Resistance To Change In Organizations Quotes

I have observed an analogy between a force field equilibrium and resistance to change in organizations. Let us imagine change to be a coiled spring in a field of opposing forces, such that some forces support change and others resist it. By increasing supporting forces such as supervisory pressure, prospects of career growth and monetary benefits or decreasing the resisting forces such as group norms, social rewards and work avoidance, the situation can be directed towards the desired result - but for a short time only, and that too only to a certain extent. After a while the resisting forces push back with greater force as they are compressed even more tightly. Therefore, a better approach would be to decrease the resisting force in such a manner that there is no concomitant increase in the supporting forces. In this way, less energy will be needed to bring about and maintain change.
The result of the forces i mentioned above, is motive. ~ Arun Tiwari

It was not seen that woman's place was in the home until she began to go out of it; the statement was a reply to an unspoken challenge, it was attempted resistance to irresistible change. ~ Rose Wilder Lane

Some critics will counter that poverty is a choice made by those that are lazy or who lack the desire to change their loves for the better. I agree that poverty is a choice. But that choice is not made by the people who live under its oppressive effects. Rather, the choice is ours. It's the choice of government that represents our priorities and allocates our investments. Its a choice reinforced by the companies we patronize and the organizations we support. ~ Wes Moore

Taken to extremes, life is a process of reorientation after shame or glory and when anxiety sweeps in there is a relief at not having left any definite tracks.

Before you understand where the emotion is going to lead, you talk to anyone and everyone about the object of your love. All of a sudden, this stops. By then the ice is already thin and slippery. You realize that every word could expose your infatuation. Feigning indifference is as hard as acting normally and fundamentally the same thing.

There is a resistance in the party who wants to leave, a fear of the unknown, of the hassle and of changing one's mind. A party not wanting to be left must exploit that resistance. But then they must restrain their need for clarity and honesty. The matter must remain unformulated. A party not wanting to be left must leave it to the one wanting to go to express the change. That is the only way to keep a person who does not want to be with you. Hence the widespread silence in the relationships of the world.

Love needs no words. For a short period you can put your trust in wordless emotion. But in the long run there is no love without words and no love with words alone. Love is a hungry beast. It feeds off touch and repeated assurances.

The sense of desolation in a flat that your lover has just left is the most complete sense of desolation that exists.

Her desperation being real, she was extra-sensitive to the ways desperation could ~ Lena Andersson

And so hope for me has died one thousand deaths. I hoped that friend would get it, but hope died. I hoped that person would be an ally for life, but hope died. I hoped that my organizations really desired change, but hope died. I hoped I'd be treated with the full respect I deserve at my job, but hope died. I hoped that racist policies would change, and just policies would never be reversed, but hope died. I hoped the perpetrator in uniform would be brought to justice this time, but hope died. I hoped history would stop repeating itself, but hope died. I hoped things would be better for my children, but hope died. ~ Austin Channing Brown

Letter to the tech giants:

When fame and abundance kiss somebody's feet before that person is wise enough, he or she is very likely to lose track of what's necessity and what's luxury. And modern society is filled with examples of such intelligent stupidity – stupidity that is carried out by apparently smart humans. Because being smart is not the same as being wise. The world has enough smartness, but not enough wisdom to bring that smartness into proper productive practice – and I mean productive practice not sophisticated practice – there is a difference. A person smart enough to visualize a Falcon rocket engine can easily pinpoint the locations of various organizations that spread terrorism, yet the person chooses to explore the space further instead of prioritizing the technological advantages to first fix real issues of the human society that inflict harm to the humans every walk of the way.
The world is a miserable place not because we have lack of resources, but because those who have an abundance of resources do not have the slightest idea of true human need. The resources needed for colonizing Mars if put to proper practice can fix the world's global warming issues – it can fix the world's climate change issues – it can fix the world's terrorism issues, yet people are more interested in the pompous idea of living in Mars for whatever reason, instead of paying attention to improving human condition on earth. I am not against technological advancement, ~ Abhijit Naskar

