Are you where you hoped to be at this point in your life? If not, why?
That’s the question I ask audiences everywhere I speak. And the answers always reveal the same thing: a gap between intention and action. Between knowing what needs to happen and actually making it happen. For most of my career, I thought I understood that gap. I thought it was about strategy, about having the right plan or the right tools.
Then in 2010, something happened that changed everything. The U.S. Army hired me to help personnel prepare for the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC)—the largest military reorganization in decades. Bases were closing. Jobs were disappearing. What most people don’t know is that on all of these bases there are civilian employees. Where military personnel would just be redeployed, civilian employees faced a completely different scenario. Some would still have employment at the new base, but many would have to explore new opportunities. Over 25,000 employees would be affected. My role was to help people transition: build a resume, find a new role, retire with dignity.
I thought I was hired to teach strategy. But what I encountered was something deeper. At base after base, people sat across from me and said the same thing: “My job’s not going anywhere.”
Even when there was a literal countdown clock on the wall—ticking down the days, hours, and minutes until their base shut down—they still said it.
They knew what was coming. They had five years’ notice. Every resource was available. But too many still did nothing. And all of those bases are now gone. One of them is now a Tyler Perry movie studio. These weren’t uninformed people. Some were executives overseeing multi-million-dollar operations. Others were only a few years into their careers. But across every role, rank, and race, I saw the same thing: They weren’t preparing—not because they didn’t know what to do, but because they couldn’t bring themselves to do it.
And that’s when it hit me: I wasn’t there to teach job skills. I was there to confront resistance. These people weren’t uninformed. They weren’t lazy. They weren’t helpless. They were stuck in something deeper—something personal. Resistance. And that’s when my work changed forever.
As a chemical engineer who spent a decade as a minister before becoming a speaker, I’d been watching resistance my entire career. But the BRAC experience gave me language for what I’d always seen.
I stopped treating resistance as an obstacle. I started decoding it as a signal, a human pattern we all face.
Over the next 15 years and more than 1,000 presentations to organizations like Chase Bank, the U.S. Secret Service, and Phillips 66, I kept seeing the same pattern—just at a different scale.
Organizations do exactly what those employees did. They know change is necessary. They announce bold transformations. They invest in new systems, new processes, new initiatives. They have talented people and adequate resources.
And then… nothing changes. Or worse, things change on paper but not in practice. The new system gets implemented but people find workarounds. The culture initiative gets launched but the old behaviors persist. The transformation gets announced but six months later, everyone’s back to business as usual.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
We don’t put off hard conversations because we’re bad communicators. We don’t avoid growth because we’re unmotivated. We don’t sabotage change because we don’t care. We resist because something is happening beneath the surface—identity, fear, history, or pain. And organizations are just collections of humans, so they resist for the same reasons, just at scale.
But here’s the part most leaders miss: organizational resistance isn’t random. It follows patterns. It has structure.
As a chemical engineer who spent a decade as a minister, I approach resistance differently than most. I see it as a system—one that can be understood, decoded, and designed around. And after studying why capable organizations with good intentions stay stuck, I’ve identified something critical: Organizations fail at change because they have systematic blind spots at six critical resistance points.
Most leaders can’t see these blind spots because they’re looking at the wrong things. They focus on the announced goal, the project plan, the rollout timeline. They measure activity and mistake it for progress.
Meanwhile, resistance is building in places they’re not watching. In gaps they don’t know exist. In dynamics they’ve never been taught to see. The countdown clock is ticking, but they’re convinced their way of doing things isn’t going anywhere.
I’ve spent my career learning to see what leaders can’t see. To spot the silent resistance before it becomes the reason your transformation fails. To decode the patterns that keep organizations stuck even when everyone involved genuinely wants to move forward.
In my next article, I’ll reveal the six systematic blind spots that sabotage organizational change—and how to identify them in your organization before they cost you another failed initiative.
But here’s something you can do right now: Remember those employees staring at a literal countdown clock saying “my job’s not going anywhere”? You probably have your own version of that countdown clock. Maybe it’s your health. Maybe it’s a career move you keep postponing. Maybe it’s a relationship you know needs attention. What are you telling yourself about why you don’t have to act yet? Because resistance sounds rational, sounds like you, sounds true—right up until your base closes and becomes a Tyler Perry movie studio.
