Transformation programmes die of ambiguity, not resistance
People are blamed for resisting change. More often they are waiting for someone to say precisely what the change is.
When a transformation programme stalls, the diagnosis is usually cultural. People are resistant. The organisation is set in its ways. Change management needs strengthening. This explanation has the advantage of being unfalsifiable and the disadvantage of being wrong most of the time.
What looks like resistance is frequently something simpler. People have been told the organisation is transforming and have not been told what they, specifically, should do differently on Monday. In the absence of that instruction they continue doing what worked before, which is not resistance but competence operating on the only information available.
Where the ambiguity hides
Programme communications are written at the level of intent: we will be customer-centric, data-driven, digital-first. These statements are agreeable and operationally empty. They cannot be acted on, argued with, or used to settle a disagreement between two teams on a Tuesday afternoon.
The ambiguity that matters is more specific. Who decides now, where previously someone else did? Which activity should stop, given that nothing has been removed from anyone’s workload? What does success look like for my team this quarter, in terms I can measure?
What resolves it
- Name what stops. Every transformation adds work; very few explicitly remove any, and the result is that people default to the old work because it is the work they are still measured on.
- Change the measures first. Behaviour follows measurement far more reliably than it follows communication, and a team told to change while measured on the old outcome will not change.
- Move decision rights explicitly and in writing. Ambiguous authority during transformation produces paralysis that is then read as reluctance.
- Translate the vision into role-level instructions. A statement that cannot be converted into a different action for a named person is not yet a plan.
- Answer the personal question. Everyone affected is privately asking what this means for their role, and a programme that will not address it directly leaves people to assume the worst.
Where genuine resistance appears
Real resistance does exist, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than managed around. It usually comes from people who understand something about the operation that the programme has not accounted for — the compliance step that looks redundant and is not, the manual check that catches an error the new process will miss.
Treating that as an obstacle wastes the most valuable information available to the programme. It is far more useful to assume the objection is informed, ask what it protects against, and design for it. Programmes that do this find that their loudest critics become their most credible advocates, which is worth more than any amount of communication.
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