Many of you know that I often like to begin an article with a musical connection if I can.
The band Queensryche is a fairly well known heavy metal band who had a song Resistance. It’s not my favorite song of theirs, that’s probably Best I Can, but it’s a good one. And it was running through my mind as this topic rose up in my thinking.
But moving on…
I was hosting a Coaching Clinic at the Agile Online Summit this week (late October 2020). In our Monday and Tuesday clinics, about ten people were looking for help in overcoming resistance within their agile contexts. Leadership resistance and team-level resistance were neck-in-neck as being problem areas.
As I was facilitating the coaching sessions, it made me think about resistance. And I remembered an old (mature, but still relevant) article written by Dale Emory on resistance entitled—Resistance as a Resource. It was published in 2001, so about 20 years ago. Dale also used to share on this topic at conferences.
I’d read it several times over the years, but I read through it again. And as I did so, it resonated more with me now than it ever had before.
Here’s a quote that represents the key idea in the article—
I have discovered a foolproof way to eliminate resistance. All I have to do is to stop giving advice, stop making proposals, and stop asking people to do things. If I never ask people to do anything, they have nothing to resist!
But of course, I won't stop doing those things.
How lucky, then, that I know a second way to eliminate resistance. All I have to do is to stop thinking of people's responses as resistance. I can think of each response as simply a response. Even better, I can think of each response as information. With every response, I learn something that I did not know before. I learn about other people's expectations, or about my own. I learn about how I am communicating about what I want. I learn about the relationships I have established and how I may need to strengthen those relationships. I learn about what is possible here and now how I may need to adjust the environment around me to better support the requests I make. Each thing I learn gives me new possibilities, new ideas about what I can do to move a step closer to resolution.
Reframing Resistance
Essentially what Dale did is reframe his response to the resistance. He stopped judging it. And decided to simply receive, whatever he perceived as resistance, as information and learning. And he suggested focusing that learning inward to his own actions and responses.
How cool is that?
And it also struck me that if we change our view to the resistance, we also change our mindset and how we’re showing up to people that we previously categorized as “resistors”.
It made me wonder if this shift in ourselves (in our thoughts, mindset, body language, attitude, etc.) would change things.
Wrapping Up
Again, inspired by TV trivia, I’d say that—Resistance is Futile.
That is, our looking at the world and determining that someone is resisting an idea, notion, or change…is futile. So, stop doing that. Instead, reframe it. I love the notion of replacing it with learning.
Then moving to self-reflection and considering what adjustments I might make in how I’m showing up.
Please don’t resist this idea!
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.