Marginalia

The Human Side of Resistance

Chris Strickland

20 Feb 2026 — 2 min read

People care deeply about how they get their work done

In many of my roles throughout my career, I have been involved with changes to processes, procedures, and cultural habits. The goal of each of these has been basically the same - to help teams and companies find ways of improving. Some came from the top down and some were bottom up. Guess which ones people tended to support more.

The worst thing that a change agent can do is show up already having the answer before understanding the problem. Having been part of a large transformation by external consultants I have seen that happen. People were on a spectrum from interested to skeptical on what was coming. As they went through training and asked questions, the prescribed method rarely adapted to fit their lived experience.

I saw some extremely hard working people get frustrated when someone that didn't know the challenges of their day to day work shows up with all of the answers to their problems. When they ask too many questions or push back, the knee-jerk excuse I heard was that they were resisting the change. People got labeled rather than understood.

A better approach is to ask questions and then see where you can help. Stephen Covey described this idea in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

“If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” — Stephen Covey

If you take the time to understand first, when you start offering new ideas people will take you more seriously. They will not jump in with all the reasons it will not work if you have spent the time understanding what those objections will be first.

Remember that you are there to help them. Not make them comply blindly. We want people to understand and agree that this is a better way of working. Better yet, get them involved so they have ownership in the new approach. If you don't build that agreement first, the moment you are gone they will go back to what they did before. We want things to work because it is the best way we currently know, not because someone is looking over your shoulder.

The difference between a team that holds a Retrospective when the Scrum Master is on PTO and one that doesn't is the team that finds value in it.

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