Barriers to Change: Why People Resist and How to Overcome It

Every meaningful reform-whether a new digital records system in a municipal office, a redesigned traffic plan for a congested city centre, or a shift to merit-based hiring in a public department-runs into the same wall: people push back. Change resistance is not a sign of stubbornness or incompetence. It is a predictable, even rational, human response. Understanding why people resist is the first step to managing change well. This post breaks down the main types of barriers to change, explains the influential framework developed by John Kotter and Leonard Schlesinger, and outlines the six practical strategies leaders can use to turn opposition into cooperation.

Why people and organisations resist change 🔗

Resistance to change is the response individuals and groups show when they perceive a change as a threat to their interests, security, or way of working. It is one of the most common reasons that well-designed reforms stall or fail outright. The important thing to grasp is that resistance is rarely irrational. From the perspective of the person resisting, holding on to the status quo often makes complete sense. The barriers below explain the most frequent sources of this pushback.

Parochial self-interest 🔗

Parochial self-interest occurs when people believe a change will cost them something they value-money, power, status, authority, or job security. They focus on what the change means for them personally rather than for the wider organisation. A senior official may resist a restructuring that reduces the number of people reporting to them, because it shrinks their influence. This kind of resistance is often well organised, since people with overlapping interests form informal alliances to slow or block the change. As one analysis notes, resistance driven by self-interest can lead to delays, lack of cooperation, and even sabotage.

Misunderstanding and lack of trust 🔗

People frequently resist a change not because they oppose the idea itself, but because they do not understand it or do not trust the people behind it. Incomplete or inaccurate information leads them to draw the wrong conclusions about what the change will do to them. Where there is a history of broken promises, poor communication, or previously failed reforms, this distrust deepens. The change may be perfectly sound, yet rumour and uncertainty fill the gap that clear communication should have closed.

Low tolerance for change 🔗

Some people resist change simply because they value security, stability, and routine. Low tolerance for change is when people experience anxiety or difficulty adapting as a matter of personality, regardless of whether the change is good for them. They may genuinely accept that a change is necessary but still worry that they lack the skills to cope with new systems, tools, or expectations. The fear of looking incompetent in an unfamiliar situation is a powerful brake on enthusiasm.

Different assessments of the situation 🔗

Resistance can also come from people who understand the change fully but honestly disagree with it. They may have access to different information, weigh the costs and benefits differently, or believe they have a better plan. This is one of the more constructive forms of resistance. When people understand the reasons for change but disagree with the approach, their objections can reveal genuine flaws worth correcting before the change goes ahead.

Structural inertia 🔗

Structural inertia is resistance built into the organisation itself rather than into any individual. Organisations are designed to produce stability. Hiring processes select people who fit existing patterns, training reinforces established roles, and formal rules, job descriptions, and procedures lock in particular ways of working. When a change arrives, these mechanisms act as a counterweight that pulls the organisation back toward its old equilibrium. As scholars Michael Hannan and John Freeman argued in their influential work, older and larger organisations tend to carry more inertia because their structures are deeply embedded and reproduced with high fidelity.

Related to this is group inertia, where established team norms hold individuals back even when they personally want to change. A single worker may be ready to adopt a new method, but if the group’s shared habits and unwritten rules pull the other way, the individual usually conforms. This is why resistance is as much a collective and organisational problem as it is an individual one.

Kotter and Schlesinger’s causes of resistance 🔗

In a widely cited 1979 article in the Harvard Business Review titled “Choosing Strategies for Change,” John Kotter and Leonard Schlesinger set out a clear framework for understanding why change is resisted. Their work remains a cornerstone of change management teaching. They identified four main reasons people resist change, which map closely onto the barriers described above.

The first is parochial self-interest: people fear losing something of value. The second is misunderstanding and lack of trust: people misjudge the change, often because of poor communication or distrust of the leaders driving it. The third is different assessments: people evaluate the situation differently and conclude the change carries more costs than benefits, sometimes correctly. The fourth is low tolerance for change: people doubt their own ability to develop the new skills and behaviours the change demands.

The real value of the framework is not the list itself but the diagnostic discipline it encourages. Kotter and Schlesinger argued that resistance is not a single, uniform force. Different people resist for different reasons, and lumping them together leads managers to apply the wrong remedy. A person resisting out of genuine disagreement needs a very different response from someone resisting out of fear or self-interest. Diagnosing the dominant cause comes before choosing a solution.

Strategies to overcome resistance 🔗

Having mapped the causes, Kotter and Schlesinger proposed six methods for dealing with resistance to change. The methods range from collaborative and gentle at one end to forceful and directive at the other. The guiding principle is to match the method to the cause and to use the lightest effective approach, escalating only when necessary.

Education and communication 🔗

This is the natural response to resistance rooted in misunderstanding or lack of information. Explaining the logic behind a change before it happens helps people see why it is needed and reduces the rumours that fuel anxiety. The drawback is that it can be slow, especially when many people need to be convinced and trust has to be rebuilt first.

Participation and involvement 🔗

When people help design and implement a change, they develop a sense of ownership and become far more likely to support it. Inviting potential resisters onto task forces or committees also surfaces useful information that the planners may have missed. This approach works well when leaders do not have all the information they need and when resisters have real power to obstruct. It can, however, be time-consuming and may produce a weaker design if the participants steer it poorly.

