Change Resistance

At the social system level, change resistance is the tendency for a system to resist change even when a surprisingly large amount of force is applied. At the individual social agent level, change resistance is the refusal of a person or organization to fully support or adopt new behavior. Thus we really have two terms: systemic change resistance and agent change resistance.

In big difficult social problems, it is systemic change resistance that we are speaking of when we say "change resistance." This is because the root of the problem invariably lies within the structure of the system, and not within its agents.

To illustrate the critical importance of change resistance, let's look at a recent interview with Al Gore, published in the September/October 2006 issue of Sierra Magazine. The interview began this way: (Bolding added)

"Question: How do you feel about the reception to An Inconvenient Truth?

"Al Gore: I'm gratified that the reviews have been 99 percent positive because more people will be exposed to the message. I've seen times in the past when there was a flurry of concern about global warming, and then, like a summer storm, it faded. But this time, it may be different.

"Question: Jeb and George Bush have said they won't see your film, and I'm sure they speak for many who just don't want to hear your message. How do you get past that resistance?

"Al Gore: That's a question I've been trying to answer for 30 years, and part of the answer is persistence. And part of the answer I don't know yet."

In other words, Al Gore doesn't know how to solve the change resistance part of the problem.

But it can be solved with the right approach. For how the phenomenon of change resistance applies to the sustainability problem and the work of Thwink.org on using the concept of change resistance to better analyze and solve the problem, please see The Missing Abstraction: Change Resistance as the Crux of the Sustainability Problem.

In the field of organizational development change resistance is also known as resistance to change, organizational momentum, or inertia. Peter Senge, in his highly influential The Fifth Discipline, 1990, page 88, describes the cause of the phenomenon this way using systems thinking and feedback loops: (bolding added)

"In general, balancing loops are more difficult to see than reinforcing loops because it often looks like nothing is happening. There's no dramatic growth of sales and marketing expenditures, or nuclear arms, or lily pads. Instead, the balancing process maintains the status quo, even when all participants want change. The feeling, as Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts put it, of needing 'all the running you can do to keep in the same place' is a clue that a balancing loop may exist nearby.

"Leaders who attempt organizational change often find themselves unwittingly caught in balancing processes. To the leaders, it looks as though their efforts are clashing with sudden resistance that seems to come from nowhere. In fact, as my friend found when he tried to reduce burnout, the resistance is a response by the system, trying to maintain an implicit system goal. Until this goal is recognized, the change effort is doomed to failure."

Change resistance tends to be high when an agent perceives they will be worse off if they adopt the new behavior, such as when the short term losses outweigh the long term benefits. Change resistance can also be due to fear of the unknown, habit, insecurity, and so on. However most change resistance is due to incompatibility between an agent's current behavior incentives and the desired change. To overcome change resistance in a population generally requires analysis of the agent types and the structural forces at play.

Change resistance is also known as the social side of the problem. For more please see What is the "social side" of the problem? This argues that change resistance is the crux of the sustainability problem, which is a huge insight. In other words, over 95% of all problem solving effort is directed at the wrong part of the problem: the technical side, which is the proper practices to follow to live sustainably. If environmentalists would redirect their efforts to analysis of the social side of the problem, and then use the results to "push" on the system at high leverage points that can be used to overcome change resistance, we would see more gains in 3 years than we have seen in the last 30.