Using Resistance for Change

IDEOLOGY AND ACTION An ideology represents a way of looking at the world that tends to maintain the status quo of a particular group through a systematic bias -- a distortion that's largely unconscious and unintentional. The particular bias inherent in the collaborative ideology of Organization Development (O.D.) is apparent not only in helping strategies (e.g., developing "team" management) but in the values placed on various sources of influence to change. In The Planning of Change Warren Bennis defined planned change as: "…a conscious, deliberate, and collaborative effort to improve the operations of a human system…" This definition is noteworthy because it makes O.D.'s collaborative ideology explicit, as if planned change could not be conceived of without collaboration. More implicit is the reality that planned change in these terms is an attempt to change clients' behavior so it manifests and affirms the value of collaboration. There are several sources of influence in the change process: The power-coercive approach is based on political, economic, and/or moral sanctions as sources of influence, is widespread in organizations but not particularly valued by change agents.   The empirical-rational approach relies on knowledge as a source of influence, is valued somewhat more (the change agent, as "expert," attempts to change the individual's conceptual/perceptual organization). With the normative-re-educative approach preferred in O.D., knowledge is less a source of influence than is a system of mutual influence. The major objective is "learning to learn;" where clients develop their own ability to examine and reconstruct premises, and apply this process to deal with future similar problems. More has been written about the concepts of change than about how to make change happen. Theories of planned change acknowledge the presence of forces for change and resistance to change, but resistance tends to be interpreted as the client's problem (the coach/consultant is usually seen as a source of positive energy). The social and cultural values those of us in helping roles bring into the system, along with our individual predispositions, are rarely taken into account. I believe the coach/consultant's conscious task is to think of change within a system of mutual influence. The client and coach share knowledge and the coach aids the client's growth, partly through examining together the premises of their relationship. It's also important to openly examine the extent to which we as coaches/consultants unwittingly fail to collaborate and instead maintain the status quo as "expert." For example, viewing resistance as the client's problem maintains a biased view of the client as dependent. IT IS INHERENTLY CONTRADICTORY TO ARGUE ON THE ONE HAND THAT CHANGE OCCURS THROUGH A RELATIONSHIP, AND ON THE OTHER HAND THAT RESISTANCE TO CHANGE IS NOT A PROPERTY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BUT RATHER THE FAULT OF ONLY ONE PARTY. Every time we say the system must change, we maintain the underlying status system (coach/consultant as expert). Every time we label the client as "resisting change" we maintain the underlying status system. Both coach/consultant behaviors reinforce the status quo! By ignoring the role of the coach in maintaining the status quo, we may block the normative, re-educative approach's highly valued goal of learning to learn about the system's premises. SOURCES OF RESISTANCE Resistance to change is functional when not carried to extremes. In other words, the energy we put into resisting change also permits us to preserve balance in our lives by relegating habitual responses to the unconscious. If we couldn't do this we'd go crazy, continually bombarded with data we'd have to assess anew every moment. In this sense, some resistance is inevitable. Two key components of resistance are selective perception and selective retention -- these generalizations help us organize our understandings of our environment. Unfortunately, they also keep us from exploring the differences between experiences that are otherwise similar. As we grow up, we learn to depend on others' expertise in various roles -- parents, teachers, doctors, sports coaches. Basically, society teaches us to accept the status quo. This leads to self-distrust in the face of potential change ("I shouldn't") and even to regression (as in reverting to old, familiar practices in new situations). All of these, of course, are processes to which the coach/consultant would be as readily subject as the client. Yet resistance is almost always discussed in the context of client behavior. Moreover, while resistance is theoretically functional, the word takes on a pejorative quality when we talk about "client resistance." No one else seems to have written about resistance as a property of an interpersonal interaction; rather, there are theories of resistance in social systems and resistance in individuals. Attempts to eliminate resistance, therefore, tend to focus on the targets of change. If team members are "resisting" their manager's directives, for example, we might facilitate group meetings where we communicate the need for change and encourage group plans to enact the change. In doing this we might use joint diagnosis and consensus-building to reduce feelings of threat, to engage peoples' interest, to help them feel the project is at least somewhat their own, and try to make it fit their values and ideals. We search for the key "defenders" of the status quo and try to enlist their support for the change effort by taking their concerns seriously: What are the threats to their well-being?  What might be dysfunctional about the proposed change that we've overlooked? What have we not yet understood about the sources of their mistrust? We can use resistance to show the "sore spots" in a change situation. These efforts may well be helpful, but they only reinforce the unexamined premise that we (or their managers) are not part of the problem. Anthropologists are good role models for us. If we see organizations as if we were anthropologists, we're better able to observe even subtle differences between our perceptions and those of our clients. We appreciate the importance of understanding clients' values and sources of identification and of determining where our values are likely to fit, rather than vice versa. We are less likely to forget that difficulties in a change effort may stem from our own assumptions about what clients need. What actually takes place in so-called collaborative relationships may differ only in degree from the more traditional role interaction of doctor-patient, marked by feelings of dependency (or counter-dependency) and deference, accompanied by some degree of discomfort and non-compliance. However, because collaborative behaviors on the part of the coach are assumed, we tend to explain any resistance we encounter on some other basis than resistance to (our) authority. Resistance as a System Variable Lewin's force-field analysis is the most commonly used model to illustrate elements of change and resistance to change:   According to Lewin's model, pressing for change tends to threaten stability and thus increases the power of forces maintaining the system. Therefore, the most effective way to bring about change is to reduce the forces of resistance. This implies, however, that resistance exists only on one side of the force field. The energy to restrain movement toward change and the energy to move toward change are treated conceptually as arising from different places. This can be seen in the graphic depiction above. As coaches/consultants, we see ourselves as the "driving forces." Thus theory guides practice when we interpret resistance to change as emanating only from clients ("restraining forces"). In contrast, I believe both change forces and status quo forces exist within the interaction system. And if a system depicts an interaction, the forces must also be depicted as interactive: This theoretical approach would guide us to interpret resistance to change as potentially emanating from both parties to a relationship. Some behaviors of both in the present state of interaction would be expected to resist change where stability in similar relationships had been functional and thus reduced to more habitual levels of learning. Where resistance exists, it cannot be a property solely of one individual in the system. It must have its counterpart in the other person.