The most important lesson from 30+ years in pharmaceutical R&D didn’t come from a success. It came from every time I failed to bring people with me.
It took me far too long to understand that the people resisting change aren’t the problem. They’re the roadmap.
Early in my career, I approached resistance the way most driven professionals do – as an obstacle to overcome, a wall to push through, a mindset to “manage.” I’d build the business case, gather the data, present the logic. And then I’d be genuinely baffled when smart, capable colleagues didn’t immediately see what seemed so obvious to me.
But I’ve come to realize that resistance is rarely about the change itself. It’s about what the change threatens.
When someone pushes back on a new process, they’re often protecting something that matters deeply to them – their expertise, their sense of contribution, their identity within the organization. When a team resists new technology, they may be asking questions we haven’t taken time to answer: Will I still be valued? Does my experience still matter? Is there a place for me in this new way of working?
At #ScopeSummit earlier this year, I went expecting conversations centered around technology – tools, platforms, features – and I wasn’t wrong. But what I also heard kind of surprised me. Person after person shared the same underlying struggle: not the what of change, but the how. How do I bring my team along? How do I help people see this isn’t a threat? The resistance they faced wasn’t really about any specific initiative. It was about uncertainty, identity, and in some cases – fear of becoming irrelevant.
This got me thinking about why adoption (of anything new) is almost always the biggest hurdle and why it’s rarely about the thing itself. So, I started asking different questions. What is this person protecting? What question haven’t I answered? What fear haven’t I acknowledged? Because the goal was never to push through the wall. It was to understand why the wall was built in the first place.
I used to think resistance was the enemy of progress. Now I think it might be the key to it.
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