Resistance to Change: Why Explaining Isn’t Enough

And yet, everything had been explained…

Picture the scene. Your company is rolling out new management software. You have presented a clear timeline and well-defined benefits: less double data entry, fewer errors, a better overview of the business.

A few weeks later, some of your team members are quietly still using their old spreadsheets. Others keep asking you the same questions, or drag their feet without saying a word.

Your instinct is to explain it all again. Longer, louder.

Explaining remains essential, and I often say so: giving a reason, even a brief one, reassures the brain. A simple “because” signals that there is a logic, an intention, a direction.

But explaining isn’t enough.

Your teams don’t have an understanding problem. They have an availability problem: understanding a decision and feeling ready to live with it are two different things.

Why doesn’t our brain change as easily as our decisions?

Habits make our daily lives run more smoothly

To understand resistance to change, you first need to understand how the brain works.

Your brain accounts for only about 2% of your body weight, yet it uses around 20% of your energy. To function efficiently, it is therefore constantly looking for ways to save. Its main strategy is routines and habits: the more familiar and automatic an action is to you, the less it costs it.

Change is therefore, by its very nature, costly for the brain.

Back to your software. A task you have been completing in a few minutes for years suddenly takes three times as long. You hunt for buttons, you hesitate, you make mistakes you thought you’d left behind.

This slowness has nothing to do with unwillingness. It is the normal price of learning.

Uncertainty changes the way we experience the situation

There is a second mechanism, an even deeper one.

For a long time, human beings were seen as essentially rational. From a biological point of view, that isn’t accurate: we are first and foremost emotional beings.

When information reaches you through your senses, it first passes through the limbic system, and in particular through the amygdala. If the information is familiar to you, the amygdala stays calm, and the information can travel on to the neocortex, the area of reasoning and strategy.

If it is new or unpredictable, the amygdala becomes activated. It triggers an emotion, and access to the neocortex becomes limited. You then operate mainly in emotional mode, with three simple reactions: flight, fight or freeze.

And change at work rarely affects just the method. For your team members, it can touch their sense of competence, their autonomy, their relationships with colleagues, the place they hold within the team. That is often where the worry really lies. I have written an entire article on the way the brain experiences uncertainty, and on what it can also bring us.

As long as the emotional side hasn’t settled, a person isn’t available for a rational discussion.

Why doesn’t understanding mean buying in?

A collective decision can have individual consequences

A change can be good for the organization and costly for some of the people in it. Both are true at the same time.

Imagine you are merging two departments. For your company, that means more consistency and less duplication. For the employee who until now was her team’s go-to expert, it may mean less recognition for her expertise, a new manager, a whole set of bearings to rebuild.

She may fully understand your overall logic, and even find it fair. But what she feels first is what she is about to lose. And as long as that loss isn’t acknowledged, she may well carry on as before.

A reaction to change is never set in stone

This gap between what we think, what we feel and what we do is something organizational psychologists have observed for a long time. Shaul Oreg and Noga Sverdlik, who brought together the research on how people respond to change in 2026, see it as one of the keys to understanding those responses.

They stress a point that is valuable for you: these reactions are often ambivalent, and they evolve over time.

In practice, a polite “yes” in a meeting isn’t necessarily buy-in. And early reluctance is by no means final: it can shift, provided it is given room to do so.

What if resistance to change were also useful information?

You have probably heard people described as “resisters”, as if it were a personality trait.

I invite you to look at it differently. Resistance to change isn’t a flaw: it is the brain’s normal reaction to uncertainty. The goal isn’t to eliminate it, but to understand what it is protecting.

Think back to your team member who is holding on to the old spreadsheets. Behind that behavior, there may be a stubborn habit, a fear of not coping, a lack of training. Or a feature that is genuinely missing from the new tool.

In that last case, their resistance is giving you valuable information.

Not every objection is well-founded. But not every objection is irrational either, and sometimes a change is simply poorly designed, or experienced as unfair. Listening doesn’t mean trying to get people to accept anything at all: it means giving yourself the means to check.

Before labeling someone a “resister”, ask yourself what their reaction is trying to tell you.

How can neuroscience help you manage change?

Bertrand Thai asked me how a manager should react, in practical terms. If you are leading a transformation, here are the four levers I suggest.

1. Give the brain time to build new automatic habits

Automatic habits are built through repetition.

What will one day feel effortless starts with slowness, mistakes, a temporary loss of ease. Plan for learning time, gradual trials, support and a genuine right to make mistakes.

Example: “For the first three weeks, I’m not asking you to be fast. I’m asking you to try, and to tell me where you get stuck.”

2. Reduce uncertainty without promising to control everything

Acknowledge the emotion before bringing clarity.

