Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. Trying to undertake a major change like rolling out the product operating model isn’t easy. A lot of companies struggle with this.
But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. There are teams out there that are successfully making this transformation. And I know that because I’ve seen it happen. And so has fellow coach Hope Gurion.
In this series on organizational change, I’ve been sitting down with Hope to reflect on our experience as coaches. We’re sharing what we’ve seen work and where teams struggle the most.
If you’re just joining us here, you might want to check out the other posts in this series:
- We covered how to decide if your organization is ready for change in the first article.
- We introduced the biggest mistake we see companies make when trying to undergo a transformation.
- We shared advice on how to select your pilot team to trial the change.
- We described how to build the skills pilot teams need to succeed.
- We discussed how leaders and stakeholders can best support pilot teams.
And for today’s discussion, we’re looking at resistance. It’s inevitable that you’ll encounter some resistance to change, even when you have enthusiastic pilot teams who have volunteered to participate.
We’re going to look at different forms of resistance that might come up within your pilot teams and offer a few ways to overcome it.
You can watch the video or read a lightly edited transcript of our conversation below.
3 Common Types of Resistance to Change on Pilot Teams
Teresa Torres: Welcome everybody, I’m Teresa Torres and I’m here with Hope Gurion. We are recording our next installment in our organizational transformation series.
We’ve been exploring some of the challenges, some of the mistakes, some of the best practices we’ve seen when a company shifts from a more traditional project or IT model to a product operating model.
In our most recent videos, we dug into how to choose pilot teams, how to make sure those teams are equipped with the right skills, and how to prepare your leaders and stakeholders to support those teams.
And today we’re going to get into, once your teams are off and running, what are some of the challenges that might come up? And the big one, with any change—we have to look for how we tackle resistance to change.
And in these types of transformations, we see resistance to change come up in a lot of different ways. I think we’re going to talk through the top three today.
Hope, do you want to kick us off? What’s the number one thing that comes up?
1. “We don’t have time for this.”
Hope Gurion: So we’re going to talk first about resistance from the teams themselves. So you’ve got your pilot teams in place. And even though you selected them as pilot teams because they were ready, willing, and interested, they still may experience some resistance.
One of the most common forms of resistance that you might hear is: We don’t have time. So this sounds like a legit reason on the surface, but it’s really one that you have to dig a little deeper into to really understand. Like when you say “no time,” tell me more. What do you mean by that?
Because often what that really means is we’re either stuck in delivery mode—and possibly it’s because they’re working on something that they feel like they have to get out the door in a short period of time.
But we talked about this before. When we’re selecting pilot teams, we generally want to choose teams that aren’t currently in the middle of a high-integrity commitment. So if that’s not the reason they don’t have time, it could be that they’re spending a lot of time on other types of activities: meetings, status updates, stakeholder updates, all the things that they’re doing to kind of help provide transparency to other people in the organization. So those are typically some of the culprits behind that no time resistance.
Teresa Torres: We’ve actually recorded a deeper video on just this objection or form of resistance because it is so common. And I think in that video, we talk about seven different things this could mean. When a team says, “I have no time,” how do we dig in and uncover what that really means?
I think a good analogy for this is sales objections. We often hear people won’t buy because the price is too high. But that’s a mask for a lot of other things. It could be the price for the value is too high. It could be, I don’t want to tell you your baby is ugly, so I’m telling you the price is too high.
And so just like salespeople have to learn how to dig in and understand what this really means, I think leaders need to be prepared that when a team says, “I don’t have time,” what are they communicating? This doesn’t seem important enough to them? They really genuinely need help clearing their calendar?
One of our takeaways for this objection—it will come up. I think it always comes up. So be ready for it. It’s not always what it looks like on the surface. We’ll link to the video where we go into more detail so you can dive in there. Think about it almost like a placeholder for one of those seven more specific things.
Hope Gurion: Another way that this sometimes comes up is: This seems like it will take a lot of time. So it’s not even that I know exactly how much time it’s going to take, and I literally cannot budget that time.
