That Resistance You’re Getting? It’s Trying to Help You.
Part 4 of The Unexpected Benefits of Fear, Conflict, Failure, and Resistance
In this series, I explore what we at CoCreative call “the Baddies.” The problem is not fear, conflict, failure, or resistance themselves, but the unhealthy relationship we’ve developed with each of them.
Part 4: That Resistance You’re Getting? It’s Trying to Help You.
A Story About Continuity
A number of years ago, I was training twenty or so change and transformation leaders across several New Zealand government ministries in polarity thinking. One of the polarities we were exploring together was Continuity & Change, the creative tension between leveraging what works and transforming what doesn’t.
These were experienced, committed change leaders, people who genuinely believed in the transformation work they were doing. And yet they had all been encountering persistent resistance that had seemed, to them, irrational. The people pushing back weren’t being obstructionist. Neither were they ignorant of the need for change. So why wouldn’t they get with the program?
The answer emerged as we worked through the polarity map. Every transformation strategy in every ministry was focused entirely on what needed to change, how things were going to change, and why those changes were necessary. There was very little in any of their plans about what needed to stay the same, nothing about what would be built on, honored, or strengthened, and nothing about what they had learned from the past that should be carried forward. In other words, there was little continuity.
As one participant observed, “It makes a lot of sense that we’re getting resistance. Because we’re not being clear about what’s being kept and strengthened, or what we’re learning from the past, it looks like we’re leaving all that behind.”
The resistance hadn’t been irrational, but entirely reasonable. The change leaders had been asking people to give up everything familiar without offering anything stable in return. Of course people pushed back. What else would we do?
What Resistance Actually Is
Resistance is a way of protecting and managing boundaries. That’s the simplest definition, and one worth sitting with. It’s (usually) not obstruction. It’s not ignorance. It isn’t a character flaw, a personality trait, or a sign of bad faith. Resistance is a boundary-management response, and like all boundary-management responses, it carries information about what matters to the people expressing it.
Resistance is a boundary-management response, and like all boundary-management responses, it carries information about what matters to the people expressing it.
Resistance is also interest. It’s engagement. It’s a signal that something real is at stake for someone. The person who pushes back hardest on a change initiative is often the person who cares most about something that might be lost. That’s not someone to overcome but someone to listen to.
David Rock’s SCARF Model offers a useful neuroscience-based lens here. According to research by Rock and others, our brains scan five social domains for potential threats or rewards: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. These domains activate the same threat and reward responses we’ve relied on for physical survival since the beginning of human evolution. A conventional top-down change initiative that focuses entirely on change, with nothing about continuity, threatens at least four of these five dimensions simultaneously. It threatens our certainty about what comes next. It implicitly devalues the status and expertise people have built under the current system. It often reduces autonomy by doing change to people rather than with them. And it raises fairness questions when people have no voice in co-designing what changes. Seen through this lens, resistance isn’t a problem to be managed. It’s a neurologically predictable response to having many social needs threatened simultaneously.
This is why one of the most powerful things change leaders can do is help people practice and experience the futures they’re imagining, not just describe them. If you want people to move toward a new vision, they need to be able to feel what it would be like to inhabit it: how they would behave, how they would show up, whether they would be valued and accepted in that future. Abstract pictures of the future can’t do that. Embodied experience can.
Jeff Campbell at Emancipation Theater Company recently shared a beautiful example of this. He helped one non-profit organization perform their theory of change as a play, acting it out in front of potential donors as a fundraiser. The performance didn’t just describe the future they were working toward; it enacted it, giving the audience a felt sense of both the destination and the pathway to get there. The group raised $250,000. Jeff is now developing this as a service for other organizations. What made it work wasn’t the persuasiveness of the argument but the tangibility of the experience. People could step into the future and feel it, not just hear about it. Their resistance quieted because the uncertainty was replaced by something real they could inhabit, even briefly.
What an Unhealthy Relationship with Resistance Looks Like
An unhealthy relationship with resistance usually begins with a single frame: resistance is an obstacle to overcome. Once we adopt that lens, we start asking how to get past it, through it, or around it. And the moment we do that, we lose the important information available to us.
When we frame resistance as something to overcome, we suppress wisdom and experience, especially during change initiatives. We disenfranchise the very people whose buy-in we need. And we often generate more resistance, not less, because people can tell when they’re being managed rather than heard.
Working from urgency makes this worse. The faster we need to move, the less tolerance we have for the friction that resistance creates, and the more likely we are to steamroll it. But urgency is often precisely when resistance is most important to pay attention to. The thing that slows us down may be the thing that saves us from a much larger failure further down the road.
I have my own version of this dynamic, though it runs in the opposite direction. My instinctive relationship with resistance is to be contrary, to push against dogma, convention, and received wisdom—sometimes, honestly, before I’ve fully understood what I’m pushing against. I’ve noticed this lately in discussions about the relationship between inner development and systems change work, where some voices suggest a dependency: that people must do the inner work before they can effectively engage in the outer work of changing systems.