Synergies are something that the CEO basically has to force to happen, because organizations are, generally, like bodies in motion that tend to stay in motion. It's very hard to get big organizations to change. And it takes really a very powerful mandate to force things to happen. ~ John C. Malone

these are ten manifestations of demon possession in the New Testament. 1. superhuman physical strength (Mark 5:3; Acts 19:16) 2. fits of rage and ferocious behavior (Mark 5:4) 3. high pain tolerance (Mark 5:5) 4. self-mutilation (Mark 5:5) 5. foaming at the mouth (Luke 9:39) 6. seizures or convulsions (Luke 9:42) 7. divided personality (Mark 5:6-7) (The demoniac ran to Jesus yet at the same time cried out in fear.) 8. resistance to spiritual things, especially the name of Jesus (Mark 5:7) 9. clairvoyance or supernatural knowledge (Mark 5:7; Acts 16:16) 10. change in voice (Mark 5:9) ~ Mark Hitchcock

Transformation is the result of big shifts in perceptions and responses. The process can be uncomfortable, since the mind is reluctant to notice itself, to take responsibility for its stories, and to change. When the mind is in acute resistance, the emotional body pays a price. ~ Miguel Ruiz

Positive change always encounters resistance, conflict, and obstacles. We must embrace difficult and heated situations in life, for that is the method of igniting our reactions in order to transform them. ~ Yehuda Berg

The fundamental driving force for me is to create a change in the world we live in ... It is about exploitation, plundering and degradation. I have a small possibility to participate in the resistance. Most of the things that I do are part of a resistance, a form of solidarity work. ~ Henning Mankell

I've seen, all too often in my career, people coming in to lead agencies and organizations and trying to impose change from the top down. Never works. You never have enough time. ~ Robert M. Gates

Often, we will stay in a miserable status quo until the misery finally exceeds the resistance to change. True wisdom is seeing the future: what will happen if change does not happen? ~ David W. Earle

There is a terrible conservatism, like a cancer, right in the heartlands of music-making, a tremendous resistance to change, an absolute horror of the idea that more people might connect with music. That infuriates me more than I can say. ~ Charles Hazlewood

There are so many things that we could do to change the world in so many aspects. There are people working in nonprofit organizations, tackling the issues that we so desperately need to face, while governments fail so appallingly. ~ Annie Lennox

choose to use Kanban as a method to drive change in your organization, you are subscribing to the view that it is better to optimize what already exists, because that is easier and faster and will meet with less resistance than running a managed, engineered, named-change initiative. Introducing a radical change is harder than incrementally improving an existing one. ~ David J. Anderson

One of the difficulties in bringing about change in an organization is that you must do so through the persons who have been most successful in that organization, no matter how faulty the system or the organization is. To such persons, you see, it is the best of all possible organizations, because look who was selected by it ad look who succeeded most in it. Yet, these are the very people through whom we must bring about improvements. ~ George Washington

All those statistics - the ones about decline - point toward massive theological discontent. People still believe in God. They just do not believe in the God proclaimed and worshipped by conventional religious organizations. Some of the discontented - and there are many of them - do not know what to call themselves. So they check the "unaffiliated" box on religion surveys. They have become secular humanists, agnostics, posttheists, and atheists and have rejected the conventional God. Others say they are spiritual but not religious. They still believe in God but have abandoned conventional forms of congregating. Still others declare themselves "done" with religion. They slink away from religious communities, traditions that once gave them life, and go hiking on Sunday morning. Some still go to church, but are hanging on for dear life, hoping against hope that something in their churches will change. They pray prayers about heaven that no longer make sense and sing hymns about an eternal life they do not believe in. They want to be in the world, because they know they are made of the same stuff as the world and that the world is what really matters, but some nonsense someone taught them once about the world being bad or warning of hell still echoes in their heads. They are afraid to say what they really think or feel for fear that no one will listen or care or even understand. They think they might be crazy. All these people are turning toward the world because they intuit that ~ Diana Butler Bass

