Forget about generic change programs — no-one wants to be manipulated into thinking differently.
Real change in behaviour starts with showing people a clear path to victory. But even then, with a brilliant strategy, you’ll still face inertia — or resistance to change.
In this series, we’ll share countermeasures for every type of inertia. First up, overcoming, “We don’t want to change how we do things around here”.
This attachment to the past stems from four sources:
1. Fear of losing trusted supplier relationships.
Countermeasure: Audit your vendors continually. The market is constantly evolving and your partnerships must too. This is not disloyalty, but a necessary step to secure the best performance and cost. Failing to do this is the real risk, as you will quickly fall behind competitors who are.
2. Anxiety over losing power and status connected to these relationships.
Countermeasure: Honour the past, but map the future. Publicly recognise the success of old relationships, but explain the need to adapt to changing conditions. Use a Wardley Map of your landscape to show what’s coming next and allow each person to see what their role is in creating a brighter future.
3. Concern about sunk financial investments.
Countermeasure: Reframe ‘loss’ as ‘cost of delay’. People feel the pain of loss more acutely than the pleasure of gain. Therefore, shift the debate from “losses on the balance sheet” towards the “future cost of delay”. Model how delay will increase cost for essential talent and tech (e.g. for AI) as competition intensifies.
4. Fear of lowering barriers to entry and letting competitors in.
Countermeasure: Attack your own barriers first. If a new practice (e.g. open-source software) threatens a barrier (e.g. proprietary tech), then that advantage was already fragile. Your only defence is to build new advantages — like speed or agility — faster than rivals. This is the core of real strategic advantage.
Use the table attached to diagnose and counter inertia in your organisation. Next, we tackle type 2 inertia: “We can’t adopt these new ways of working!”.
Sign up to the blog to make sure you don’t miss this: https://powermaps.net/blog
Real change in behaviour starts with showing people a clear path to victory. But even then, with a brilliant strategy, you’ll still face inertia — or resistance to change.
In this series, we’ll share countermeasures for every type of inertia. First up, overcoming, “We don’t want to change how we do things around here”.
This attachment to the past stems from four sources:
1. Fear of losing trusted supplier relationships.
Countermeasure: Audit your vendors continually. The market is constantly evolving and your partnerships must too. This is not disloyalty, but a necessary step to secure the best performance and cost. Failing to do this is the real risk, as you will quickly fall behind competitors who are.
2. Anxiety over losing power and status connected to these relationships.
Countermeasure: Honour the past, but map the future. Publicly recognise the success of old relationships, but explain the need to adapt to changing conditions. Use a Wardley Map of your landscape to show what’s coming next and allow each person to see what their role is in creating a brighter future.
3. Concern about sunk financial investments.
Countermeasure: Reframe ‘loss’ as ‘cost of delay’. People feel the pain of loss more acutely than the pleasure of gain. Therefore, shift the debate from “losses on the balance sheet” towards the “future cost of delay”. Model how delay will increase cost for essential talent and tech (e.g. for AI) as competition intensifies.
4. Fear of lowering barriers to entry and letting competitors in.
Countermeasure: Attack your own barriers first. If a new practice (e.g. open-source software) threatens a barrier (e.g. proprietary tech), then that advantage was already fragile. Your only defence is to build new advantages — like speed or agility — faster than rivals. This is the core of real strategic advantage.
Use the table attached to diagnose and counter inertia in your organisation. Next, we tackle type 2 inertia: “We can’t adopt these new ways of working!”.
Sign up to the blog to make sure you don’t miss this: https://powermaps.net/blog
