You’re Calling It Change Resistance. It’s Really Loss.
THIS WEEK’S READ
We are asking people to change faster than they have the capacity to adapt.
Research conducted by The Grossman Group and The Harris Poll, recently featured in an article from MIT Sloan Management Review, found that 83% of business leaders are experiencing more major change than ever before.
The same research found that employees can realistically absorb only one or two major changes per year, while executives are planning three or four.
For context, a major change is one that materially alters how people work, what is expected of them, who they work with, or how they understand their role in the organization.
A new strategic plan overlaps with a technology implementation. A restructuring happens alongside a leadership transition. New performance expectations arrive while budgets are being cut and roles are being redefined. Each decision may be reasonable on its own, but together they create a level of disruption that can quickly exceed what people are able to absorb.
And that does not take into consideration people’s starting capacity.
Someone entering a major change in an organization with high trust, clear expectations, and a history of navigating change successfully is starting from a very different place than someone who has just survived a restructuring, lost three coworkers, taken on additional responsibilities, and is already struggling to keep up.
So what happens when we continue to push beyond people’s capacity?
We get what organizations call change resistance.
Employees push back on new initiatives. Disengagement increases. People cling to old processes. Teams struggle to adopt new ways of working. Organizations respond by communicating more, pushing harder, or trying to convince people that the change is necessary.
But we may be diagnosing the wrong problem.
OUR TAKE
The surface-level assumption you will hear most often is that people do not like change.
But change itself is not necessarily what people are resisting.
You’re calling it change resistance. It’s really loss.
If you have been here a while, you have likely heard us say that every system is designed to benefit someone. When you change that system, you are almost always asking someone to give something up.
Sometimes that loss is obvious: a job, a program, a portion of the budget, or an entire team.
More often, it is much less visible: control over a process, expertise, influence, status, relationships, predictability, or even a portion of someone’s identity in their role.
New technology can mean losing expertise in a system someone spent years learning. A restructuring can mean losing relationships, influence, or status. A new strategy can mean walking away from work someone helped build. A new process can mean giving up autonomy. Even growth can create loss when the organization no longer feels like the place people originally joined.
This is important because organizations tend to manage change by focusing almost entirely on what is being introduced. We communicate the new strategy. We train people on the new technology. We explain the new structure. We roll out the new process.
Meanwhile, the people experiencing the change are trying to understand what they are being asked to leave behind, often without that part ever being acknowledged or discussed.
They are left to process the loss on their own. That loss can then surface in ways the organization labels as disengagement, resistance, resentment, or an unwillingness to move forward.
That is why pacing the work matters so much.
Pacing does not mean making change comfortable, and it certainly does not mean organizations should always move slowly. There are moments when the environment demands rapid change and waiting carries greater risk than moving.
Pacing means understanding how much disruption the organization is already carrying before adding more. It means identifying the losses created by a change, understanding who will experience them, and deciding whether those losses need to happen simultaneously or can be sequenced over time.
This is also why understanding your organization’s adaptive capacity is so important.
Two organizations can experience the same amount of change and respond very differently. In an organization with high levels of trust, learning, and healthy risk-taking, people have more capacity to navigate uncertainty. They can ask questions, admit what they do not know, experiment with new behaviors, make mistakes, learn, and adjust.
In an organization where those conditions are weak, the margin is much smaller. Every additional change consumes capacity that may already be stretched thin.
Adaptability, then, is not simply about whether your organization can change. It influences how much change your organization can absorb and how quickly it can absorb it without overwhelming the system.
YOUR NEXT MOVE
Most organizations have a roadmap showing what they plan to change. Far fewer have a roadmap showing how much loss those changes will create.
Take the major initiatives planned for the next year and put them on the same timeline. Then, instead of looking only at what each initiative adds, identify what it requires people to give up.
Where are people losing expertise, autonomy, relationships, status, predictability, control, or familiar ways of working?
More importantly, where are several of those losses landing on the same people at the same time?
If the answer is everywhere, another communication plan will not solve your problem.
You need to consider pacing the change or, at a minimum, account for the consequences of asking people to absorb more than they currently have the capacity to handle. Projects may take longer. Adoption may slow. Productivity may drop. The organization may spend significantly more time and money managing resistance that could have been anticipated from the beginning.
I want to be clear: The goal is not to eliminate loss. Meaningful change to any system REQUIRES loss.
The work is to understand what people are losing, how much they are already carrying, and how much capacity they have left.
Then pace the loss at a rate people can actually handle.
At Well Led, we help organizations understand and strengthen their adaptive capacity so they can navigate change without overwhelming the system. If you are interested in understanding how adaptable your organization is, email info@wellledstrategies.com to start the conversation.
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