Art. 9 Ford

Question 1

What is the change agents role in sensemaking?

Answer 1

**Expectation effects: **The work on self-fulfilling prophecies and the Pygmalion effect suggests that if change agents go into a change expecting resistance, they are likely to find it.

Observe it and expecting it and are acting accordingly

**Self-serving account: **change agents shift responsibility for resistance from things under their control (i.e., systemic factors) to the characteristics and attributes of recipients

Question 2

Change agent contributions to resistance

Answer 2

• Broken agreements and the violation of trust
  
  • psychological contract
  • lack of trust
  • feeling injustice
• Communication brakedowns
  
  • Failure to legitimize change
  • Misrepresentations
  • No call for action
• Resisting resistance
  
  • Agents do not like resistance (tend to ignore it, none-responsive, afraid to confirm resistance).
  • As a result, this confirms resistance or leads to resistance (paradox).

Question 3

Resistance as a resource

Answer 3

• Existence Value of Resistance
  
  • Resistance helps keep conversations in existence
  • keep the conversation active, gave agents an opportunity to clarify and further legitimize the change, and gave recipients an op- portunity to create translations and understandings that contributed to their subsequent acceptance and expansion of the change.
• Engagement Value of Resistance
  
  • ​change agents can use resistance as an indicator of recipient engagement and a valuable source of feedback for improving the process and conduct of change.
  • Better well-considered arguments against than un-thoughtful acceptance (motivated recipients)
• ​​Strengthening Value of Resistance ​
  
  • Resistance is form of conflict
  • Can signal what needs to be done (Task-oriented and Emotional)

Question 4

“resistance to change” can be more appropriately understood as a dynamic among three elements

Answer 4

1. Recipient action: any behavior or communication that occurs in response to a change initiative and its implementation
2. Agent sensemaking: agents’ interpretations of and meanings given to actual or anticipated recipient actions as well as the actions agents take as a function of their own interpretations and meanings
3. Agent recipient relationship: provides the context in which the first two elements occur and that shapes, and is shaped by, agent-recipient interactions

Question 5

Reconstructing resistance

Answer 5

• Recipient resistance is public: shifting attention from the internal resistance to the public behaviors, conversations, and observable activities that form the interactions between the agents and recipients. That resistance is ‘public’ means that observable recipient actions are the triggers for agent sensemaking, and it is these actions that are the basis for the label resistance
• Agent sensemaking is determinant: why do agents call some actions resistance and not others?’
• Overcoming “resistance”: issue of agents effectively managing the agent-recipient relationship, including making recipient ‘resistance’ and agent sensemaking a public part of the discourse for change. Important here is the willingness of agents to be responsible for their own sensemaking.