Inertia — or resistance to change — is a widespread problem. However, the supposed ‘cure’ — cultural transformation — is often worse than the disease.
No-one sensible would try to change a nation’s culture, because it’s the outcome of billions of interactions over time that have enabled a people to survive and thrive in that environment.
In the same way, a company’s culture emerges from millions of everyday interactions between its people, systems and markets — interactions that have enabled them and the organisation to survive and thrive.
Yet many organisations still buy the snake oil of prescriptive cultural change programs, forgetting that culture is an emergent outcome of millions of interactions, not a mechanical system to be re-engineered.
If you want to change a culture, you have to change the way people interact.
But what can you do if many of those interactions are about resisting change — whether that change is coming from the outside (for example, AI disruption) or from within (a deliberate change in direction)?
The first step is to understand the root causes of that resistance and to recognise when inertia is negative — born of habit or fear — and when it’s actually protecting you from making serious errors.
We can group all types of inertia into four categories:
Attachment to the past (negative inertia): “We don’t want to change the way we do things”
Cost of moving forward (mostly-negative): “We can’t adopt these new ways of working”
Doubt in the new (sometimes negative - sometimes positive): “We’re not sure this is better”
Threat to current model (often positive): “These changes could hurt the business”.
In the next post in this series, we will explore these four types of inertia in detail, explain what causes them and — most importantly — show how to overcome each of them with practical countermeasures.
To make sure you don't miss any blogs in this series, subscribe here.