Last week, I argued that organizations aren’t machines. They’re living systems made up of people, relationships, habits, and history. That’s why change rarely unfolds in a straight line. Technology can be implemented on a schedule. Human adoption can’t.
But that raises an even more important question.
If organizations are living systems, what actually causes people inside those systems to stop moving?
For years, we’ve answered that question with a familiar phrase: people resist change.
Actually, I think people resist something else entirely. They resist feeling defenseless.
That is what I started to understand while listening to Immunity to Change by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. People don’t experience anxiety because of change itself. They experience anxiety because they feel defenseless in the presence of perceived danger.
Change itself was never the enemy. Change gets experienced as danger because it usually arrives alongside a loss of control. Something is shifting, and the person living through it has no say in whether it happens, how fast it moves, or what it costs them. That combination, real stakes and no way to influence them, is what the brain reads as a threat.
Change Isn’t the Threat
Think about the changes you’ve willingly embraced in your own life.
You probably welcomed a promotion, a new home, the birth of a child, or learning a new skill. Those changes were significant, but they weren’t necessarily frightening.
Now think about a change where you had no control.
A surprise restructuring.
A new boss.
An AI tool that suddenly made you question your value.
Budget cuts.
A merger.
The anxiety wasn’t created by the change itself. It came from the uncertainty surrounding it, the sense that something important was moving and you had no hand in where it landed. Notice what all of those examples have in common: none of them are asking you to learn something new. They’re asking whether you’ll still have a place once the moving stops.
Will I still matter?
Will I lose influence?
Will I know what’s expected?
Will I make a mistake?
Can I safely speak up?
Will anyone listen if I do?
These aren’t questions about change.
They’re questions about survival.
The Hidden Commitment
Organizations often assume resistance is irrational, but it usually isn’t.
Most people genuinely want their organization to succeed. They may even agree with the stated goal of a transformation. But beneath that goal is often another commitment—one that may actually be subconscious.
Stated commitment: “I support the new AI strategy.”
Hidden commitment: “I can’t afford to look incompetent.”
Stated commitment: “I support becoming more innovative.”
Hidden commitment: “I can’t risk being the one whose idea doesn’t work.”
Stated commitment: “I support this reorganization.”
Hidden commitment: “I need to protect my team.”
Those hidden commitments aren’t signs of stubbornness. They’re acts of self-protection.
Every change initiative asks people to let go of something that once helped them succeed: a process, a title, an identity.
No amount of communication can eliminate that tension if leaders never acknowledge it.
The Buzzword Everyone Repeats and Almost No One Defines
Psychological safety has become one of those phrases that gets repeated so often in leadership circles it’s started to lose its meaning. It’s often described as creating an environment where people feel comfortable speaking up, asking questions, or admitting mistakes.
Those are important outcomes, but I think there’s something even more fundamental underneath them: psychological safety reduces perceived defenselessness. When people believe their voice matters, when they understand what’s happening, when they know they won’t be punished for uncertainty, and when they have some influence over what comes next, something shifts at a more basic level than attitude or morale. Their nervous system moves from protection to participation. That’s the moment learning actually becomes possible, because a person defending themselves and a person exploring something new are running on two different operating systems, and you can’t do the second while you’re stuck in the first. Once that shift happens, experimentation stops feeling risky and adoption stops feeling forced. It starts to move at its own pace, because the person doing the adopting finally has room to.
The Case for Slowing Down First
PATH is the framework I use to walk organizations through change, and it opens with a stage called Present, simply understanding current conditions before anyone starts planning what comes next. Most change efforts rush past this stage. Leaders want to get to the future state, the roadmap, the new org chart, so Present gets treated as a formality, a quick status check before the real work starts. That’s a mistake.
Present means understanding current conditions as they actually are, not as the org chart says they should be. It was built to identify and ground people in what’s actually working and what isn’t changing.
Because before people can imagine what’s next, they need to know what isn’t disappearing.
When leaders describe current conditions honestly—including what remains stable, like the organization’s purpose, values, relationships, or mission—they aren’t simply communicating.
They’re reducing perceived danger.
They’re giving people something solid to stand on.
