Today, I’m going to talk about change management, and I’m going to come at it from a very different perspective than you might have heard before. I am certainly going to contradict many of the beliefs that we hold true about change, and speak to it from a reality-based perspective. In other words, you’re going to be able to verify anything I say today for yourself and determine whether it’s true or not.

I’m going to start with a statement that is seen by many as totally, absolutely outrageous. People do not resist change. This is despite the title of my presentation, which is “Managing ‘Resistance’ to Change.” Note that the word “resistance” is in quotes. Now, if I were standing in front of you in a typical presentation, I would ask how many people believe that the statement, “people resist change” is true. Most people would raise their hands. I’ve given this presentation in more than 34 countries. I’ve given it to those at the highest levels of organizations all the way down to the unemployed, so I get everybody in the spectrum. Nearly everybody agrees with the statement people resist change. So when I say people don’t resist change, there’s naturally some skepticism.

Right now you’re thinking, “But that’s the problem we have in our organization - people are resisting change.” And while that may be true in some sense, I would suggest that the specific phrase we’re using is totally wrong.

Consider for a moment – actually write it down – what is the biggest change that an individual can bring about in their life?  If you’ve got a pen in front of you, actually write it down and make a commitment to your belief that the change you’re thinking of is a biggie. Don’t write down "death", there’s nothing we can do about that – it’s going to happen to us anyway. What is the biggest change that you can voluntarily bring about in your life?

Most people will have written down "marriage" or "having children." Yet my guess is that, if I asked “Are you married?” most people would say yes. So most people are married, even though it is the biggest change we can bring about. So we are faced with a contradiction.  On the one hand, we believe that people resist change. And on the other hand, we all embrace the biggest change we can think about in our lives and we do it voluntarily – we get married.

It’s not just that one example. We seek out promotions. We relocate. We jump from one organization to another. We learn second languages. We learn musical instruments. Etc., etc., etc.  All of these are big changes. All of them are changes that we embrace voluntarily. So we are faced with a conundrum, a paradox. On the one hand, we have this firm belief statement that "people resist change". And on the other hand we have a ton of personal evidence that we do not resist change, but that we embrace it on a regular basis.

The way out of that conundrum is to recognize the validity of another statement – we do not resist change; we do resist being changed. I perform a simple exercise in my stand-up presentations where you stand up and pair off, two people facing each other. The shorter person places their right hand up as if they are about to make the oath of allegiance and the taller person places their left hand flat against that right hand. Imagine me doing this in a large audience of six hundred or a thousand people. I ask the tall person only, to push as hard as they can. In your mind’s eye you can see what’s happening. The short person is pushing back. Why? Very simply, “I push back because you’re pushing me.” It’s natural, it’s almost a reflex action, and it’s instinctual.  When I ask people why they do it, the one statement that gets voiced immediately every single time, is some variation of, “I pushed back because if I didn’t, I would fall over. I would lose control; I would lose my space.”

We resist being pushed; we resist being changed. So there we have the secret to how you bring change about - and also the secret as to how to make it as difficult as possible for yourself to implement a change. To make it difficult, all you have to do is announce a change and expect everybody to jump in on it.

Now why is this all happening?