Studies have shown that there are two major obstacles that deter people from change. First they are unwilling or unable to alter long established attitudes and behaviour. Managers may be unable to change their behaviour because they lack specific abilities, or unwilling to change because they perceive no personal benefit in doing so.

The second major obstacle is that change frequently lasts only a short time. After a brief period of trying to do things differently, people often attempt to return to their traditional pattern of behaviour. Managers, for instance, become frustrated by their early, unsuccessful attempts to change their behaviour, perhaps because they fail to get adequate feedback, or because more senior managers fail to adjust the work content to reinforce desired new behaviours.

To overcome obstacles of this sort you must unfreeze (making the need for change so obvious that the individual group or organisation can readily see and accept that change must occur) the present behaviour pattern, change or develop a new behaviour pattern, and then refreeze (transforming a new behavioural pattern into the norm) or reinforcing the new behaviour.

Without delving deeply into areas of individual psychology, there is a wide range of typical causes of resistance. Theses are rarely simple cause and effect situations, and resistance is usually a complex mix of historic, factual and emotional issues, which are not always easy to disentangle. However, the following list, while not exhaustive, does mention the most frequent sources of resistance to change and unwillingness to engage in new behaviour.

Fear of the unknown

Listing the possible causes of resistance can be a useful process in itself since it can be seen that some of them are considerably easier to deal with than others. Low trust may be a key issue but it is a considerably longer term proposition to rectify than correcting misinformation or reassuring staff about new skills.

Resistance comes essentially in two forms - systemic and behavioural. Systemic resistance arises from a lack of appropriate knowledge, information, skills and managerial capacity. Behavioural resistance describes resistance deriving from reactions, perceptions and assumptions of individuals or groups in the organisation. So one is cognitive and the other emotional, a distinction which is useful because it allows us to see that some resistance sources are easier to correct and minimise than others. As already noted, an emotionally based resistance such as low trust is much more difficult to handle than a lack of information or misunderstanding of facts.

Levels of resistance will inevitably be higher if the levels of involvement and information are low. This is the essence of parallel implementation. The less a person knows about plans to change, the more they assume, the more suspicious they become, and the more they direct their energy into counterproductive "resister games" referred to above. Once a person feels manipulated, or uninvolved, they will inevitably tend to veer towards a negative view of the change and its effect on them.

The management of resistance demands attention to the systemic aspects such as information and communication flow, which need to be considerably increased during the uncertainty of the change process. It also demands attention to the natural individual and group processes of prejudice, assumption perception and conclusion formation, because these processes will take place with or without "facts".

You need to pay attention to those weak signals which indicate bigger problems to come. It is at this early stage in the change process that as a change manager you have a golden opportunity to turn feelings of threat - and hence resistance - into perceptions of opportunity and benefit.

In my experience, one of the most common resistance patterns, which is not always easy to recognise until it is too late, is the "paralysis by analysis" syndrome, especially in organisations which consist of highly intelligent, rational people with a great leaning towards the intellectual enjoyment of the analysis process for its own sake. There is nothing quite as satisfying as doing a good diagnosis which is rigorous and wide reaching. The problem is always that it gets out of phase with changing realities, so that the longer the diagnostic phase takes, the greater the chances are of the goal posts having been moved. There is ample evidence of this having happened - sometimes by default or lack of awareness but, in my own experience, sometimes by deliberate tactic of those wanting to get on with the changes whilst others are keep busy diagnosing.

The significant point here for the change manager is that he or she can inadvertently be seduced into reinforcing this process out of sheer intellectual curiosity and unwittingly find himself colluding in avoiding action. The seductiveness of the analysis game is that there is a thin line between a good analysis and avoiding action. There is always a good reason for getting more data and thus putting off implementation. Never forget what you are doing it for. Making it happen is what is important.

2. Stoner, James, Yetton, Philip, Craig, Jane, Johnston, Kim; Management, Prentice Hall, 1994