Anna Bulat is a psychologist and business and team coach who works with founders, owners and teams. She trained first as a mining safety engineer in the Donbas coalfield. She practises at bulat.company.
Resistance to change is the explanation most owners reach for when a new system stalls in their firm. You have probably heard that 70 per cent of change programmes fail, which makes a stall sound inevitable.
The figure has no reliable evidence behind it, and it hides something more useful about resistance to change in a small firm.
What the 70 per cent myth hides about resistance to change
Michael Beer and Nitin Nohria opened a 2000 Harvard Business Review article with the claim and gave no source for it. Writers have repeated it ever since, usually to make you sit up.
In 2011, Mark Hughes of the University of Brighton went looking for the origin. Writing in the Journal of Change Management, he reviewed five prominent published sources of the figure. He found no valid and reliable empirical evidence behind it in any of them.
One trail leads to Michael Hammer and James Champy. In their 1993 book Reengineering the Corporation, they estimated that as many as 50 to 70 per cent of organisations attempting reengineering missed the dramatic results they intended. They called it an unscientific estimate.
A guess dressed up as a measurement, repeated until it hardened into a fact.
So why has it lasted?
Because it is comfortable. If most change is doomed anyway, your stalled project is a statistic rather than a puzzle. It lets you say “people resist change” and mean “this is universal”, when the honest sentence is “I do not yet understand what is happening in my own firm”. That second sentence is harder, and it is the one worth staying with.
What resistance to change is protecting
The word resistance usually stands in for whatever behaviour is annoying the person using it. Someone nods in the meeting and does nothing afterwards. The bookings diary stays on paper months after everyone agreed to move it. We call that stubbornness, or fear, or attitude. I want to offer a different reading, and you do not have to accept it to make use of it.
In a 2001 Harvard Business Review article, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey described what they had seen in hundreds of cases: capable people who wanted a change, supported it, and still did nothing. Their argument was that resistance to change often reflects a hidden goal rather than opposition. They called the pattern immunity to change. Alongside the commitment you can hear, there is often a second one you cannot, pulling the other way.
That second commitment is protective. It is not laziness and it is rarely hostility. The person who looks like they are failing to change is often succeeding at keeping something else safe.
Picture an eight-person services firm bringing in one shared system for allocating jobs. Everyone agrees it will cut duplicated work. Two months on, the old spreadsheet is still alive on two laptops.
Ask what the spreadsheet is holding, and it turns out to hold quite a lot. The coordinator who maintains it can see the week filling up before anyone else can. That is how she manages to refuse one more urgent job on a Thursday. The new system takes that away from her. And the long-serving employee who knows every workaround in that file has a standing in the team that the tidy new process makes invisible.
Neither of them is wrong about the change. Neither will tell you any of this if you ask whether they support it, because they probably do. Once you read resistance to change as protection, the spreadsheet stops looking like sabotage. It starts looking like a job somebody is still doing.
In a small firm, you are the system
Women led 14 per cent of UK SME employers in 2024, according to the government’s Longitudinal Small Business Survey, either as one woman or as a majority-female management team. Roughly 1.4 million UK private sector businesses had employees at the start of 2025, according to the Department for Business and Trade, and the great majority employ fewer than 50 people.
A large organisation can put distance between a decision and the person who made it. A company of eight cannot. When there are eight of you, the owner is not managing the system. She is the system, and her attention decides which things are real and which quietly disappear after the meeting.
Which means your ambivalence is not private. It never was.
Teams often read their owner’s second thoughts long before she admits them to herself. They read them from small things: what she leaves out when she introduces the change, which questions she answers in half a second, which project she stops asking about. Then they act on what they have read. So a good deal of what gets called resistance is not resistance to change at all. It is loyalty to the reservation you have not said out loud.
Now rewind to the week before the change stalled. Not to the launch, to the week before it. What were you privately unsure about, and who saw it?
Why resistance to change gets sharper under uncertainty
I work with teams under prolonged uncertainty (war, displacement, relocation), where the ground genuinely moves, and the pattern gets sharper there rather than weaker. When everything else is unstable, people hold hard to whatever procedure still works, and hardest of all to the ones that look pointless from outside.
That is not irrationality. A predictable routine is doing a job: it holds something steady while everything else is not. Take it away without replacing what it held, and you get behaviour that looks like sabotage and is closer to self-preservation.
My first profession was mining safety engineering, and the same thing was true underground, where the stakes made it visible faster. Crews kept their own private checks alongside the official ones. On paper this was duplication, and somebody was always proposing to tidy it away. In practice the private check was the one they trusted, because they had watched it work with their own eyes, and the official one was simply the one someone had given them. You could remove the duplication by instruction. You could not remove what it was for.
Ask yourself which of your team’s small stubborn habits you have been meaning to tidy away.
Four things you can do this week
These steps treat resistance to change as information rather than a fault.
1. Ask each person on their own: “What would we lose if this worked?” Not in the team meeting, and not “what do you think?”, which gets you agreement. This question gets you the competing commitment. The first answer will be polite. Wait through the pause for the second one.
2. Write down your own hidden commitment before you ask anybody else. What would you personally lose if this change succeeded? Less control over the detail, perhaps. A reason you have been giving yourself for a while. If you cannot find one, you have not looked properly, and your team already knows what it is.
3. Find out who is quietly keeping the old way going. That person is usually not the opponent of the change. They carry the thing the change is about to drop, and they are the fastest route to understanding what that is.
4. Change one visible thing yourself, in front of them, and let it cost you something. In a firm your size your own behaviour is the announcement. Everything else is a memo.
None of this needs a budget or a programme. I would put it at about two hours, plus a willingness to hear an answer you would rather not.
And some changes should not survive the examination. If the reservation you find turns out to be yours, and on inspection it is sound, then the resistance to change did its job. It stopped you spending six months and your team’s goodwill on something you never quite believed in. Whatever the true failure rate for change turns out to be, some stalled projects are simply the team voting.
So before Monday’s meeting, take ten minutes and a blank page, and write down what you stand to lose if this works. Start there. The team can wait until you have an answer.
For more on the women running small firms like yours, see our key UK facts on women in business and our guide to why women make great entrepreneurs.
