Vive la Résistance – To Change

Several years ago, I worked at a global consulting firm as a change-management consultant.

I landed a plum assignment in 2002 as a member of a project team consulting for a pharmaceutical company in Paris, France. It was there that I had a profound experience that forever changed my views on managing resistance to change.

My role on the project was to ensure that the firm’s employees supported the changes that management was implementing. Specifically, my mandate was to seek out change-resisters and help them overcome their resistance to change.

My home away from home was the Hotel Lutetia, on the Left Bank. I loved this hotel. I called it the ‘Grand Old Lady’ because that’s how it felt — beautiful, proud and elegant. The decor was plush, with gold and dark red velvet throughout. My room was small but had all the conveniences. It overlooked an open courtyard, a quiet place with high stone walls and a flower garden. My little room was a haven to return to at the end of the day, an oasis compared to the busy streets outside.

One beautiful sunny spring morning I decided to explore the neighbourhood. Next to the hotel, I found a little park. There I discovered one of those plaques that adorn so many historic buildings in Paris. It said that during the Second World War, the hotel had been commandeered to serve as part of Gestapo Headquarters in Paris. It was here that captured leaders of the French Resistance were brought to be interrogated, tortured and executed. I was absolutely stunned. Everything seemed to change in that instant — it felt like the sun had stopped shining, the birds had gone quiet and the whole world had turned grey.

"The Hotel Lutetia's elegant facade belies its sinister use in WW11."

I was overcome with the realization that my luxurious and beautiful hotel had been a prison, a place of humiliation, pain, torture and murder. I was so shocked that I couldn’t continue on my walk; I had to sit down in the park to absorb and process this information.

I saw the quiet courtyard in a completely different light, its high walls offering an ideal place for a firing squad. I realized that my little room could have been a cell, or perhaps even divided into two cells. The people in those cells would have been able to watch, or at least hear, their colleagues being tortured and executed, persecuted for what they believed in, and for what they wanted to protect. Their way of life was so precious that they were willing to resist it being taken away, and risked their lives in doing so.

That’s when the thought came to me — resistance to change can be a good thing; sometimes resistance is the right thing to do. This was the exact opposite of what I had been doing every day in my work managing resistance to change. It had never entered my mind that such resistance could be a good thing.

It occurred to me that I was punishing my client’s employees for not accepting the changes that my organization wanted to impose. I knew that resistance takes bravery and much courage since it’s so much easier to just comply. This may sound overly dramatic, but I felt that I was taking on a similar role to the Gestapo’s. It struck me that ‘resistance to change’ was a term defined by the person who wanted other people to give up what was valuable to them and accept something that was valuable to the person initiating the change. It had nothing to do with the person being changed! This was devastating and life-changing for me. I simply could not continue to operate the way I had been. I vowed that I would never again use the term ‘resistance to change’ in my work, and I never have.

From that day on, I began to pay attention to what the resisters in the client company were saying. What they had to say became important to me. I began to actively listen to them, to try to understand why they were pushing back, why this was important to them and why they saw themselves as victims of change. This new approach led us to modify the project implementation process to accommodate the resisters’ views, whenever possible. In subsequent projects, I began to actively seek out the resisters early on, not to punish them as I had done before, but to truly welcome them into the process. I also began to present their points of view at project team meetings. This approach often worked out very well for my clients and for the change projects I have led in the years since.

So now, every time I hear someone ask, “How can we overcome resistance to change?”, my mind goes back to the plaque on the wall in a little park in Paris, when the sun stopped shining and the whole world went grey.

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Hotel Lutetia photo: Paris-Paul Prescott/Paris-Inspired.com