When do things change entirely you wonder? When do they get better? When will it be possible? It is possible now. You are built to open your fists and show me your palms and to pass food from them into the hands of others. You are built for comfort and for fire, for battle and for poetry and you are a child of my family and my family was made by the world. Here we stand in the dark now and I am old and you are holding my hand and walking me from the bed to the window. We are looking out at all of it, the wonder and the danger. There are voices and the sun blazes and everything is bright enough that if I were reading the letters on your skin, I wouldn't be able to parse them. Now look at your own hand and the wrinkles in them. Those wrinkles are what happens when you clinch your fists. You were born for this resistance, for this preparation, for this life. You were born to fight. ~ Victor LaValle

To burn those 1,100 calories through exercise you will have to walk at a 2 mi/hr pace for about 6 hours. If you can manage a 4 mi/hr pace jog, it will still take you 3 hours. That is why a change in your diet is the number one solution to your obesity and Diabetes, with some cardio and resistance exercise to provide you additional lift. ~ Sanjay Raghavan

If our story isn't serving us, negatively impacts our families, our communities, or our organizations, we might just have to find a way to "StoryJack" the story, transforming it, and creating a new story that we resonate with so that we can "Jack Into" a better version or experience the story – and our life - in a new way. ~ Lyssa DeHart

We're trained to see the world in terms of charismatic organizations and charismatic people. That's who we look to for leadership and change, for transformation. We're awaiting the next J.F.K., the next Martin Luther King, the next Gandhi, the next Nelson Mandela. ~ Paul Hawken

What is it, really, that we could lose if we handed ourselves over to the discernment of faith? Would we really lose anything except the illusion of control? This question suggests that there may be an idolatrous project underlying resistance to spiritual discernment: the desire for a decision-making process that we can predict and control.
But the obedience of faith offers no certainties, not even that of being certain of our our fidelity. We cannot know if the decision we make here and now are correct. We only know that they are the best we are able to make, and that in the future we might both regret them and need to change them. The reason has nothing to do with our sinfulness and everything to do with the fact that faith has to do with the Living God, who always moves ahead of us in surprising and sometimes shocking ways. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (Heb. 10:31). ~ Luke Timothy Johnson

I have a weird graphic I made for myself once, and it's the "lineage tree" of everyone that has inspired me and more importantly given me the permission to be myself in my work. There's a slew of people from theater: Erwin Piscator, Chekhov, Mac Wellman, Stein; and then a whole lot of wonderful works that are called novels: everything from Tristram Shandy to Bouvard and Pecuchet, to Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, and Finnegan's Wake and Invisible Man, and then contemporary writers I'm currently reading like Renee Gladman and Anakana Schofield. There are many more in my graphic also: there's Beckett's novels and Melancholy of Resistance, and there's Reznikoff and Dos Passos, there are contemporary poets I admire like Jena Osman, dance-writers like Michelle Ellsworth, and books I can't help read for fun like Muriel Spark. But there's Groucho Marx and Oscar Wilde. It's a huge question and the answers would likely change daily. But these I'm talking about here are in the pantheon. ~ Thalia Field

The best way to make change is to know how something works. If you're going to go build something or change whatever it is, if you don't know how it works and you're trying to go make a change in it, the first thing you're doing is you're spending time figuring out how it works. The same thing happens in organizations. ~ Brian Krzanich

As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt.
What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet.
"Ah, humanity ... " But he was heavy with shadow and the joke went into a dying fall. He trist to break its fall by laughing at himself. ~ Nathanael West

The power of resistance is to set an example: not necessarily to change the person with whom you disagree, but to empower the one who is watching and whose growth is not yet completed, whose path is not at all clear, whose direction is still very much up in the proverbial air. ~ Tim Wise

Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it - either through effort or by some happy chance. And, in a growing life, the recovery is never mere return to a prior state, for it is enriched by the state of disparity and resistance through which it has successfully passed. If the gap between organism and environment is too wide, the creature dies. If its activity is not enhanced by the temporary alienation, it merely subsists. Life grows when a temporary falling out is a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives. ~ John Dewey

Those in the System, would like us to share their belief that all the changes [we are witnessing] are not connected: they are simply anomalies, isolated symptoms to be treated or preferably ignored, before the all-powerful Western capitalist patriarchal model goes on to ever greater heights and grander ejaculations. Most are numb to it, caught in fear, denial or resistance.

