I was just beginning a new novel by Greg Iles entitled “The Devil’s Punchbowl” the other day and a quote on Page 2 stuck with me. It read “I’ve learned that most people don’t want change, even when it’s in their best interest. We pay lip service to ideals, but we live by expediency…” While others have probably expressed similar phrases this really hit the nail on the head for me.

Of course, I immediately put this into an organizational framework and thought that it explained a lot about why change management consultants, both internal and external, have so much trouble implementing their ideas.

Then I wondered why this was true or maybe more practically how do we get around this obstacle. In reading about marketing I remembered the advice that to be successful one needed to deal with the emotional issues of the buyer and not just with logical explanations of product/service features. Well, this makes sense. To get people to accept change you must demonstrate that the new way is going to make them feel better.

I believe that this true but I still feel as if I am missing a piece to the puzzle. Why do people resist change? Because they do not really trust that change is going to be an improvement for them. Either they just don’t trust management at all or else they do not have the confidence that management will be able to do what they say they are going to do.

For organizational change to be accepted, employees must have trust in management’s intentions and trust in management’s ability. Even then it is going to take a lot of work, plenty of good communications, and time. It will be an on-going process as the system will try to reject the change and return to normal.