It’s also the perception that this seems like it’s going to take a lot of time. Sometimes that perception comes from, I’ve never really done this before, so I don’t know how much time it’s going to take. Or it’s so foreign to me, it feels like it’s effortful because I haven’t done enough of this to know that it’s second nature and make it fast and easy to do. So time is a bit of a red herring and you just kind of need to really dig into what it is that you’re really worried about.
Teresa Torres: I have a good analogy for this one, too. We ask engineers to estimate user stories and we get an eight if we’re using the Fibonacci sequence or an extra large T-shirt size. And we’re like, what? This didn’t seem that hard.
But really what they’re saying with that estimate is, “There’s so many unknowns. This scares me. I think it’s going to take a lot of time.”
And we overcome that by letting them go investigate a little bit. And so with this response of: I think this is going to take a lot of time, it’s the same thing. There’s a lot of unknowns. How do we fill in the gaps and let them size it a little bit better so they can start smaller iterations?
Okay, so I think for this one, what I’m going to summarize: It is going to come up. It always comes up. Teams are going to feel like they don’t have time. Nobody likes being told you need to do more on top of all the stuff we’re already doing. But usually that’s an indicator there’s something deeper under the surface.
And then be sure to check out the video where we dive in more on what “I have no time” really means.
What’s the second most common one that comes up?
2. “I don’t want to be a beginner again.”
Hope Gurion: For a lot of people, this is related to the “it feels like it’s going to take a lot of time” worry. It’s this feeling of: I knew exactly what I was supposed to do in my job. And now I feel like you’ve told me I have to be doing something completely different. And there’s this discomfort with going back to being a beginner. I felt like an expert until now.
And so that is a very common form of resistance. Everybody wants to feel like an expert. And to have to tell people you’re going back to doing your role—but in a new way—can create this feeling of discomfort and resistance because everybody wants to feel confident and capable in what they’re doing.
Teresa Torres: I think we’re seeing a lot of this across the industry in all roles related to generative AI.
How does my role change? I’m a little afraid to try this new technology, but I don’t want to fall behind. And it’s messy.
Just go read LinkedIn for 20 minutes. You see a wide variation in positions on this, from “this is the worst technology ever, never use it, you’re unethical for using it,” to “this is the best thing ever,” and everything in between.
And it’s all the human response to: Everything is changing around me. How do I react to having to learn something new? And the fear of having to start over, and I’m not very sure, versus some of us are early adopters about these things, and get excited for the change.
And so hopefully when people choose their pilot teams, they’re picking the teams that are more on that early adopter side.
But it doesn’t mean this isn’t going to come up. They might still get into it and be like, oh, this is harder than I thought. And they’re still going to find themselves in the beginner stage all over again.
Hope Gurion: This is why the pilot teams—especially when you’ve recently retrained, reskilled, or upskilled a team in discovery, for example—it may all make perfect sense as they’re learning it. And then the second they have to put it into practice in the context of their own work, it’s like everything that once made sense is gone or confusing. And I don’t know how to do it.
It will take a few at bats to be able for this to become second nature. And so as a coach to those teams going through this for the first time as a pilot team, you want to give teams time to make mistakes, because it is inevitable. And you want to let people know that’s how we go from not knowing something to knowing something.
It’s all part of having a growth mindset and being a continuous learner. And you really want to celebrate the fact that they were trying to do it. And even if they made mistakes, that’s okay.
That’s why you may want to think about how you can create the space for people to give it a try, make mistakes, maybe not have a giant spotlight on those teams as they’re doing things for the first time, inevitably making mistakes.
Teresa Torres: I think the hard part of all of this is that learning hurts. It’s effortful and it hurts our brains. And that’s required to actually acquire new skills and to learn. It’s also exciting and it can be fun.
But I think especially in the workplace, something feeling hard really taps into this psychology of maybe I’m not competent, imposter syndrome might come back up. And if someone’s well into their career, those are very uncomfortable feelings.
Hope Gurion: Maybe not ones that we’ve had in a while. And again, this is where as a leader—especially if you’re a new leader coming into the organization trying to manage these pilot teams—there may not be a lot of psychological safety within a culture to be able to make mistakes or make them publicly. And so you really need to gauge how you can create an environment that enables the teams to try it quickly, make the mistakes, learn from them, and not feel like that is putting their jobs at risk, their reputations at risk.
