERP advisor Martha Garza built her career on a belief she now knows to be false: that people resist change. The truth is far more human and far more useful than that. Read how Martha sheds light on this important topic.
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I spent over 25 years reinforcing a belief I now know to be untrue.
Careers in consulting, including my own working with Fortune 500 companies, have been built on the idea that people resist change, especially big change. All those change management methodologies, the professors, the conference speakers, the self-proclaimed “experts,” the Organizational Change theory of the week, they all say the same thing: people resist change, and your job is to overcome that resistance.
What if I told you that’s a big, fat lie?
Coming from someone who made a career in change management consulting, that may sound strange. But it’s precisely what drove me to dig deep and understand what’s really happening inside organizations during large-scale projects. And what I found changed everything about how I do this work.
A Little Test
Before we go further, let’s put this idea of “resistance to change” to the test.
Have you ever moved across the country for a new job, uprooting your family and your home? Have you ever made the decision to get married? Did you leave the comfort of your parents’ house to attend college somewhere new? Those are enormous, life-altering changes, and most of us made them willingly.
Now consider this: what if your boss announced today that no one could leave the office at lunch anymore because he wants to build team camaraderie? What if your spouse declared tonight that the TV goes off Wednesday through Sunday so you can “broaden your spare-time activities”?
Suddenly, the pushback feels very different, doesn’t it?
Humans are perfectly fine with life-altering change when they choose it. But when the lunch spot changes without their input? Time to polish the résumé. There’s a well-known idea attributed to both Peter Senge and Peter Bregman that captures this perfectly: People don’t resist change; people resist being changed. It’s not a new idea, but we don’t act like we believe it.
What “Resistance” Actually Means
Let’s take this a step further and look at what “resistance” actually means. By definition, it is “an opposing force,” and not a passive one. Resistance means “the attempt to prevent something by action or argument.” Actively prevent. It is also defined as the “use of force or violence to oppose someone or something.”
We see real resistance at politically charged demonstrations. We see it in history when Napoleon waged war across Europe. We watch it play out in films when soldiers fire from foxholes at advancing tanks. That is resistance.
Is that what we see in our companies? In my experience, no. No one is pointing a gun at a project manager because she proposed a new workflow. Employees aren’t blowing up cafeterias because the company is rolling out AI. There is no “resistance.”
If It’s Not Resistance, What Is It?
In the late 1990s, candy manufacturer Hershey was implementing SAP for the first time. Everything was done right. Employees had been trained. Customizations and integrations were working. Three full rounds of integration testing and UAT had been completed across every department. The Go/No Go results were a clear “Go.” There was even a go-live celebration with hundreds of attendees, including the CEO.
A few months later, the company lost millions because candy never made it to store shelves in one region of the country during Halloween, their most critical selling season.
What happened? A handful of loyal, long-tenured employees at one distribution center quietly kept doing things the manual way they’d done for twenty years; they bypassed the new system entirely. When interviewed, it turned out these employees loved Hershey. Some had worked there for decades. One man admitted he had a son with special needs. He was terrified that if he couldn’t figure out the new system, he’d lose his job and with it, everything his family depended on.
Was that resistance? No, that was fear.
What the Experts Say
This behavior is NOT resistance. It is not violent opposition or an attempt to prevent or fight, so what is it then?
There is a growing body of research that confirms what that story illustrates so powerfully. Let’s dive in to what the experts say:
Matthew James, PhD, tells us we are literally wired to change and grow. “Whatever stops changing and growing begins to dissolve or die. Change is within us.” Other researchers describe what happens during large-scale change as a natural neurological response, a function of the amygdala. It is not resistance. It is biology.
Prosci, the globally recognized change management research company, has spent decades collecting data on why big projects fail. Their findings consistently show that what we label “resistance” is actually driven by:
- Fear
- Lack of confidence
- Lack of awareness
- Personal concerns and circumstances
Rosabeth Kanter, Harvard professor and change management thought leader, identifies the predictable sources of this reaction: people feel a loss of control, uncertainty abounds, they fear losing face if they accept the change, or they question their own competence in the new environment.
And Fred Nickols, a leading change management expert, puts it most simply: “It’s evidence that people care about something they want to protect.”
Caring about something you want to protect sounds very different from forcefully opposing something, doesn’t it? It sounds a lot like being human.
Were those folks at Hershey aggressively opposing us? No, they were doing the exact opposite; they were pulling in, hunkering down, preserving their way of life!
The Resistance Pyramid: Why Our Traditional Playbook Fails
For decades, change management has relied on what I call the Resistance Pyramid. The logic goes like this: people push back because they don’t know what’s coming, so you tell them. Once they know, you train them. And if they still won’t budge, you restructure their role so they have no choice.
Think about how that played out for those employees at Hershey. If someone is terrified of losing their job and the income that supports their family, their child’s care, their entire way of life, does sending a project communication email fix that? Does a two-day SAP training session make them feel secure?
Of course not. And yet that is exactly what our industry has prescribed for years.
The end result of that approach isn’t buy-in. It’s terrifying compliance. And I’d ask every leader reading this to consider: do you want employees who are compliant, or employees who are committed? Because there is a profound difference between the two, and it shows up directly in your project outcomes.
Changing How We Think About Change (And What to Do Instead)
The first step is reframing the reaction itself. What we have been calling “resistance” is a natural, predictable, universal human response to change. It is not an attack to be countered. It is not a problem to be eliminated. It is something to be understood.
Three things are true of this reaction every single time:
- It is predictable.
- It will always happen.
- It is not resistance.
Once we accept that, the path forward becomes clearer.
Key Change Management Tools That Work
The tools that actually work are not about overcoming opposition. They are about addressing fear, building trust, and restoring a sense of control. That means involving people early, communicating honestly and often, and putting your own leaders front and center as the human faces of the change.
No consultant, no matter how skilled, can do that last part for you. Your employees trust the leaders they know. When those leaders show up, visibly and actively, as champions of the change, the entire dynamic shifts.
The reaction to change is not something to fight. It is something to understand. And when you do, you stop wasting energy battling a lie and start doing the work that actually moves people forward.
FAQs
If people don’t resist change, why do ERP projects fail?
Because we’ve been misdiagnosing the problem for decades. When employees struggle to adopt a new system, we call it resistance and respond with more communication, more training, and more pressure. But if the real issue is fear, none of those responses actually help. We’re treating the wrong thing entirely.
What’s the difference between compliance and commitment, and why does it matter?
Compliant employees go through the motions. Committed employees actually believe in what they’re doing. On an ERP project, that difference shows up directly in your data quality, your process adoption, and your ROI. You can mandate compliance. You can’t mandate commitment.
What should leaders do when they see employees struggling with a new system?
Get curious before you get corrective. Ask what’s getting in the way. More often than not, you’ll find a fear or personal concern that’s easy to address once you know it’s there.
How is this different from standard change management?
Traditional change management is built on overcoming opposition. This approach is built on understanding people. That shifts the tone entirely, from broadcasting project communications to having real conversations, and from relying on outside consultants to putting your own trusted leaders front and center.
What about employees who flat-out refuse to change?
While true refusal exists, it’s much more rare than we think. When someone won’t move forward, dig into the why. There’s almost always an unaddressed fear or a trust problem underneath it.