Good Resistance to a Bad Change

If you have ever learned about change management, you are most likely familiar with the term “Resistance to Change.” Typically, if not always, it carries a negative connotation: as a change manager, you are expected to help people adopt the change introduced by a project and to manage resistance. Resistance is essentially caused by the fact that people have become used to the old processes and tools they use on a daily basis and are not willing to change their routines.

And if the new product or service truly brings value, it is clear why “selling” it to employees is important. Adoption of the new processes is critical to realizing that value.

But imagine the situation: a company purchases a new tool to manage its projects or operations. The tool is widely promoted, well-branded, and heavily used around the world. Yet it does not really do anything new. For example, it simply combines content management, project tracking mechanisms, and reporting.

Management finds it beneficial mainly because the CEO can easily pull a report and see project status. Otherwise, the actual project work remains the same, and rather than easing tasks for each team member, the tool requires many awkward adjustments. Missing information must be substituted with freshly invented generic inputs just to fill in the blanks.

As a result, the company ends up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars and wasting endless cycles trying to adjust the tool to its standards by mapping fields, creating new fields that never existed, modifying project roles, and convincing everyone that this is the way forward, simply because management made a decision.

Instead of spending less time on administrative work, employees end up spending at least 20 percent of their billable time serving the tool and creating completely useless inputs, all so the CEO can click a button and receive a beautiful report. Will that report actually help the CEO? Of course not, because managers below will ensure the report looks good, rather than showing the real picture.

Am I talking about a specific tool or a specific organization? Not really. But I am sure that almost every large enterprise has gone through this bad experience at some point. And sometimes there is nothing you can do but comply. However, if you have a voice in your workplace, think twice before supporting a popular yet useless “enhancement.” Resistance to change can sometimes be good for the business.