You just never quite know what people might be wrestling with. And so it’s really important to create that protection for the team and encouragement as they’re learning and putting into practice these new skills.
Teresa Torres: I think another really underestimated approach here is also just to remind your teams that learning is hard and this is normal. I think sometimes we start to feel like, oh, I’m not smart enough. I’m just not getting it. I’m not a good fit for this. And really we’re just going through that growth stage of learning something new. And I think a leader can play a big role and be like, “It is hard. It’s supposed to be hard.”
In fact, I know as a coach, I say, “It’s supposed to be hard” probably more often than anything else that I say.
Hope Gurion: I had this with a team that I was coaching earlier today. We are so wired—especially at work—to present with confidence. It is really unnatural to say the words “I don’t know,” or “I’m not sure,” or “I’m not sure I’m doing this right.”
Most of our organizations reward competence, whether it’s warranted or not. And so even when a team is presenting something and they’re off track with what they were supposed to be doing, it’s important to call out, “I think this is what you’re trying to do, but I’m noticing this. And so how do we get on track to do this? And tell me what you were thinking.”
This is a way to just sort of build the bridge between this feeling like I’ve got to present everything with confidence and the humility required when you’re learning something new for it to really sink in and absorb.
Teresa Torres: Really great point. Okay. What’s our third one?
3. “That will never work here.”
Hope Gurion: Our third one might be one of those reasons under why people are saying they don’t have time. But this could also be something you need to unpack a little bit, which is this resistance coming from: This is really never going to work here.
We’re saying we want to do it this way, but there’s no way our leaders are going to support this. No way our stakeholders are going to support this. This is never going to work here.
And so then it creates people sort of going through the motions or saying they’re interested. But then when you look at their behaviors, they’re not acting in the way that would be consistent with an outcome-oriented team. And so we just have to keep uncovering if that’s why they’re resisting and unpacking why they believe that to be true.
Teresa Torres: You know, it’s funny. We sometimes see this at companies where they train everybody. And that’s this very high level, I just don’t believe in this. It’s not going to stick. It’s the flavor of the week.
I think with pilot teams in particular, it’s a little bit more insidious. It’s not this high-level belief that this will never work. They signed up to be a pilot team. It’s a little bit more like they get to one of the habits or one of the new behaviors, and they dismiss it. And they dismiss it because it’s different from what they’ve done in the past. It’s different from how their boss does it.
And so it’s probably not the wholesale, this is never going to work. It’s like they get rid of an element before they even try it. They’re not even trying to see if it could work here because there’s something in the organizational context or their own background or experience that it is clashing with. I think with pilot teams, it’s a little more localized.
Hope Gurion: Yeah, I can give an example. I was working with a team about a week ago, and when we talked about coming up with multiple solution ideas for an opportunity, their resistance was, “Well, aren’t there some times when it’s really just the one idea and you really just have to build it to see if it works?” And I was like, “Maybe, tell me more.”
And they were operating from a mindset that: We have to replatform something. There’s no choice in our ability to replatform it. And we’ll never know it works until we actually release the entire platform and force everybody into using that platform.
Teresa Torres: This is why we don’t recommend replatforming teams being pilot teams.
Hope Gurion: Absolutely true. But also, this is sort of a fixed mindset. That can’t possibly work in my circumstance and sort of rejecting outright that maybe there’s signals that we could learn that would de-risk our decisions before we go so far down a path that it’s hard to unwind.
There’s the: It’s not going to work here or it’s not going to work in my specific circumstance and really needing to uncover that as a leader.
Teresa Torres: I see another one, too, which is: I think my way is better. And I see this usually really localized. Sometimes it’s coming, let’s say from a UXer who has a lot of experience interviewing, but they’re conducting a different type of interview. Maybe they’re doing deeper, broader ethnographic research.
And we teach a very specific story-based format of interviewing. It’s not that we’re saying this is the only way to interview. We’re saying when you’re looking for opportunities, this is a good way to do it.
But they dismiss it before they even try it because it’s different from what they were taught. And what we would like to see, I think, is: Try it out, compare it to what you know, put it in your toolbox, and you can still decide which tool to use when. But don’t just dismiss the tool. Just because you have a hammer, that doesn’t mean you don’t need a screwdriver.
