Let's turn our attention now to how resistance is demonstrated within organizations. When I first started to put this course together, I started to list the different reasons for resistance. And I found that this was becoming an impossible task. These numerous reasons are from just one book on organizational change. And I had dozens of other books that have even more combinations of why people resist change. And it occurred to me that too often, authors come at resistance as to these other reasons.

Let's address the reasons. But there's too many reasons. We need to be more generalized to figure out why people resist assuming that we've already taken ourselves out of the equation, let's talk about then why people resist in a way that we can deal with it, instead of having so many of these little things that you have to go through as a checklist of is this the case? Is this the case? Is this the case? Is this the case, we need to be more generalized in our approach.

The key then is that every situation is different. generalization is going to be the essence if we're going to deal with change resistance, because there's too many different reasons to try to organize them. So let's talk about the tight just see if we can group though into some generalized types of reasons that we can then start to deal with, as to how to understand and eliminate those reasons for resistance. First, is let's talk about active resistance. These are the people that are Critical, overly critical, even even the smallest details, they will argue they will fall fine. They will undermine obstruct and stall progress from happening.

To some extent they may be starting rumors, they may be actively sabotaging events and raising fear throughout the organization. They are active in their resistance. We also have the passive, those that are slow to act, they don't follow through, they will treat the change as a fad of the month that this too will pass ignore it and it will go away. And all too often, that is the case. So you've got active resistance, passive resistance. We also have some symptoms of distress.

This is truly distressful. They are struggling with With the change process itself, these are symptoms that have underlying causes. The absentee rate may go up this illness, in which case, we're talking about mental work, that just like physical work can wear people out, reduce their resistance to illnesses, and they may truly get ill. Or they may want to avoid the conflicts and the pressure and will call in sick when in reality, they're avoiding the change and the stress it's causing on them. low productivity procrastinating. This is a critical one. Procrastination may be a symptom of the resistance, but we need to be careful because to some extent, procrastination is also normal behavior and Similar to what we talked about last time, we are the ones that label resistance and we need to be careful about incorrect labeling.

Those that are in distress will also more likely be involved with the rumor mill, the more alleppey to gossip, they're also likely to focus in on themselves closed themselves off from others, their low morale and their isolation. These are symptoms of distress that people are struggling. These are not necessarily anticipated as likely that they will happen if the change process is difficult, difficult mentally, as well as habit changing difficult. We're also talking then about passive aggressive, it's not just passive, but passive. By saying that they will do something, but consciously not doing it, in which case, they appear to be on board. But internally, they're actively resisting very dangerous, because you don't know what's happened.

You think they're on board when they're not. We also need to talk about the perceived risk of a particular change and how that perceived risk will impact the resistance that we will see. Here we have on the left hand axis, the perceived risk low to high, this is a perception and that perception may be influenced by their understanding of the problem, the context surrounding that problem and their understanding of the relationship of the context the problem and the solution being offered in To change, we're also talking about past experiences that they may have with the change process previously, where they've had very little, some or moderate change, or possibly a lot of change or prolong change over a period of time. Let's talk about what this actually looks like. So we can get an understanding of how people understand risk and how they relate to that risk in the change resistance.

This is a graph of how to resistance can be perceived as high risk if they've got little experience with change. And as they get more experienced with change that risk drops. However, as it becomes more ongoing change fatigue sets in and the risk goes up until such a point Where becomes a crisis situation at crisis it becomes better to move forward than to face non change during the crisis. Labeling these in change inexperience people that have little experience in change will think that any change will be high risk. Those that experience change regularly and this is an argument for the Kaizen or continuous change process of many frequent small changes versus infrequent large changes, people become competent with change and as they become competent with the change process, they also gain an understanding that they can get through this change also it becomes routine change becomes a core routine competency.

However, change fatigue as I mentioned at the peak versus crisis being acknowledged. The key then is to challenge the organization to have a moderate level of change. So, that change competency becomes ingrained within the organization. And they can then approach it with a perception of less risk, thereby less resistance to change when it occurs. What resistance Are you experiencing? What resistance Are you expecting?

And how is that resistance being demonstrated within your organization?