Enterprise Adaptation
The difference between companies that adapt to market pressure and those that react to it — and what the leaders running those companies are doing differently.
In the room
- Host
- Jesse Hopps
- Guest
- Jeevan Satishkumar, Josep Sitjes
- Room
- Commercial and transformation leaders from Arla Foods, Baker Hughes, Boston Scientific, Esri, Lonza, Maersk, Mitsubishi Chemical, Owens Corning, Pandora, Pfizer, PPG, SABIC, Smith & Nephew, Solmax, Solventum, and Zimmer Biomet
People don’t have a problem with change. They have a problem with someone trying to change them.
Eighteen commercial leaders on where resistance really comes from — and the argument that the change-management paradigm is itself what produces it.
Commercial and transformation leaders from medical technology, chemicals, shipping, pharma, jewelry, geosynthetics, food, oilfield services, and mapping software, across four continents. Contributors are described by role and industry, under the Chatham House Rule.
The short version
- Resistance is a symptom of how change is introduced rather than a defect in the people receiving it.
- The room named six distinct causes, and only one of them was disagreement with the change itself.
- In a McKinsey Health Institute study of thirty thousand people, 23% rated themselves both resilient and adaptable — so roughly eight in ten of the people you are asking to change do not think of themselves as good at it.
- The alternative is to pull adaptation out rather than push change in: let teams name their own bottleneck and design the fix.
- One reciprocal deal is what made that work at scale — you choose your own problem, and in exchange you give the changes you did not choose an open mind.
- Training transfers information. Coaching is what converts it into behavior, and the sales manager is where that has to sit.
Where the resistance comes from
Asked what form resistance takes when people are told to work differently, the room gave six answers in quick succession — and disagreement with the change was barely among them.
- 1
Passive resistance
People nod and agree in the meeting, then go back to what they were doing the next day. As one participant put it, they are not pushing back — they simply have no investment in it, so the training video plays on one screen while they work on another.
- 2
Capacity, not clarity
A leader who rolled strategy out to more than eighty distributors was blunt about it: the strategy was clear and they understood it. They had nothing left to give. Change only started once things came off their plate rather than being added to it.
- 3
Ego, and not being asked
Experienced professionals who were not consulted on the design object to the design. The response is emotional rather than practical, which makes it the hardest kind to argue with — they may even agree it is a good idea.
- 4
Attachment to whatever exists now
One leader’s observation from years of system integrations: if you want people to love a process, propose replacing it. The version they resented for years becomes the standard the new one has to beat.
- 5
The comfort zone, and fear of failure
A business leader who has run three turnarounds put it simply. Salespeople have done the job one way for years, and a new way means risking visible failure at something they were previously good at, with ambiguity attached.
- 6
Change fatigue
Change layered on change, and each new leader arriving with a different tone. Behavior turns ambiguous because everyone is waiting to see which direction survives.
“People don’t have a problem with change. They have a problem with someone trying to change them.”
One participant drew a distinction worth keeping. Passive resistance is hard to manage but survivable. Actively toxic resistance is worse and has to be dealt with directly. Aggressive resistance, oddly, is the most workable of the three — it creates useful tension, and with enough clarity and involvement it can be turned.
The number underneath all of it
The McKinsey Health Institute asked thirty thousand people whether they considered themselves resilient — able to get back up after a setback — and adaptable, able to form new habits in a new environment. Only 23% said both. Meanwhile something in the order of one company in six invests in strengthening that capacity in its people.
Push, or pull
The provocation the session was built around: if the people responsible for driving change keep meeting resistance, the approach may be the problem rather than the people. Strategy from one firm, systems from another, training on top, and a rollout plan — the infrastructure exists to push change outward, and roughly four in five transformations still fall short.
The alternative described is to stop designing solutions for people and start facilitating people to design their own. It begins with letting the group say out loud that there are too many changes and too little time, then asking a single question: which capability, if you got really good at it, would make everything else easier? Teams answer it accurately, because they already know where the bottleneck is.
“If you try to change yourself, you’re a god. If you try to change others, you are just mad.”
The deal that made it work
The mechanism, in the one program in the room anyone had seen do this at scale, was a bargain struck at the very start. Each person got to pick a problem they cared about and design the fix. In exchange, when someone else’s solution arrived in their area, they agreed to give it an open mind.
That reciprocity is the part most rollouts skip. Ninety days of autonomy on one slice bought open-mindedness on the rest, and the changes that were not open to negotiation stopped triggering the reflex. More than 300 leaders, mid-eight-figure EBITDA impact in a year, and — the detail worth noticing — no meaningful resistance.
The worked example: sales teams reported that a new SKU took twenty-eight days to set up in SAP, and quotes were being lost while customers waited. Master data was batching the work because batching was locally efficient; the cost landed somewhere no team was measuring. The commercial team assumed it was outside their lane until they were handed ninety days to isolate it. When the finding reached a board-level audience, the instruction was to fix it immediately.
Earning the right to challenge
A commercial excellence director with a decade in the role made the point that the function has two jobs, and they are not equal. Support is expected of you. The right to challenge has to be earned, which means investing disproportionately in the support half first, and starting from what a team already does well rather than from the gap.
