Hostility, resistance, complexity, anxiety: these are the four forces that obstruct anyone innovating inside a complex organization, and that I group in the book under the acronym O.R.C.A. Here I focus on the second one.
Hostility, which I covered in the previous piece, has at least one virtue: it targets people — whoever brings the change, whoever becomes its face — so sooner or later you can look it in the eye. Resistance can't be looked in the eye. Resistance runs through the system itself: processes, procedures, habits and consolidated practices that look harmless one by one and, added together, work as a brake. It has no face. And that is exactly why it is so much harder to spot and to counter.
One clarification is due: resistance is rarely deliberate. Far more often it is an instinctive reaction, tied to a sense of insecurity towards change — a collective defence, systemic more than individual, that tends to preserve the existing equilibrium. Understanding it as physiology, rather than conspiracy, is the first step to managing it.
"Irrituale", or: the word that explains everything
Anyone working in the Italian public administration will, sooner or later, hear a proposal rejected because it is "irrituale" — roughly, "contrary to ritual", outside the customary way of doing things. It is a marvellous word, if you think about it: the rejection has nothing to do with the merits of the proposal, only with the fact that it departs from what is customary and formally familiar. An entire cultural model condensed into four syllables. Because the public sector is historically oriented towards compliance: success is measured in conformity — the legislator asked for this, we did it, we won. In a system built to run on stable rules, every change looks like a potential breach of the equilibrium: better not to act than to do something that could be challenged. As long as everything is formally compliant, there is no urgency to change anything.
The forms resistance takes
Resistance almost never shows up as an explicit "no". It shows up like this:
The endless referral. The decision needs an opinion from another department, which takes months to answer and then produces interim notes or opinions so generic that nobody can safely proceed. Steps born to guarantee procedural correctness that turn into time traps.
Cosmetic agreement. The project is supported in words, included in documents and meeting minutes — and in practice nothing changes. Activities go on exactly as before, with the sole difference of a new vocabulary to describe them. An elegant conservation strategy: it avoids conflict and keeps the status quo intact.
Letting it run. The sneakiest one. The project moves forward, even receives signals of encouragement. Meanwhile, somewhere else, a photocopy project takes shape — similar goals, but set up in a more customary, "safer" way. Two parallel tracks that never meet — and the innovative one bleeds legitimacy and resources along the way. In the better cases it even reaches completion: formally finished, but on a dead-end track, with no adoption and no real consequences.
It is the hardest form of resistance to counter, because it doesn't push back — it absorbs. It lets the change burn itself out, until it expires in a silent, orderly fashion.
The common trait of all these forms: they formally respect the rules while draining them of substance. Nobody sabotages. Nobody protests. The system simply cushions the blow and springs back into position.
Why it happens: a past to defend
It would be convenient to write it all off as bad faith or incompetence. In most cases these are instead self-protection strategies — and underneath them sits a precise psychological mechanism, well known to organizational literature: escalation of commitment (Staw, 1976) and the sunk cost fallacy (Arkes & Blumer, 1985). It is the tendency to stick with a course of action even after it has stopped working, simply because too much has already been invested in it — time, energy, reputation — to admit it should change.
For someone who has guarded a process for twenty years, acknowledging the need for change would mean admitting that years of work and past decisions were suboptimal. A direct blow to self-esteem, individual and collective. That is why people who have invested heavily in a certain way of doing things keep defending it even when the results are no longer satisfying: resistance is born from fear of the new, yes, but also — and perhaps above all — from the desire not to see the past rendered worthless.
The way out
From this reading follows the most effective countermove, which is also the least intuitive: recognize and give value to what people have built, instead of confronting them. Show that the change does not erase their work: it extends it and makes it evolve. It sounds like a rhetorical detail; it is the difference between a last-ditch defence and active participation. I have seen more resistance dissolve in front of one sentence of sincere recognition than in front of any slide of expected benefits.
The second lever is impact metrics. As long as the yardstick of success is the "number of files processed", the status quo wins every time, because it is safe and formally correct. Introducing measures that look at concrete effects — starting with citizens' satisfaction with the services they receive — shifts attention from compliance to outcomes, and builds a solid, hard-to-dispute case for change.
The third lever is the public. Public administration is used to being accountable upwards — hierarchy and legislator — far more than towards citizens. Reversing that habit also pays off tactically: communicating the concrete benefits of the work to the public generates external attention and approval, which in turn gives the leadership a positive return in image — the perfect angle for winning it over. And inside the organization, workshops and co-design sessions where goals and vision are built together show the staff that their work has a real impact on people's lives: that is how initial resistance turns into convinced support.
In short
Resistance is physiological, systemic, and almost always in good faith: a system built for stability, cushioning whatever disturbs it. Fighting it head-on is pointless, because there is nobody to fight. You overcome it by valuing past work, measuring real impact and using citizens as leverage. And once you have, the next challenge awaits: making innovation work inside a system that multiplies connections, rules and actors. I write about it in the next piece of the series, The Mechanical Watch.