And I think that’s a little bit of “This would never work here. No, our design team works this way.” And I’m not just picking on designers. I think we’ve seen this from all roles. This is just an example that came top of mind.
It’s almost like a method that’s new to you—but has some overlap with a method you already have—threatens you a little bit. And it’s almost at the identity level.
We see this with story mapping. A lot of teams use story mapping to do release planning. We teach story mapping in a little bit of a different way. We do it much earlier in the process. We do it to uncover assumptions.
And I’ve seen some people get really stuck, saying, “But that’s not what story mapping is.” Okay, good. Let’s call it a solution user journey map. I don’t care. The idea is: We’re mapping out the steps so we can generate assumptions.
But because it is connected to what they already know, there’s a little bit of overlap. They get stuck. “No, that’s wrong. That wouldn’t work here. That’s not how we do things. We do it this way.” And that’s where I see this really localized. It’s like they just have a tactic that’s a little different and they get stuck there.
Hope Gurion: And I think it goes back to that second point: I really prefer to feel like an expert. It’s just so much more comfortable. And so you see people reverting back to that as opposed to like, what’s the decision we’re trying to make? How do we expedite making a good decision? How do we expedite learning as quickly as possible?
Teresa Torres: I think you’re raising a good point. All three of these sort of intertwine. I may feel like I don’t have time because I don’t want to be a beginner again, and I don’t think it’s going to work here.
Hope Gurion: What I know how to do has always worked for me.
Teresa Torres: Yeah. Hey, nothing’s broken. Why are we changing things?
That’s also a good point. One of the best ways to help overcome resistance is to show actually what isn’t working. What’s driving the need for this change? And that’s also a good way to think about removing some of these obstacles.
Let’s get into how we address these as they come up. I know you have sort of rituals in mind, ways to overcome these. Do you want to get into that?
What To Do When Teams Push Back
Hope Gurion: Again, it’s not always going to be easy to uncover these points of resistance. So when we’re working with these pilot teams, we want to create some rituals, some ways of letting the pilot teams share their progress, what they’ve tried, what they’ve learned, what’s working for them, where they’re stuck. You want to make sure you’ve got some rituals.
One of my favorite ones is—I call it a discovery delivery demo—but you can call it whatever you want. It could be a pilot team showcase or a progress ritual. Call it whatever you want.
But it’s: How are we showing what we’ve learned, what we want to learn next, how we think we’re going to learn it? And is there anything slowing us down? What I like doing is having the pilot teams do this together with the functional leaders—head of design, head of product, head of engineering.
Because as the pilot teams get coaching from their functional leaders, that benefits the other teams. When the teams see one team getting stuck, they realize, oh, we need to avoid that or learn from that.
You get this benefit of bringing all the teams along and you get visibility in people sharing their work, showing the interview snapshots or showing their opportunity space or showing their assumption test plans.
It’s just another way to expose where there might be legitimate ways that they’re getting blocked or in their minds they’re stuck on something or resistant to something.
Teresa Torres: It also helps to create a little bit of momentum by letting your best pilot team pull your other pilot teams along. If you have a team that is starting to do this and put it into practice, it really gets rid of that, “That can’t work here.” It is working here.
That’s actually why we do pilot teams. We’re trying to get examples of how it does work here so we overcome that objection for everybody else. But it also allows those teams to share what they did to make time for that in their week.
And so it takes some of the burden off the leader to have all the answers. They have multiple pilot teams, they’re all going off and exploring and finding different things to work. It becomes an opportunity for them to share peer to peer as well.
Focus On the Root Cause, Not Just the Surface Expression
Hope Gurion: These are some of the points of resistance to keep an eye out for with your pilot teams, but there’s ways around them as a leader who’s just really anticipating and then trying to help address the root causes of each of those points of resistance.
Teresa Torres: And that root cause piece is the most important takeaway of this video. What you hear on the surface is not always what’s going on.
All right. Thanks, Hope.
Next, we’re going to dive into the types of resistance we see from stakeholders and leaders as your pilot team starts to work. So stay tuned.
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