But we, Burning Woman, know this process intimately. Amongst Burning Women and Men, there is a fierce, quiet knowing that these are both the death pangs of the old, and the birthing pangs of the new. ~ Lucy H. Pearce

Formerly irreconcilable enemies, morality and happiness have fused; today, it is being unhappy that is immoral; the superego has moved into the citadel of felicity and governs it with an iron hand. The end of culpability comes at the price of endless torment. Pleasure is no longer a promise but a problem. The idea of full satisfaction has replaced that of constraint, and it has in turn become a requirement that full satisfaction be achieved. Each of us is responsible for being in good shape, in a good mood, and no longer has to renounce anything; instead, we have to adapt to a process of improvement that rejects any resistance to change. Order has ceased to condemn us or deprive us; now it shows us, with maternal solicitude, how to fulfill ourselves. ~ Pascal Bruckner

About what mainly constituted what you ask, it was something other. It was just a certain inclination to meet people. And as far as possible, to change something in the other, but also to let me be changed by him. At any event, I had no resistance, I put no resistance to it. I already began as a young man. I felt I have not the right to want to change another if I am not open to be changed by him as far as it is legitimate. ~ Martin Buber

Bluntly: the United States will need to accept some further loss of sovereignty in exchange for more just and effective mechanisms for solving collective global problems. No state can combat disease, climate change, or international terrorist organizations on its own--but any state can play a destructive and destabilizing role on its own. ~ Rosa Brooks

The greatest challenge to organizations is the balance between continuity and change. You need both. At different times, the balance is slightly more over here, or slightly more over there, but you need both. And balance is basically the greatest task in leadership. Organizations have to have continuity, and yet if there is not enough new challenge, not enough change, they become empty bureaucracies, awfully fast. ~ Peter Drucker

Resistance to change in the mental health system comes disguised as protection of civil liberties and freedom of speech. As a result, many parents, families, and caregivers are at a loss and feel defeated by the majority of Americans who strive to maintain the current rules of society. ~ Tamara Hill

Another sob came, harder than the first, but she couldn't cover her face and her mastectomy scars at the same time when he raised his head. When she tried, Luke merely caught her wrists and lightly pinned them on either side of her head.
"It's all right, Em. Tears are part of this," he whispered, bending to kiss them away. He moved gently within her, another tender caress that soothed as much as it stimulated. It broke the seal on the dam of her tears. They came out in a quiet rush while he stayed above her, eyes on her face as he murmured soothing things she didn't quite catch. And when the tears slowed, she looked up into his handsome face with a sniffle and the smile he gave her filled her heart to overflowing. Dear God she loved him. Had always loved him and would never love another man but him.
Her heart had known it all along. And so had her body.
Still, she tensed when he released one of her wrists to touch the skin beneath her right collarbone. Luke shook his dark head, those liquid eyes looking right into her soul. "I won't let you hide from me. Or from yourself." Embedded deep inside her, he raised his upper body to gaze at her, and all she could do was close her eyes in resistance. "Look at me."
After a long hesitation, she did.
He stared down at her with a powerful mixture of tenderness and hunger. "You think a scar's going to change how I see you? Feel about you?"
She swallowed and struggled to find her voice. "It's ugly."
"You' ~ Kaylea Cross

An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment. ~ Kevin Kelly

No mind ever grew fat on a diet of novels. The pleasure which they occasionally offer is far too heavily paid for: they undermine the finest characters. They teach us to think ourselves into other men's places. Thus we acquire a taste for change. The personality becomes dissolved in pleasing figments of imagination. The reader learns to understand every point of view. Willingly he yields himself to the pursuit of other people's goals and loses sight of his own. Novels are so many wedges which the novelist, an actor with his pen, inserts into the closed personality of the reader. The better he calculates the size of the wedge and the strength of the resistance, so much the more completely does he crack open the personality of the victim. Novels should be prohibited by the State. ~ Elias Canetti

In unstable times, growth comes from leaders who create change and engage their organizations, instead of from managers who push their employees to do more for less. ~ Seth Godin