When someone is angry or stressed, don’t respond to the substance straight away. First, put a word on what they are going through: they feel seen and understood, and that already starts to calm them. Listen without counter-arguing, rephrase what you heard, and allow yourself to come back to it later.

Biologically, an emotion lasts only about 90 seconds, provided it isn’t reactivated over and over. In reality, it often lasts longer, because few people have learned how to manage their emotions. Give it time to pass.

Then come back with clarity: what is going to happen, step by step, who is responsible for what, what has already been decided and what is still open. You can even name the most difficult stage, and how it will be handled. Showing that there is a plan already goes a long way.

Example: “I get the feeling this announcement is putting you under stress. I’ve noted your questions, and I’ll come back to you on Thursday with clear answers.”

3. Strengthen people’s sense that they can cope

We dare more when we feel capable.

Faced with change, many of your team members aren’t asking “why?”. They’re asking: “Will I manage?”

And you, how do you experience stress? We don’t all have the same relationship with it. Some experience it as a threat, others as a signal of adventure, and their bodies don’t react in the same way. This difference comes partly from personality, but also very much from working on oneself.

I know this from experience. Public speaking used to cause me immense stress. I learned to love the unknown, and today I experience the stress at the start of a talk as stimulation. That is the whole subject of my article on stress as a performance accelerator.

So start by showing that no one is condemned to always react the same way. Then make visible the skills that will remain useful, the support available, and a realistic first step.

Example: “Your knowledge of the client files is exactly what the tool is missing. Let’s start there, together.”

4. Make the future concrete and progress visible

Bring the benefits closer to the present.

Your brain sees the immediate advantages of not changing very clearly, and so do your teams’ brains. The benefits of change, on the other hand, often remain abstract and distant. You almost have to “sell” them to the brain: make them concrete, repeat them, bring them closer to everyday life.

Two questions help: what would it cost to stay exactly as things are today for two years? And what would your work look like if the transformation succeeded? Then mark out the path with milestones, and recognize progress as soon as it appears, without letting the vision hide the practical difficulties.

Example: “This month, you stopped entering orders twice. That’s exactly what we were aiming for.”

Why does team participation complete this approach?

Bertrand raised a fair objection, one you may be asking yourself too: a company can’t support each employee’s emotions one by one.

At that scale, there’s no miracle, but there are levers. First, a leader who truly embodies the vision before passing it on: I mentioned the example of Microsoft, where regular, clear and engaging communication from the CEO played an important role in the evolution of its culture. The energy a leader gives off often says more than their words. Second, change ambassadors, trained and committed, who become concrete relays within their teams.

Finally, there is an essential difference between informing your teams and genuinely involving them.

In 2025, Martin Edwards and his colleagues followed 620 employees of a manufacturing company through a merger and acquisition, at three different points in time. They compared downward communication, from management to employees, with representative participation, where employee representatives take part in decisions.

Downward communication is associated with a positive effect early in the process. Representative participation, on the other hand, is associated with longer-lasting positive effects on job satisfaction, stress and feelings of job insecurity, throughout the integration and beyond.

Of course, this study looks at a single company, and it shows that participation and well-being go hand in hand, without proving that one causes the other. But the message speaks for itself.

Informing helps you get started. Involving helps you go the distance.

For you, this means being clear about what has already been decided, and about where your teams have real room to act. And never pretending to consult: a consultation whose outcome is written in advance damages trust far more than an openly owned decision. It is also what we work on in team coaching: enabling everyone to genuinely contribute.

Creating the conditions for change rather than trying to impose it

Back to your new software.

You had explained everything, and your reasons were good. What was missing wasn’t one more explanation. It was the conditions that allow people to make the change their own: time to learn, listening, clarity, early visible successes, a real place in the decision.

None of this guarantees that everyone will buy in. But it gives everyone a real chance to adapt.

On my way back from Montpellier, I wrote that when our brain feels safe, it naturally becomes more open to exploration, creativity and learning. And I added:

“Anticipating change may not be about predicting the future… but about developing the human capacities that will allow us to adapt to it.”

This is what I support within organizations: transformations built on how the brain really works, rather than on the hope that a good explanation will be enough.

Sources

Todorova, B. Interview with Bertrand Thai, Neurosciences & résistance au changement (YouTube video, in French).

Oreg, S., & Sverdlik, N. (2026). Responses to Organizational Change: Evolution of the Concept, Established Findings, and Future Directions. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 13, 387-413.

Edwards, M., Townsend, K., Wilkinson, A., & Edwards, T. (2025). A longitudinal study of employee participation in the context of organisational change. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 36(19), 3437-3468.