A recent blog post by Jim Highsmith, entitled, "Change-Resistance versus Doubt" helped crystallize in my mind something that's been bugging me.
Whenever we engage on a project, we put a tremendous amount of energy into the concepts and efforts around cultural change. We talk a lot about the need to focus on people and their behaviors and not just process or tools. We deploy an entire methodology that helps make this work.
But inevitably, as time goes on, it ends up morphing from this holistic open process built around bringing people into the tent, into one of merely convincing or cajoling people to follow the new rules.
And it completely misses the point.
I don't know that I've ever developed or helped developed a process that I thought was "right." They are (hopefully) better than before, but they are never perfect. The real goal, in my opinion, is the journey to creating an organization that learns to think critically about what's going on and whether or not it's still the best way of doing things. To constantly ask, "What's broken" and to once and for all banish the false "comfort" of "the way we've always done things."
Cultural Change is about getting people out of their rut and participating in the process - honestly and genuinely. It's not about just making them do something different. That should be the outcome, but it's the process of creating that something different that's the key. If you fail at that, you haven't changed the culture at all, you've just replaced one way of doing things with another and set yourselves up to have to do it all over again somewhere down the road.
So "Resistance to Change" needs to be properly understood as "Resistance to Participating in the Process of Change" - but participating in the process sometimes means telling the designer of something new that's it genuinely not going to achieve what is desired and that you therefore need to go in another direction.
And it is critical that when that happens, it is recognized for what it is, because sometimes, resistance isn't resistance.