Zone 1: When Your People Resist the Change You Need
Resistance to change is the most common form of organisational conflict. Industrial conflict is its most visible and most costly form.
It sits at the border where an organisation’s commercial imperatives meet its people’s legitimate interests: security, workload, conditions, voice, dignity. When change is pushed across that border rather than designed with the people it affects, resistance is the rational response.
Where there is a union, that resistance is organised and visible: adversarial industrial relations and cycles of claim and counter-claim. Where there isn’t, it is just as real but harder to see: quiet non-compliance, workarounds, initiatives that stall, and discretionary effort withheld.
The symptoms are familiar:
- Change programmes that stall or quietly fail, because the people doing the work weren’t engaged in designing them
- Decisions agreed in the room and abandoned on the floor
- A trust deficit so deep that even mutually beneficial proposals are rejected because of who proposed them, not what they contain
- Grievance volumes that consume management time and goodwill
- At the extreme, ballot threats and strike action that disrupt operations and damage reputation
The Conflict
Why It Persists
Most organisations try to manage resistance to change through one of two approaches, both of which fail:
The power approach: Management pushes change through, asserts prerogative, and treats resistance as a problem to be overcome. This works in the short term but compounds the trust deficit. Every change forced through costs discretionary effort, engagement, and willingness to collaborate on the next improvement.
The concession approach: Management softens or shelves change to keep the peace, avoids difficult conversations, and treats the relationship with its people as something to be managed rather than leveraged. This creates dependency, escalating expectations, and an inability to make necessary changes when commercial pressure demands it.
Both approaches share the same underlying assumption: that the organisation’s commercial interests and its people’s interests are fundamentally in tension, and one must be prioritised at the expense of the other.
This assumption is the constraint.
The 3Cs Diagnosis
In The 3Cs Model™, this is the border between Commercial Responsibility and Culture.
Commercial Responsibility encompasses the organisation’s financial stewardship — margin, investment, and operational expense. Culture encompasses the environment that enables people to contribute fully — their interests, security, and satisfaction.
When these two dimensions work in synergy, the result is genuine collaboration: people contribute their expertise and discretionary effort because they can see that the organisation’s success and their own interests are aligned. Investment in people generates returns. Partnership is rational, and change becomes something people help to shape rather than something done to them.
When they’re in opposition, the result is resistance to change, and at its most extreme, industrial conflict. Each side protects what matters to them, and the organisation pays a Conflict Tax that compounds through every other dimension of performance.
What Transformation Looks Like
Genuine transformation at this border doesn’t mean compromising between commercial and people interests. It means finding the synergy — the configuration where both are strengthened simultaneously.
This requires:
Structural Change, Not Just Behavioural Change
Asking people to embrace change within structures that exclude them doesn’t work. The structures must change: joint governance with real authority, and Co-Lead partnerships where the people affected share genuine ownership of the change. Where there is a union, that means union and management leading together. Where there isn’t, it means the leads of the functions involved.
Interest-Based Problem Solving, Not Positional Bargaining
Positional bargaining assumes fixed resources and zero-sum outcomes. Interest-Based Problem Solving surfaces the legitimate interests underneath the positions and searches for solutions that honour all of them. The question shifts from “What do you want?” to “What do you need, and why?”
Governance That Protects the Process
Collaborative work is fragile when resistance runs high. It requires governance structures — Strategic Delivery Groups, Charters, escalation paths — that protect the space for genuine partnership even when external pressures intensify. The Strategic Delivery Group brings together the people who hold the competing claims: union and management, or the leads of the functions involved. Without governance, collaboration reverts to power dynamics the moment the pressure rises.
Capability Development on Both Sides
Both the people leading change and the people affected by it need new capabilities to work this way. Facilitation skills, interest-based thinking, the ability to hold productive tension without reverting to positional defence. This isn’t training for one side — it’s joint capability development that builds shared language and shared practice.
The Evidence
Organisations that have made this transformation report:
- Dramatic reduction in formal disputes — grievances, disciplinaries, and ballot threats replaced by structured problem-solving
- Operational improvements unlocked — changes that were blocked for years become possible when the workforce is genuinely engaged in designing them
- Management time redirected — from reactive firefighting to strategic improvement
- Workforce engagement transformed — not through surveys and initiatives, but through structural inclusion in decisions that affect working lives
- Financial returns — the Conflict Tax reduces as collaboration replaces conflict, and the savings compound through improved operational performance
For Organisational Leaders
If you’re facing resistance to change, from the quiet cold war of disengagement through to industrial action, the question isn’t whether you can afford to invest in transformation. It’s what you’re already paying for the conflict you have.
The most powerful question you can ask:
“What is our Conflict Tax?”
This reframes the conversation from “Should we invest in a better way of working?” to “How much are we already spending because of the way we work?”
For Union Leaders and Representatives
If you’ve been offered “partnership” before and found it was compliance in collaborative clothing, this approach is different — by design, not by promise.
HPtE structurally protects workforce interests through:
- Co-Lead partnerships where union representatives share genuine ownership and decision-making authority
- Terms of Reference that define the scope, authority, and boundaries of collaborative work — not management wish lists dressed up as joint objectives
- Strategic Delivery Group governance with union representation at the highest level of oversight
- Escalation paths that work — if the collaborative process isn’t being honoured, there are real mechanisms to address it
- Improvement Teams that make recommendations, not decisions — protecting democratic accountability to your members
The methodology doesn’t ask you to trust management. It creates structures where trust can be earned through demonstrated behaviour over time.
The Other Conflict Zones
Zone 2: Your Departments Are Working Against Each Other
When Culture and Customer Value are in opposition, silos form — not because people are territorial, but because retreating to your own department is the rational response to an unsafe environment.
Zone 3: Financial Pressure Is Destroying Customer Value
When Commercial Responsibility and Customer Value become adversaries, cost-cutting creates more cost with less Customer Satisfaction — and the balance sheet eventually tells the truth.
🔔 Stay up to date
The thinking behind the 3Cs Model is constantly evolving — shaped by live enterprise work across aviation, healthcare, and manufacturing. For the latest insights on dissolving resistance to change and industrial conflict, and building genuine partnerships, follow Karl Perry on LinkedIn.