Agreeing with change is not the same as making it
People can agree with a change and still not change.
That sounds obvious. In practice, it is one of the easiest things to miss.
In major transformation, the focus often falls on visible resistance. Who is objecting? Who isn't on board? Who needs more communication?
But some of the most significant barriers are much quieter.
People can genuinely believe the change is necessary while still holding assumptions, fears, loyalties and competing commitments that pull behaviour back towards the familiar.
So the organisation changes on paper.
People agree with it.
And six months later, the old ways of working are still remarkably intact.
Perhaps the real challenge of transformation isn't getting people to agree with the change.
It is helping people understand what the change requires them to let go of.
A closer look at the less visible side of organisational change in the latest article.
An amalgamation running to a fixed deadline tends to be diagnosed, when it goes wrong, in structural terms. Decision rights went fuzzy. Communication dried up. Escalation replaced judgement. Those are real failure modes, and worth designing against.
There is a quieter one that structural fixes do not reach. Staff who genuinely agree the change is needed. Who say so in the survey, nod in the town hall, do not resist anything you could point to. And six months later are running the new structure with the old assumptions, because agreement and change turned out to be two different things.
A failure rate that has not moved in decades
John Kotter's 1996 research put the success rate of change programmes at around 30 per cent. A McKinsey survey of over 3,000 executives in 2008 found much the same, one transformation in three succeeding. Boston Consulting Group's more recent work puts the figure at roughly 75 per cent failing to deliver lasting change, and notes the rate has not improved in decades, despite an entire industry having grown up around fixing it.
New Zealand's current wave, thousands of core public service roles being reduced, councils absorbing each other under a fixed Cabinet timetable, ministries merging into new machinery, is a structural change of exactly the kind these numbers describe. The structural work is being done at pace. Whether the underlying behaviour changes at the same pace is a separate question, and it is the one the failure statistics are actually about.
Tony Schwartz, writing in Harvard Business Review in June 2018, offered a reason that has nothing to do with better project plans. Citing BCG's finding that 85 per cent of companies have run a major transformation in the past decade, he pointed out where the effort in those transformations goes: policy, structure, process, software, seating arrangements. Externally visible things, changed by people who never stopped to change how they themselves think and feel about the change.
What resistance actually looks like
The word resistance suggests something you could see coming. Someone objecting in a meeting, dragging their feet, working to rule. Schwartz's point, and it is a useful correction, is that most of it does not look like that at all. It is passive, mostly invisible, and often unconscious to the person doing it.
He grouped the causes into two kinds. Cognitive barriers: assumptions held so long they no longer feel like assumptions, and blind spots by definition not visible from the inside. Emotional barriers: the anxiety, fear of failure and self-doubt that uncertainty reliably produces, whether or not anyone admits to feeling them.
Neither shows up on a RACI chart. Both are entirely capable of leaving a merged organisation with a new structure and the same behaviour running inside it.
The commitment nobody has named
Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, in their research on what they term immunity to change, offer the clearest account of the mechanism. People who sincerely want to change, and rationally agree the new direction makes sense, often carry a hidden competing commitment, an unconscious goal that runs against the stated one, built on an assumption they have never tested because they have never noticed it is an assumption.
A manager might genuinely support a new operating model and, underneath that, be quietly committed to never looking uncertain in front of colleagues from the other organisation. The second commitment does not announce itself. It just keeps producing behaviour that looks like caution, or thoroughness, or a preference for the tried and tested, right up until someone points out that none of the new ways of working have actually been tried.
Kegan and Lahey's finding is not that people are dishonest about wanting to change. It is that wanting to change and being organised to change are not the same state, and the gap between them is invisible to the person standing in it.
Why losing the old thing outweighs gaining the new one
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's research on loss aversion, running from the 1970s onward, found that losses are felt roughly twice as strongly as equivalent gains. People will act to avoid losing something well past the point where the maths says they should have moved on.
Applied to a merger, this explains a pattern that otherwise looks irrational. A role, a way of working, a set of relationships built up over years, none of it turns up on the ledger the transformation business case is built on, and all of it is being lost, or feels like it is, while the gains sit somewhere in an unproven future state. Agreeing intellectually that the new structure is probably better does not touch the loss. The two run on different systems, and only one of them was addressed by the business case.
Why the same structure lands differently depending on who chose it
Ellen Langer, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1975, ran an experiment on what she called the illusion of control. People given a lottery ticket with a number they chose themselves valued it roughly three times higher, and were far less willing to sell it back, than people given a ticket with a random number, despite both tickets having identical odds.
Nothing about the object changed. What changed was whether the person had generated it themselves. The same effect appears to operate on organisational structures. A target operating model imposed from outside is resisted with an intensity that often has little to do with its actual content, and a structure people had a genuine hand in shaping tends to be defended even when it is objectively no better. Coch and French found the same pattern in their 1948 field experiment on factory workers, participation changed how people experienced an identical change. Langer's finding suggests why: authorship itself, not just the outcome, is what people are attached to.
Which puts a sharper edge on Arnstein's ladder and the difference between being informed and being asked. It is not only about fairness. It is that a structure nobody had a hand in shaping starts the transition already carrying a resistance the content did not earn.
Capable people, defended reasoning
Chris Argyris, in Harvard Business Review in 1991, studied why highly successful professionals often make the worst learners during organisational change. People who have rarely failed have had little practice learning from failure, and when their competence is implicitly questioned, which any restructure does simply by declaring the old way insufficient, they respond with what he called defensive reasoning: externalising the problem, protecting themselves from blame, treating the critique as a threat rather than information.
This matters specifically in public sector amalgamation, staffed overwhelmingly by capable, experienced people who have spent careers being good at their jobs. Being told the structure they built no longer fits is not neutral information to them. It reads as a verdict on their competence, and Argyris's finding is that the more capable the person, the more sophisticated the defence is likely to be, which makes it harder to spot, not easier.
What this changes about the middle
The middle leader carries most of this, and usually without the language for it. They are the ones translating a structure they may or may not have shaped into daily instructions for a team, while quietly running their own competing commitments, not wanting to be the manager who cannot make the new model work, not wanting to admit the old model they built still feels more sound to them than the one they have been handed.
None of that gets fixed by an FAQ document. What tends to move it, on the evidence from Kegan and Lahey's work, is naming the competing commitment out loud, in a setting safe enough for someone to say it without it becoming a performance issue. Which puts a specific demand on psychological safety that goes further than encouraging people to flag risks. It asks people to admit, to themselves as much as anyone, what they are actually protecting.
A few questions worth putting to a transition currently under way
Where have we asked people to agree with the change and stopped there, assuming agreement was the finish line rather than the start.
What would someone in this organisation be protecting if they quietly did not want the new model to succeed, and have we ever asked.
Are our most capable, most experienced people getting a genuine hearing when they raise concerns, or are they being managed as a change risk to be worked around. What have we, as the people leading this, not yet said out loud about our own fears for how this lands.
Where this leaves things
The original account of agency in amalgamation was mostly about structure, decision rights, communication, the boundaries governance sets. All of that still matters and none of it is wasted effort.
It is also not sufficient on its own. An organisation can fix every structural condition for agency, clear decision rights, real delegation, open communication, and still find the change has not landed, because the people inside it agreed with the plan without ever examining the quieter, unconscious commitment running underneath their agreement. Kotter's number and BCG's number are close to forty years apart and have barely moved, which is itself evidence that the structural fixes, however necessary, have not been the whole answer.
Worth asking, of any transition plan currently under way, whether it has addressed the visible half of the problem and left the invisible half untouched.
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