Can peoples resistance to change ever be a good thing?
You bet it can. In fact, change agents should not automatically resist resistance — they should learn from it. I was involved in a change effort to make a high-tech, major industrial concern more entrepreneurial, and someone stood up and said that we’d totally missed the fact that there was no way to find critical resources for entrepreneurial ventures in this organization. And he was right. So we asked him to create an internal clearinghouse that would identify key employees’ functional specialties, so when we needed people’s expertise, we’d quickly know how to find them. Not only did we learn from this guy’s criticism, but we embraced it. It’s one thing to promise people that they’ll have a real voice in the change process, but how do you deliver on that promise? From the very first day, you make the process transparent. I learned that lesson about 15 years ago, when I was working on a change project at a money-center bank located in New York City. We had a dedicated conference room
