The most common sentence in a transformation programme is "we need to bring people along". It is said by people who have already decided where everyone is going.
Two kinds of resistance
There is resistance to the change, and there is resistance to being changed. They look identical in a meeting and they need completely different responses.
Resistance to the change is usually information. Someone knows something about the process you don't. If you listen, you get a better design.
Resistance to being changed is about status and competence. Someone has spent eleven years being the person who knows how the system works, and you are proposing to make that knowledge optional. No amount of communication fixes this, because it is not a communication problem. It is a loss.
What actually helps
Name the loss out loud. "This will make part of your job disappear, and I don't have a good answer for what replaces it yet." People can work with honesty. They cannot work with being told they are excited.
Give the sceptic a real job. Not a token seat on a steering committee. The job of finding the failure mode. Sceptics are the best testers you will ever get, and testing is the one role where pessimism is an asset.
Change something visible in week two. Momentum is not built by a roadmap. It is built by one person saying "that used to take me a day" in a corridor.
What doesn't help
Town halls. Newsletters with a stock photo of a handshake. The word "journey". Any sentence containing "embrace".
The thing I keep relearning
People are not resistant to technology. They are resistant to being made to feel stupid, and technology is an unusually efficient way of making people feel stupid in public.
Design for that, and most of the rest takes care of itself.
