6 Hidden Dynamics Behind Resistance to Change in Organizations

“We should finally make some tough people decisions, you know,” my colleague insists during one of our board meetings, locking eyes with the CEO.

The boardroom goes quiet, the atmosphere charged with unspoken agreement.

“We already made some tough decisions. But people also need time,” the CEO replies, trying to stretch the room’s perspective. “You can’t expect everybody to welcome the change with open arms. And yes, we need to deliver the business plan. But we won’t — not if we let go of key players just because they’re not in love with every decision we’ve made.”

“Some people won’t change. They’ll just keep defending the past. We need some fresh air. Otherwise, we’ll stay stuck,” another colleague pushes back, his voice laced with frustration.

“Firing people is the easiest thing to do,” the CEO answers, steady and sharp. “And let’s be honest. We haven’t really done our best working with the people we have now.”

The CEO’s words draw a line. And the topic remains shelved. At least for now.

What Looks Like Resistance May Be System Intelligence

I still remember feeling torn in that board meeting. Feeling the urgency. The stuckness. And the outdated leadership reflexes trying to hook me back in, convincing me that we needed to be pacey, decisive, solution-oriented.

And yet, I was so grateful to be working alongside a CEO who wasn’t driven solely by short-term metrics and surface fixes. Someone courageous enough to trust his intuition and to use it to balance his otherwise crisp, results-driven, unsentimental approach to business.

Because the truth was that while people struggled with the changes that followed the merger and it was draining for all of us, we stood at a transformational crossroads: call their struggle resistance and replace the most resistant ones, or slow down to understand if what we called resistance actually carried some intelligence.

If you’ve ever led a complex organizational change, you probably recognize the tension. The heat around who stays and who goes. The pressure to “solve” resistance. And the temptation to avoid or escape the messy middle. Fast.

It’s understandable. Who wants to stay stuck and drained?

Resistance Doesn’t Need Solving. It Needs Understanding.

But deep down, I knew the CEO’s instincts were spot on. By then, I’d experienced the downsides of trying to “solve resistance” in similar projects. People whose legitimate emotions were treated as problems to fix or their emotions as reasons to be let go. The contagious disconnect, disengagement, and mistrust that often spread through a company as a result. The missed opportunities to learn from what looked like barriers. And the reality that resistance not only didn’t dissolve. It deepened.

Fast forward a few months, after deep work in many workshops and honest face to face conversations with both the change enthusiasts and the biggest critics. The landscape felt clearer and the atmosphere lighter. Not everyone agreed. And not everyone stayed. Some self-selected and left on their own. But it was as if our ankles had unbound from the weight we carried while swimming towards the future vision.

Just over two years later, the business was thriving. The ratio between employee promoters and detractors flipped. And I’m convinced that the initial choice to embrace resistance and try to understand it rather than solve it, was a big part of it.

Grief Is Often Misread as Resistance

When we lose a dear person, it’s natural to grieve. If someone told us to just move on, we’d feel disrespected, resentful, and our sadness might deepen. In personal relationships, most of us find it natural to honor endings before we embrace new beginnings.

But at work, we somehow assume we should act like machines and leave emotions at the company’s doorstep. We expect people to move on after restructures, layoffs, and leadership shifts — forgetting that most people are emotionally invested in their work environment. And that’s not only healthy. It’s exactly we want — and measure — in engagement surveys.

But when we announce change, we want people to disconnect at a finger snap. Not realizing they might be mourning their lost sense of purpose, their team, their work rituals. A way of working that felt safe and fulfilling.

So what if what we call resistance is actually a sign of engagement — of something still alive in them? What if it gives us information about what people find important, what we’ve overlooked, where we’ve gone off balance? And what if parts of it need to come with us into the future, rather than be rejected altogether?

Asking these questions pays off. At least in my experience… It helps restore connection after what feels like rupture. It helps honour endings with dignity. And it distills intelligence from the past — not just demonizes it.

Systems Don’t Just Move On. They Remember.

People don’t only mourn what they’ll miss. They also remember how they were hurt. And systems, like people, have emotional memory.

A company’s DNA stores how decisions were made, who they benefited, how people were treated. It stores losses, and betrayals of trust. And even when those directly affected are long gone, the memory lives — through stories that eventually freeze into unspoken norms and agreements. About trust. About what matters. About what’s safe to say or do.

If there are echoes of similar changes in the company’s history, that memory gets activated. And with it, old fears and defense mechanisms.

If we don’t listen, if we assume change means starting from scratch rather than starting from memory, that memory will show up as mistrust, cynicism, quiet (or not so quiet) sabotage.

Culture is shaped by what people have lived through — not just what their leaders aspire to.

The Past Doesn’t Need Fixing. It Needs Witnessing.

One of the key moments in our post-merger work was when the CEO and I had a major clash that almost hijacked a company-wide meeting. Not being aligned on our message, we had a choice to either brush it off and reschedule, or open the meeting by acknowledging the disagreement publicly.

We went for the latter — knowing the company’s history was burdened by a lack of transparency at crucial moments, and we didn’t want to replay the past.

What could have looked unprofessional on the surface actually became one of the doorways to transformation. We acknowledged not just our disagreement, but how it was shaped by our personal histories and memories that got triggered.

That honesty eventually inspired a series of workshops where we tracked the company’s history — and how its memories kept affecting the present. These moments of reckoning created appreciation and resonance. And they helped mark the transition.

This wasn’t about nostalgia. It was about respecting that we weren’t building new culture on a greenfield — and that transformation has its own timeline.

It softened the atmosphere. It helped many people stop clinging. And it helped restore trust in the company’s future.

So what if honouring endings and facing organizational memory doesn’t slow change down? What if the willingness to be honest and own the past — without shaming — is what turns frail cultural foundations into resilient ones?

If You Don’t Make Space for It, It Will Linger and Block Change

Yes, this takes time, commitment, and energy. But not as much as what you’ll spend trying to move on prematurely.

Because you can’t wish grief and memory away with polished slides or branded mugs with new values statements. At best, what you suppress goes underground — and keeps shaping everything from there.

And because you won’t connect the two, you’ll be confused and frustrated about why people resist, why teams don’t deliver, why more tensions rise. You might end up blaming their skills or capacity for change, rather than seeing how the sprint toward fresh starts turned into a brake.

So if your culture change feels stuck — what if part of the reason is organizational memory that was never allowed to surface? Even if unintentionally?

What does it cost you? And what’s the smallest act of inviting it to the table to enable movement?

Original version published on Medium.