Facilitation and support 🔗

This method targets resistance caused by fear and low tolerance for change. It means providing emotional and practical support-training in new skills, time to adjust, counselling, or simply listening to concerns. It is the most helpful approach when people are resisting because they are struggling to cope. The downside is that it takes time and money and offers no guarantee of success.

Negotiation and agreement 🔗

Sometimes the most practical route is to offer incentives to those who resist, in exchange for their cooperation. Negotiation is especially useful when individuals or groups hold real power, such as union leaders who could otherwise block the change. The risk is cost: once people learn that resisting earns concessions, others may resist purely to extract their own deal.

Manipulation and co-optation 🔗

This is a more covert approach used when other tactics will not work or are too expensive. Co-optation typically means giving a leader of the resisters a symbolic role in the change effort-a seat at the table that creates the appearance of agreement without granting real influence. It can be quick and cheap, but it carries serious risk. If people realise they are being manipulated, trust collapses and resistance often intensifies. For this reason, modern practice treats manipulation with great caution.

Explicit and implicit coercion 🔗

The final method is force. Leaders use their authority to compel acceptance, whether explicitly by threatening job loss or transfer, or implicitly through pressure. Coercion is fast and can overcome almost any kind of resistance, which makes it tempting when speed is essential, such as during a crisis or turnaround. It is also the riskiest option. People may comply on the surface while resenting both the change and the way they were treated, leaving lasting damage to morale and trust. It is best reserved as a last resort.

Matching the strategy to the situation 🔗

The strongest change efforts rarely rely on a single method. They blend several, beginning with communication and participation to address the most common causes, adding support to ease the transition, and using negotiation for powerful stakeholders. Co-optation and coercion are reserved for urgent, high-stakes cases with clear guardrails. The choice depends on how much resistance exists, how much power the resisters hold, how much time is available, and the long-term relationships that need to survive the change.

Why this matters for cities and public institutions 🔗

These ideas are not confined to corporate boardrooms. They are vividly visible in the reform of cities and public institutions. Urban governance reform offers a textbook case of structural inertia. Many cities remain trapped in a colonial-era governance model where unelected bureaucrats hold real power while elected mayors serve largely ceremonial roles. Decades-old rules, deputation-based staffing, and entrenched procedures all act as built-in counterweights against reform.

Parochial self-interest shows up clearly too. When the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act of 1992 sought to devolve real power to municipalities, the predictable response was resistance from those who stood to lose control. As policy researchers have observed, most states have been unwilling to transfer powers and functions to municipalities, leaving key provisions of the amendment unimplemented more than three decades later. Existing bureaucratic structures tend to resist institutional reforms precisely because those reforms would loosen their administrative control. Meanwhile, the Smart Cities Mission attempted to bypass this inertia altogether by creating Special Purpose Vehicles-corporate bodies set up to execute projects outside the traditional municipal structure-rather than reforming the slow-moving system from within.

The lesson cuts both ways. Reforms imposed from the top without education or participation often meet quiet resistance on the ground, and consultations that are merely pro forma exercises lose legitimacy and invite pushback when policies are finally implemented. Kotter and Schlesinger’s framework explains why genuine participation, not just announcements, is so often the difference between a reform that sticks and one that fades.

Turning resistance into resilience 🔗

The most useful shift in thinking is to stop treating resistance as an obstacle to be crushed and start treating it as information to be read. Resistance signals where people feel threatened, where communication has failed, and sometimes where the plan itself is flawed. A leader who diagnoses the cause-self-interest, misunderstanding, disagreement, low tolerance, or structural inertia-can then choose a proportionate response rather than reaching reflexively for force. Applied with skill and sensitivity, these strategies can convert opposition into commitment, and a stalled reform into lasting improvement.

What do you think? If you were leading a difficult reform in a public office or city body, which of the six strategies would you reach for first, and why? And can you recall a change you once resisted-was your resistance a barrier, or was it actually pointing to a real problem worth fixing?

References

1. https://www.tutorchase.com/notes/aqa-a-level/business-studies/10-1-4-barriers-to-change-kotter-and-schlesingers-four-reasons
2. https://study.com/academy/lesson/kotter-schlesinger-resistance-to-change.html
3. https://www.aqa.org.uk/resources/business/as-and-a-level/business-7131-7132/teach/teaching-guide-kotter-and-schlesingers-reasons-for-resistance-to-change
4. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1505910
5. https://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_kotter_change_approaches.html
6. https://workplacepsychology.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/implementing-change-and-overcoming-resistance/
7. https://www.tutorchase.com/notes/aqa-a-level/business-studies/10-1-5-overcoming-resistance-kotter-and-schlesingers-6-strategies
8. https://expertprogrammanagement.com/2018/05/six-change-approaches/
9. https://umbrex.com/resources/frameworks/organization-frameworks/kotter-schlesinger-six-methods-for-managing-resistance/
10. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-editorials/urban-governance-reforms-for-viksit-bharat-2047
11. https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/fixing-the-foundations-reforming-urban-governance-in-india
12. https://www.policycircle.org/opinion/urban-governance-and-indian-cities/