The Misdiagnosis That's Killing Your Change Initiative

What leaders get wrong about resistance — and why it matters more than you think

Keith Laplante

Thirty-five years leading inside organizations (TD Waterhouse, BMO, HomeEquity Bank) and advising alongside them (Accenture, ExperiencePoint, The Refinery Leadership Partners). Facilitated leadership programs at Harvard, Duke, and Stanford. Read more about Keith

"Your people are not the problem. How you lead them through change very often is."

June 9, 2026

What leaders get wrong about resistance — and why it matters more than you think

I've spent more than thirty-five years working with leaders and organizations through change. And one of the most common things I encounter, rarely stated out loud but often hanging in the air, is some version of this:

My people are the problem.

The new system makes sense. The process improvement is clearly better. The restructuring is obviously necessary. And yet people are pushing back, dragging their feet, relitigating decisions that have already been made. So the conclusion, quietly reached, is that the obstacle is the people themselves.

I want to offer a different explanation. One that doesn't just reframe the problem. It changes what you do about it.

People aren't resistant to change. They're loss-averse.

And those are not the same thing.

Loss aversion is one of the most well-documented findings in behavioural psychology. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated that the psychological pain of losing something is roughly twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining something of equivalent value. We're wired, deeply and neurologically, to weight what we might lose more heavily than what we might gain.

Think about what that means when you announce a change initiative.

However beneficial the change, however well-intentioned, however clearly better the new way is than the old one, the instinctive question your people are asking isn't what will I gain from this? It's what am I going to lose?

Their familiar routines. Their accumulated expertise. Their sense of competence, the quiet confidence that comes from knowing how to do their job well. Their relationships with colleagues. In some cases, their identity as the person who knows how things work around here.

None of these losses may be real. The change you're introducing may preserve all of them and add considerably more. But the perception of potential loss is enough to trigger resistance. And in change leadership, perception is everything.

This isn't a character flaw in your people. It's not a sign of limited ambition or insufficient commitment. It's human wiring. The same wiring that exists in your most engaged employees, your highest performers, and, if you're being honest, yourself.

Why the misdiagnosis is so costly

If you believe your people are resistant to change, the interventions you reach for are predictable. More communication, more urgency, more incentives, more consequences. Compliance levers. And compliance levers can produce compliant behaviour, but only for as long as the incentive holds and the manager is watching.

If you understand that your people are loss-averse, the question changes entirely. Instead of asking how do I overcome this resistance, you start asking what do my people believe they stand to lose, and how do I genuinely address that?

That's a different conversation. And it leads somewhere compliance levers never can.

The leaders who make this shift don't just get better change outcomes. They get something more valuable and more durable. Teams that are genuinely committed to the change rather than technically compliant with it. Teams that don't need to be watched, incentivized, or managed through every step of implementation. Teams that become advocates and bring others with them.

The real problem with change initiatives

The change itself is almost never the problem. In more than thirty-five years, I've rarely encountered a change initiative that failed because the new thing wasn't actually better than what it was replacing. It almost always was better.

What determines whether change succeeds or fails, more than the quality of the plan, more than the size of the budget, more than the sophistication of the implementation, is how human beings are led through it.

Your people are not the problem.

How you lead them through change very often is.