Often I would hear other people ask, "When will I be normal again?"
What you don't often hear is a blunt truth: things will never be normal again. Not the "old" normal at least. You have to invent the new normal.
I knew that I needed to take an honest appraisal of my life. Were my problems really bigger than me? Of course not. That's why I remained in constant motion. Resistance to life's changes meant death. No matter how depressing and bleak my past looked, I knew that I needed to keep moving and adapting in order to survive. ~ Michelle Dallocchio

You all know the saying which is very true: What you resist persists. And I'm sure many of you have already found that out in your life. And then suddenly when you let go of resistance you let go of an attachment to something: I need this to happen in order to be happy; I don't want what is, I want something else. To be okay with what is, which is the simplicity of this moment, is the beginning of true change. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change ~ Frank Herbert

This is true even in organizations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an MBA sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought. ~ John P. Kotter

Nature of the Desire for Change:

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change. The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on. "If anything ail a man," says Thoreau, "so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming - the world."

It is understandable that those who fail should incline to blame the world for their failure. The remarkable thing is that the successful, too, however much they pride themselves on their foresight, fortitude, thrift and other "sterling qualities," are at bottom convinced that their success is the result of a fortuitous combination of circumstances. The self-confidence of even the consistently successful is never absolute. They are never sure that they know all the ingredients which go into the making of their success. The outside world seems to them a precariously balanced mechanism, and so long as it ticks in their favor they are afraid to tinker with it. Thus the resistance to change and the ardent desire for it sprin ~ Eric Hoffer

The Work reveals that what you think shouldn't have happened should have happened. It should happened because it did, and no thinking in the world can change it. This doesn't mean that you condone it or approve of it. It just means that you can see things without resistance and without the confusion of your inner struggle. No one wants their children to get sick, no one wants to be in a car accident; but when these things happen, how can it be helpful to mentally argue with them? We know better than to do that, yet we do it, because we don't know how to stop. ~ Byron Katie

One of the things that I realized when I left office was that in the 1990's citizens across the world applied more power than they had ever had, as compared with the government, because of more people living under democracies than dictatorships for the first time, the power of the internet, which the young Chinese used to basically change China's policy on the SARS epidemic, and shut it down, and because of the rise in non-governmental organizations like my foundation. ~ William J. Clinton

The competitive instinct is what I think drives organizations and people to become better and better. It can promote change toward progress and development, which is good for everybody. It can be the motivating force behind improvement in our social well-being that is far beyond anything we might have imagined on our own. ~ Lee R. Raymond

When we see the need for deep change, we usually see it as something that needs to take place in someone else. In our roles of authority, such as parent, teacher, or boss, we are particularly quick to direct others to change. Such directives often fail, and we respond to the resistance by increasing our efforts. The power struggle that follows seldom results in change or brings about excellence. One of the most important insights about the need to bring about deep change in others has to do with where deep change actually starts. ~ Robert E. Quinn

In my opinion, neither organisms nor organizations evolve slowly and surely into something better, but drift until some small change occurs which has immediate and overwhelming significance. The special role of the human being is not to wait for these favorable accidents but deliberately to introduce the small change that will have great significance. ~ Edwin Land

All that is needed is to listen. The love song of the world enters our souls through the language of life. Our touchstone of strength forms the shape of our beloveds. Courage surges into our limbs. We rise. One foot steps in the direction of change. This is the Love that thrusts the world through eternity and carries us forward into the infinity of tomorrow. It sings overhead, scouring the barriers of reality, looking for an opening. ~ Rivera Sun

The only way to bear the overwhelming pain of oppression is by telling, in all its detail, in the presence of witnesses and in a context of resistance, how unbearable it is. If we attempt to craft resistance without understanding this task, we are collectively vulnerable to all the errors of judgement that unresolved trauma generates in individuals. It is part of our task as revolutionary people, people who want deep-rooted, radical change, to be as whole as it is possible for us to be. This can only be done if we face the reality of what oppression really means in our lives, not as abstract systems subject to analysis, but as an avalanche of traumas leaving a wake of devastation in the lives of real people who nevertheless remain human, unquenchable, complex and full of possibility. ~ Aurora Levins Morales