In 2008, I joined our family publishing business just as Greece entered the worst financial crisis in its modern history.
The business needed to change quickly. I arrived with answers. And, to be fair to my younger self, I was not wrong about the direction.
But I was wrong about the execution.
I treated resistance as something to overcome. I assumed that if the case for change was sound enough, people would eventually accept it. What I had not understood was what sat underneath their resistance, or how much of my own ego I had brought into the room.
That lesson matters even more now. AI means almost every leader will have to change how work is organised, which tasks people do and where decisions sit. The technology may be new. The human predicament is not.
Resistance is only the visible part
When a change effort stalls, resistance is often named as the problem.
The word is convenient. It puts one group on the side of progress and another in its way. Leaders have the vision. Employees resist it. The task then becomes one of communication, influence or persuasion.
Sometimes people do resist a sensible change. But resistance is usually the surface, not the cause.
People do not simply follow processes or hold opinions at a safe distance from themselves. They identify with them. A role, a method, a professional belief or the way a team has always solved a problem can become part of how someone understands their value.
Challenge the work and they may not hear, “This process could be better.”
They may hear, “What you know no longer matters.” Or, “The thing that made you useful is being taken away.”
That is not an argument about a process. It is a threat to identity.
Leaders bring an identity too
The mistake is to imagine that ego exists only on the receiving side of change.
Leaders identify with the answer. We become attached to the strategy, the new operating model or the technology we have chosen. The change becomes proof of our judgement. Questions feel like delay. Disagreement feels like a lack of ambition.
Then we walk into the room carrying a message that sounds, even if we never say it aloud, like this:
We are here to fix this for you.
Without realising it, we make the change personal. People protect what they know. Leaders protect what they have decided. Improvement becomes ego against ego.
This is where good ideas break. Not necessarily because the vision is wrong, but because it is held so tightly that nobody else has room to engage with it.
The first thing to change is your own posture
The job of a leader is not to dismantle other people's ego. It is to notice and remove enough of their own.
That does not mean abandoning responsibility or turning every decision into a vote. It means being clear about the outcome while staying open about how the organisation reaches it.
In practice, that can be quite ordinary:
- ask people to show you how the work really runs before explaining how it should run;
- separate the result you need from the solution you happen to prefer;
- say which constraints are real and which assumptions remain open;
- let the people closest to the work challenge the design;
- test changes against a baseline rather than defending them through conviction;
- give credit away when the work improves.
This is one reason the Map comes first in our MERA method. Mapping is not only a process exercise. Done properly, it forces leaders to look before they prescribe. It replaces the neat version of the work with what actually happens, and makes space for the people who understand the awkward parts.
AI makes this more urgent
AI will alter tasks, roles and professional identities. Some work will disappear. Some will become more valuable. People who were rewarded for knowing the process may be asked to help redesign it. Others will wonder whether the redesign has a place for them at all.
Calling those reactions “resistance” is not enough.
Leaders need to explain what is changing, but also what the change is for, how people will shape it and where the gain will go. If AI only arrives as a tool for removing cost, people will read the intention correctly. If better work creates a shared benefit, such as more capacity, better service or time returned, then the conversation changes.
I started learning this lesson in 2008. It took me too long to understand it, and longer still to embrace it.
Leaders driving change now do not have that kind of time.
Change management is not mainly the art of overcoming resistance. It is the discipline of creating enough space for people to build a better way of working together. That space begins when the leader lets go first.