You believe in change. You know change is the way to succeed. Everyone on your team says the same thing. So why are you still using the same processes that were developed in 2012?
You’re suffering from Change Resistance. There are symptoms, of course, but they seem to be difficult to spot in yourself. Fortunately, Tom Haak, founder and director of the HR Trends Institute, put together a game of Change Resistance Bingo.
Here’s how you play. Take the following phrases and arrange them on bingo sheets. Every time a phrase is uttered in a meeting, mark it off:
- We need clear roles and responsibilities
- The culture needs to change
- Let’s wait until [name] is back
- What are other organisations doing?
- We need more data
To read the remaining phrases and the rest of the article, click here: Let’s Conduct a Survey and 23 Other Ways to Stop Change
You sound just like the proponents of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Institutions as important as workplaces can easily ruin people’s lives if they change. All change should be viewed skeptically, especially if done to exclude some people for political reasons. Google’s horrible culture is a fine example of the results of not resisting bad change.
Life is change. Nothing can survive without it.
Aren’t Number 1 and Number 15 duplicates?
This feels to all inclusive and borders on change for changes sake is good.
Not all change is good. It’s OK to pushback on change.
Too many companies use lists like these in absolutes. My company labeled everyone who asked for more data, or to survey the market, or even to scale back the growth timeline of one of our major strategies as “change resistent”.
Turns out they were right and 100MM + in the hole later it closed a major failure. Now we are having to cut back our successful programs to save costs…. I wish senior leadership had listened to the “change resistent”.
There is a big difference between change resistance and making changes. The only thing I have against making a change (especially in the workplace) is if we are re-doing an old idea re-worked as a new idea, is that the mistakes made in the past with this idea will not be repeated again. I had to put this out there for the millennial thinking folks who devalue input by the older workers who have seen multiple re-cycled ideas over the years.
Change for the sake of change is exactly as destructive as resisting change for the sake of resisting change. Both are an excuse to avoid thinking. Perhaps new ideas should be investigated, questioned, and analyzed for their merits, instead of trying to reduce all business decisions to a flow chart with no human judgment involved.
Good morning, Ms. Lucas.
I enjoy reading your column. I think sometimes these reasons for opposing change are real and not excuses.
I think the bigger issue is knowing which is which in a specific case.
Would you consider following up this column with some small case studies showing examples of each?
I would welcome the opportunity to sharpen my wits to better know which alternative applies in a given situation.
Thank you.
It really does help to read entire articles: “It’s possible that you’re resisting this particular change because it’s a bad change–those happen for sure–but it’s also possible that you’re just content to complain about how things are.
If you’ve been complaining about the status quo but still spout these phrases, it’s time to take a deep breath and make some change, without conducting another survey.”
Getting input is important; getting buy-in is important; transparency is important. But it’s also important to recognize when a process is being weaponized to stop forward progress.