"They resist change", "They do not want to participate", "They are not aligned", "In this company changes do not work". Phrases of this style are frequently heard at the strategic levels of many companies. The resistance change is defined as an erroneous or evil conduct, but in all cases undesirable. There are other possible looks. Let's see.
Change and stability
In open systems such as a cell tissue, a family or a company, two essential conditions for its existence are verified, such as the ability to grow, mature or develop and, simultaneously, the ability to ensure stability, self-regulation or constancy of certain factors.
Although there are different names for these two capacities, we can call the growth morphogenesis and the stability stability homestasis. In all open systems these two capacities are present and combine their functions to achieve an organized development of the whole.
The disorderly growth poses enormous risks to the survival of the system, which can be seen in the Enron case or in the expansion of mortgage-based financial businesses that wiped out the largest investment banks in the US.
But if the system responds to external variations with extreme rigidity, it also risks its survival, which can be easily observed with companies that are absorbed by more competitive groups or that simply close down because they cannot assimilate market fluctuations.
Ongoing dialogue between development functions and self-regulatory functions ensures safe and sustainable long-term growth.
The model is replicated if we consider the company, a group of collaborators or a single person “system”. They are all systems seen in different perspectives.
Resistance to change
From this perspective, resistance to changes can be understood as a self-regulatory function of the system.
Imagine that a certain development stimulus sent to a sector of the company generates a reaction of resistance or preservation of stability. Those who assume resistance to change are sending a response, a signal that indicates: "We cannot process that stimulus."
The function of maintaining stability is not capricious: it indicates that the sector that promotes resistance did not manage to capture the information or that it translated the stimulus as a threat to its survival.
If these signs are transformed into signs of evil or laziness, the opportunity to understand the message and to change the situation without leaving injuries is lost.
The efficiency of the stimuli
Not all stimuli are efficient. Some have an irrelevant impact because they are not clear (from the point of view of the receivers), because they are not intense enough (they are confused among many other stimuli that are processed at the destination), or because they do not arrive through the appropriate channel (access to the destination is by a road usually little traveled).
A common case is when the drivers of novelty generate stimuli based on the resources they have and not on the resources necessary to efficiently reach the recipients.
The clearest example is the publication of key information on the Intranet, which in some companies rarely reaches the recipients because people are too busy to sit and research the news on the different pages of the internal areas.
Of course, the Intranet is an economic resource, but not necessarily efficient.
The threat of stimuli
Beyond the medium and the chosen format, some stimuli that actually reach their destination are interpreted as threats from various causes.
A stimulus is read as a threat when it prompts some behavior that the recipient does not understand how to operate or can decipher the real benefit that it will bring to his function and to the company.
Many stimuli define "what to do" but omit "how to do it", assuming that the other side has the right resources and tools to automatically transform intentions into action.
An everyday example is the introduction of management control systems. Employees often confuse management control with personal surveillance, assume that the company mistrusts their work effort, and are offended by the lack of awareness of their daily commitment to the business.
It is a painful misunderstanding, based on the scarcity of the resources allocated for an adequate internal positioning of the management control systems and their strategic, not police, function.
Finally, a stimulus is seen as a threat when it proposes a behavior that requires skills that are not available, or worse still, that are very difficult to acquire with the available profiles and means.
Resistance is a traffic light
For this cyber approach, resistance is always a signal that indicates the state of information flows in the company's networks.
The existence of resistance signals should be interpreted as the verification of the health of the system and not as a defect, making it easier to detect towards which area or level attention should be focused.
Often the resistance in companies is not opposed to changes in themselves, but to the way in which they are proposed and the implementation methodologies, because they are perceived as brakes to maintain the rhythm of operations.
From an optimistic reading of resistance, it is much easier to accept it as an opportunity to generate the necessary corrections to facilitate the changes to be incorporated in a balanced and safe way. In this sense, resistance to change is always good news.