My contrarian instinct immediately reacts against that framing. And it’s not wrong to react. There are real problems with implying a strict dependency between inner and outer work, and the reaction protects something worth protecting: a commitment to not jumping on every bandwagon, and to holding my own theoretical integrity in a field where concepts can move fast and spread wide before they’ve been properly examined. As Karen Horney might say, it’s a form of moving against authority, and there can be real value in that.
But this tendency has also, at times, gotten in my way. My resistance to the framing has occasionally interrupted my deeper engagement with what was actually being offered. The insight I eventually arrived at, that the relationship between inner and outer work is not a dependency in either direction but a mutually reinforcing dynamic (as Tracy Kunkler has beautifully articulated here), and that working in both realms simultaneously produces the most powerful growth and outcomes, required me to stay in the discomfort long enough to find it. My contrarian instinct wanted to move out of that discomfort much faster.
The Benefits of a Healthy Relationship with Resistance
Here is what becomes available when we stop treating resistance as a problem and start treating it as data.
Resistance reveals what people actually value. Beneath every act of resistance is something someone doesn’t want to lose: status, continuity, identity, expertise, a way of working that has served them well. That information is design criteria. If you can surface what people are protecting, you can design change strategies that honor those things rather than threatening them.
Resistance ensures real ownership. People who have had no opportunity to resist, question, or push back on a direction haven’t really consented to it. As my CoCreative colleague Melissa Darnell puts it, “If I can’t say no, then my yes means nothing.” With no opportunity to meaningfully resist, people simply comply, and compliance is fragile. Ownership, which can only emerge through genuine engagement with resistance, is durable.
Resistance weeds out bad ideas. Not every idea that gains traction deserves to. One of the most important functions of healthy resistance in a collaboration is to slow down premature convergence, surface assumptions that haven’t been examined, and challenge approaches that look good in theory but won’t survive contact with reality. The group that has no resistance is the group that doesn’t think critically.
Resistance slows us down in ways that matter. Urgency is one of the dominant cultural values in systems change work, and it produces some of the field’s worst outcomes. Resistance creates productive friction. It forces reflection, analysis, and a more complete understanding of the problem before committing to a solution. That’s not inefficiency. That’s quality.
Resistance, honored rather than overcome, builds the conditions for change. The New Zealand change leaders didn’t just solve a facilitation problem that afternoon. They left with a fundamentally different relationship to the resistance they would encounter in their work. Once you understand that resistance is carrying information rather than blocking progress, it changes how you listen, how you design, and how you lead.
Practices for Developing a Healthier Relationship with Resistance
Read the resistance before you respond to it. When you encounter pushback, resist the urge to address it immediately. Ask instead: “What’s important to you here,” or “What are you trying to solve for?” (And ask yourself, “What might I have missed in my own thinking or planning?”)
Map what will continue or expand, as well as what will change. In any change initiative, be as explicit about continuity as you are about change. What will be named, honored, built on, and carried forward? What has the organization learned from the past that deserves to be preserved? Answering these questions doesn’t slow change down. It actually makes the change more resilient.
Address the SCARF dimensions explicitly. When you’re asking people to move toward a new future, help them experience what that future might mean for their status, their certainty, their autonomy, their relationships, and their sense of fairness. Better yet, find ways to let them experience that future directly, not just hear about it. The more tangible and inhabitable the future feels, the less threatening the path toward it becomes.
Do inquiry before advocacy. Before making the case for your changes, take time to understand the interests and values behind any resistance. An empathy interview, a structured listening process, or simply a well-placed question, like “What are you most worried about losing here?”, can surface information that changes everything.
Notice your own resistance style. The Battle-Klein-Battle Resistance Style Inventory offers a structured way to understand your preferred mode of resisting. Gestalt practitioners commonly identify five common styles: introjection, deflection, confluence, retroflection, and desensitization. None is inherently wrong or unhealthy, but each becomes a problem when it’s our default response. Our goal is to cultivate the same fluency we’ve been working toward across this entire series: not the elimination of the response, but a healthier, more conscious way of relating to it.
Reframe resistance as a resource in your culture. This is the systemic practice, and perhaps the most important. The organizations and collaborations that treat resistance as data and insight rather than friction to be eliminated develop something rare: a genuine capacity to learn more deeply from disagreement. That capacity is one of the most powerful assets any complex change effort can have.
The pushback you’re getting isn’t evidence that something has gone wrong. It may be the most important signal you’re receiving. The question isn’t how to overcome it. It’s what it’s trying to tell you, and whether you’re willing to listen.
Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.
I really like this understanding of the unexpected benefits of pushback. I will be thinking about and applying what you have written here for sure.
nice, I learnt something new