The second stage, Assess, is where the organization recognizes the patterns already in motion and what needs to change, which don’t reveal themselves from the top of the org chart. They live in the day-to-day reality employees are closest to.
That’s why Assess also restores agency.
When employees help surface the patterns already in motion—the customer frustrations, the process bottlenecks, the unnecessary work, the quiet workarounds—the emotional experience changes.
Instead of thinking:
“Change is happening to me.”
They begin thinking:
“I helped shape this change.”
That shift matters.
Understanding creates clarity.
Participation creates ownership.
Together, they create trust.
The Missing Layer
There’s another realization that’s been taking shape for me. Leadership development has become genuinely introspective. Coaching, retreats, identity and values work, all built around questions like who am I becoming and how do I want to show up. It treats leaders as people who need to make sense of what they’re going through, not just survive it. Companies take this seriously enough to spend more than $60 billion a year on it. Employee training gets none of that investment. Instead, it’s built around compliance: here’s the new process, here’s the deadline, here’s what you need to complete. Nobody sits an employee down and asks what any of it means for them. That’s a gap we rarely acknowledge.
That gap isn’t neutral. It builds a dependency model instead of an agency model. When employees aren’t equipped to interpret and own change themselves, the job of translating it for them falls entirely on their manager. Every rollout becomes something a leader has to carry on their back, explaining the reasoning, absorbing the anxiety, running interference, because nobody gave the people underneath them the tools to do any of that for themselves. Leaders get overburdened. Employees get less ownership, not more.
And it costs the organization something else down the road. The employees never given that development are the same employees who’ll eventually be asked to lead. If the only people who ever get practice interpreting change, reflecting on it, and making meaning from it are the ones already sitting in leadership seats, you’re not just under-supporting your current workforce. You’re failing to build your next generation of leaders before you even know you’ll need them.
We develop leaders, but we don’t always develop the people they lead. Managers are asked to carry the change; employees are asked to absorb it. Without that development, change becomes something done to people, not built with them.
Leaders are encouraged to ask:
Who am I becoming?
Employees are usually asked:
Did you complete the training?
What if sustainable transformation requires both?
What if every person inside an organization needs opportunities to make meaning from change, not just understand the mechanics of it?
Not executive coaching.
Not therapy.
Simply structured opportunities to reflect:
What am I learning?
What strengths am I discovering?
How has my work changed?
What kind of professional am I becoming?
That can’t be a pulse survey nobody reads or a form employees fill out to check a box. It has to carry the same weight and investment leaders get in their coaching and retreats: real time, a real person or peer group listening, and an actual expectation that the answers matter.
When people can answer those questions, change stops being something that happens to them.
It becomes something they grow through.
A Different Way to Lead
Many leaders believe their primary responsibility during transformation is convincing people that change is necessary.
But if you get people grounded in what’s stable and genuinely involved in shaping the direction, convincing them stops being necessary. They already believe it, because they helped build it. Reducing perceived danger comes first. Restoring agency comes second.
Only then does communication become persuasive, because people are no longer listening from a place of self-protection.
People don’t need complete certainty before they’ll move forward. They need enough safety to participate.
That’s not just the humane way to lead through change. It’s the faster one. Every cycle spent managing quiet resistance, re-explaining decisions, or waiting for people to come around is time you don’t get back. Reduce the danger and restore the agency, and that time returns to you, along with something harder to build after the fact: a culture full of people who feel safe enough to be creative, who bring you problems before they become crises, and who actually want to build what comes next instead of just tolerating it.
Participation, not compliance, is what ultimately determines the speed of adoption.
If you’re leading a transformation right now and you’re not sure whether your people have what they need to actually participate in it, that’s worth a conversation. Reach out, and let’s talk through where the gap might be in your organization.
Oh, and one more thing…
Malika Bowling at Yahoo Creators just ran a review of Learn to Love the Roller Coaster, and I loved how the piece framed it. The reviewer’s core point: most of the conversation about AI is about jobs and tools, when the real question underneath is what happens to our sense of identity and worth when the pace of change outstrips our ability to emotionally process it. That’s exactly the gap the book is trying to close.
You can read the full review here.