- Treat the sales organization as an internal customer, with the obligations that implies.
- Begin from existing good practice. Each team has some, at whatever level they are operating.
- Acknowledge that most of the people you are advising have done the job longer than you have.
- Be explicit about trade-offs rather than promising everything. Naming what a project will not cover buys more credibility than agreeing to all of it.
A related failure mode came up twice: asking the field to feed a system that returns nothing to them. Competitive intelligence goes up so headquarters can see all of Europe, and the rep who entered it seldom gets a view back. People adopt the apps on their phones because those make life easier, and they judge internal systems the same way.
Coaching is the missing link
The strongest practical note came from a leader who had gone from sales rep to sales manager to business leader before moving into commercial excellence. Fix the process, buy the best tool, and it still comes down to whether the sales manager uses either one to give the team meaningful feedback. Reporting into a void teaches people that reporting is the job.
- Fix the process before the tool. Trying to solve a broken process by buying software is the standard mistake.
- Training is information transfer. Skills come from practice, failure, and another attempt — few people learn a backflip in a weekend workshop.
- Ask sales managers whether they would coach more given the time and they all say yes. None of them have the time, which makes it a design problem rather than a willingness problem.
- Coach the coaches. Organizations that train the team and skip the manager have built the reinforcement layer nowhere.
Practices to apply immediately
- Ask which capability, if the team got really good at it, would make everything else easier. They know where the bottleneck is.
- Strike the reciprocal deal up front: you choose your own problem to solve, and in exchange you give the changes you did not choose an open mind.
- Take something off the plate before adding to it. Where the strategy is already clear, the constraint is capacity.
- Consult before you design, not after. Being asked late reads as being told, and the objection that follows is emotional rather than practical.
- Earn the right to challenge by over-investing in support first, and start from what a team already does well.
- Give the field something back for what you ask it to enter. A system that only reports upward teaches people that reporting is the job.
- Fix the process before buying the tool. Software applied to a broken process makes the breakage faster.
- Equip sales managers to coach, and coach them on coaching. Training transfers information; reinforcement is what changes behavior.
Questions the room worked through
- Why do people resist change at work?
- This room named six causes, and disagreement with the change barely featured: passive resistance from having no investment in it; capacity rather than clarity, where the strategy is understood but there is nothing left to give; ego, from not being consulted on the design; attachment to whatever exists now; the comfort zone and fear of visible failure; and fatigue from change layered on change. The underlying point is that resistance is a symptom of how change is introduced.
- What is passive resistance?
- People nod and agree in the meeting, then go back to what they were doing the next day. No colleague argues with you — they simply have no investment in it, so the training plays on one screen while the real work happens on another. It is social rather than instrumental, and it is the most common form.
- Are some kinds of resistance easier to work with than others?
- Yes, and the ranking is counterintuitive. Aggressive resistance is the most workable — it creates useful tension and can be turned with clarity and involvement. Passive resistance is harder because there is nothing to engage with. Actively toxic resistance is the one that has to be dealt with directly and early.
- How many people are genuinely good at change?
- Fewer than most transformation plans assume. In a McKinsey Health Institute study of thirty thousand people, 23% rated themselves both resilient and adaptable — so roughly eight in ten do not think of themselves as good at change. Around one company in six invests in building that capacity. The people designing transformation are unusually adaptable by selection, and tend to project that onto everyone else.
- What does it mean to pull adaptation out rather than push change in?
- Stop designing solutions for people and start facilitating people to design their own. It begins by letting a group say out loud that there is too much change and too little time, then asking which capability, if they got really good at it, would make everything else easier. Teams answer accurately, because they already know where the bottleneck is.
- How do you get a team to accept a change it had no say in?
- Trade for it explicitly. In the one program in this room that had done it at scale, each person picked a problem they cared about and designed the fix — and agreed in exchange to give an open mind to solutions arriving from elsewhere. Ninety days of autonomy on one slice bought openness on the rest. More than 300 leaders, mid-eight-figure EBITDA impact in a year, and no meaningful resistance.
- How do you earn the right to tell an experienced team to work differently?
- Commercial excellence has two jobs and they are not equal: support is expected of you, and the right to challenge has to be earned. That means over-investing in the support half first, treating the sales organization as an internal customer, starting from what a team already does well rather than from the gap, and being explicit about what a project will not cover rather than promising everything.
- Why do sales teams stop using the systems you give them?
- Usually because the system asks and gives nothing back. Competitive intelligence goes up so headquarters can see the whole region, and the person who entered it seldom gets a view in return. People adopt the apps on their phones because those make life easier, and they judge internal tools by the same standard.
- What is the difference between training and coaching?
- Training transfers information. Skill comes from practice, failure, and another attempt — few people learn a backflip in a weekend workshop. The reinforcement has to sit with the sales manager, who is close enough to observe the work and senior enough for the feedback to land. Ask managers whether they would coach more given the time and they all say yes; none of them have the time, which makes it a design problem rather than a willingness problem.
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