Photo by Sven Mieke (Unsplash)
Any coach, regardless of industry, has probably lamented the difficulty of getting people to change. This can be especially frustrating when you know the change would benefit them. It’s easy to conclude that people are simply resistant to change, but people change all the time:
They introduce something new into their morning routine. They try a new restaurant. They buy different clothes. They listen to a new artist. They move across the country, start families, change careers, learn new technologies, and adapt to circumstances they never anticipated. Human beings are remarkably adaptable.
So I think the more interesting question is not, “Why are people resistant to change?” but “Why do people struggle with some changes even when they want the outcome?”
Take fitness, for example. At this point, we have reasonably strong evidence about many behaviors associated with better health: exercise regularly, eat nutritious food, get adequate sleep, manage stress, and so on. A client might seek out a fitness coach because they want to lose weight, reduce pain, or get stronger. They chose the goal. They sought help voluntarily. They may even understand exactly what they need to do.
And then they don’t do it.
Is that resistance to change? Maybe, but that explanation feels lacking.
The reality is that a goal isn’t enough. Knowledge isn’t enough either. If knowing what was good for us reliably changed behavior, nobody would smoke, soda companies wouldn’t exist, and gyms wouldn’t be packed every January before returning to normal in February.
Behavior happens inside a system.
I may want the physique of Ryan Gosling, or his dry wit, or, hell, his hair, but that goal exists alongside a sedentary 9-to-5 job, back-to-back meetings, work stress that leaves me mentally exhausted, limited time to prepare meals, easy access to calorie-dense food, family responsibilities, and an environment designed largely around convenience and sitting still… to name a few of the challenges.
None of those things make my goal impossible. Plenty of people overcome those constraints, but they do work against my goal. The system is not neutral, let alone working to my advantage. I’m not trying to resist change, I’m trying to resistance train.
Put healthy food within reach and I’m more likely to eat it. Put a gym between my office and my house and I’m more likely to stop. Give me control over my schedule and I have more opportunities to exercise. Surround me with people who share the behavior and maintaining it becomes easier. Change the environment and you change the probability of the behavior.
This becomes even more important at work because employees often didn’t choose the change in the first place. Imagine asking someone to adopt a new way of working. You explain the benefits. You provide training. Maybe you bring in a coach. Everyone nods during the presentation. Then they return to work.
Their calendars are still full of meetings. Their performance goals still reward the old behavior. Their manager still asks for the old metrics. Their funding model still encourages the old decisions. Their peers still operate according to the old norms. The list goes on.
Making the change creates more work in the short term, while following the existing process is easier, safer, and more likely to be rewarded. Then we call them resistant. But is it resistance when every policy, metric, celebration, promotion, deadline, and management response tells people how the organization actually works?
We tell people to collaborate but reward individual achievement, so they learn to protect their own work. We tell them to experiment but punish failed experiments, so they learn to avoid uncertainty. We tell them quality matters but celebrate the person who works all weekend to rescue a preventable production failure, so they learn that heroics receive more recognition than prevention. We even tell people to focus while asking for status updates on twelve initiatives, so they learn that appearing busy on everything matters more than finishing something. In each case, the behavior we criticize may be perfectly rational within the system we created.
This is why I’m increasingly skeptical when I hear that an organization has a “resistance to change” problem. Sometimes people genuinely prefer the old way. Sometimes they disagree with the proposed change. Sometimes the new approach is simply worse. But before attributing stalled change to stubbornness, laziness, or mindset, look at the system producing the existing behavior.
What makes the old behavior easier?
What makes the new behavior harder?
What gets rewarded?
What gets punished?
Where does someone assume personal risk by behaving differently?
What constraints remain unchanged?
And perhaps most importantly: does the new behavior actually make anything better for the person being asked to adopt it?
People operating inside a frustrating system usually don’t need another philosophical explanation of why they should change. They’re already overwhelmed by bottlenecks, contradictory priorities, unnecessary work, unrealistic expectations, and problems they can see but cannot address. They’re not looking to join a crusade. They need relief.
So instead of another dry PowerPoint deck or exasperated email, fix something that hurts. Remove an approval that serves no purpose. Eliminate a meeting nobody needs. Reduce competing priorities. Give someone enough control to solve the problem in front of them. Run a small experiment that makes the work noticeably easier. Then let people experience the difference.
Traditional change efforts tend to focus on changing people without changing the conditions producing their behavior. But if we change those conditions enough for people to behave differently, they can observe the result, and belief can follow the evidence. You don’t have to convince someone that a better way works when they can experience it working.
That reframes the coach’s role too. The question is no longer simply, “How do I get these people to change?” It becomes: “What is making the current behavior rational, and what would need to change for a different behavior to become easier?”
That is a much harder question. It is also a much more useful one.