Reframing Resistance

I spent most of my thirties working as an Agile coach and Scrum Master in various companies, from smaller startups to multinational corporations. For years, the most frustrating part of my job was resistance to change.

Take, for instance, my experience with Greg, the CTO of a tech startup that a larger company had recently acquired. Greg had hired me as a contract Agile coach to help his team adopt Agile ways of working as they prepared to integrate into the technology department of the larger firm. It was my first Agile coaching role, and I was very excited to share all the wonderful things I had learned about Agile methodologies with Greg and his team.

Greg had always been an extremely hands-on technical leader. He had written most of the codebase and worked with the same core group of five developers for years, including at other companies he had co-founded and successfully sold. 

I remember explaining to Greg in an early team meeting that he was not technically on the Scrum team and would not be welcome at certain meetings. His eyes nearly popped out of the sockets, and veins started bulging from his neck and forehead. This was his team, after all! He saw no reason not to attend their meetings, and he was not about to accept my pronouncements about self-organizing teams as a justification.

Greg tested all of my rules about what good Scrum looked like. He wanted to attend the team’s retrospectives (a usual no-no for the boss). He pushed back when a vendor team wanted to implement continuous integration and deployment; he wanted to continue to sign off on each release personally. We clashed regularly as the team learned more about Agile and encountered some of the more radical ideas, such as self-managing teams or limiting work-in-progress.

At the time, I thought my job was to enlighten Greg and protect the team from his interference. I had almost lost sight of the fact that Greg had hired me and that he had done this quite purposefully. He wanted his team to be successful as they navigated the merger. Greg had an equal, if not greater, interest in helping his team succeed with the changes—the stakes were just as significant for him as they were for me. 

In time, I realized that it is highly counterproductive to label behavior like Greg’s as “resistance.” Greg offered me vital information about the environment in which we were working. We never know how the organization will respond when introducing a change from outside. Resistance, especially vocal resistance, provides the first clues about what we must address for the change to be successful in this specific environment. 

Many people view resistance in a negative light. They see complaints, pushback, or noncompliance as a problem to be solved, squashed, or swept away. They see resistance as interference with the change. I have learned to see it as something else entirely. Resistance is the first sign that the idea of change has made contact with the on-the-ground reality. It means we are gaining traction.

Traction is essential for forward momentum. When a new idea makes contact with an actual environment, friction is a natural result. Just as car tires on an icy surface slip and spin without moving forward, a change idea is an abstraction that will not gain momentum until it makes contact with something solid on the ground. The friction is necessary to pull forward. 

As I experienced with Greg and his team, friction was one of the first things we encountered when we tried to apply Agile concepts to their work. This should not have been surprising or alarming. Quite the opposite—it was a sign that we were making progress.