The loudest skeptic in the room gets the most design attention and deserves the least. Calibrate to the willing middle, and let the results do the arguing.
Every change programme has one. The person who has seen it all before, who asks the question designed to be unanswerable, whose team will adopt the new way of working "once the obvious issues are fixed." And every change programme faces the same temptation: redesign everything until this person is satisfied.
Don't.
When you subscribe to the most resistant person, or the most resistant team, you make everyone else pay for their comfort. The rollout slows down. The design accumulates exceptions. The willing majority, the people who were ready to move, watch the organisation negotiate with its own decision and conclude the change is optional. Which, by then, it is.
It is worth naming why this keeps happening, because the pull is psychological long before it is organisational. In most rooms, skepticism passes for sophistication. The person predicting failure sounds analytical, experienced, hard to fool. The person who is optimistic about the change sounds naive, and can feel the room deciding so. Cynicism accumulates authority it never earned, and the programme starts orbiting it.
The second pull is kinder, and just as damaging: groups gather around misery. Put twenty people in a room where ten are happy with the change, three are indifferent, and seven are hurting, and the room will organise itself around the seven. We are decent people. Celebrating in front of suffering colleagues feels cruel, so nobody celebrates, the wins go unmentioned, and the mood settles at the level of the least happy person present. The majority quietly learns that enthusiasm is inappropriate here. The drift happens one polite silence at a time, with no decision ever being made.
Underneath both pulls sits a question worth asking out loud: what is this organisation optimising for? Change, or niceness? Execution, or niceness? Look at what gets measured and the answer is usually niceness. The surveys ask whether people liked things. The interviews ask whether the new way of working feels comfortable. Upskilling is the clearest case: teams get asked whether they enjoyed the training and whether it was clear, and almost never what they learned or what they will now do differently. Every question is about how the change treated the individual. Nothing asks what the individual owes the change. Responsibility flows one way, and it is the wrong way.
The instinct comes from a decent place. Resistance often carries signal, and the skeptic sometimes sees a real flaw. Listen to the objection. Take what's true in it. But there is a difference between hearing resistance and handing it the pen. The first improves your design. The second transfers ownership of the change to the person least invested in its success.
The better bet is the willing middle: the people who are curious, capable of moving, and waiting to see whether this is real. They are your highest-return audience. Build with them, make their progress visible, and the social proof does what no amount of stakeholder appeasement can. Most resisters are simply opposed to being early. When the middle moves, the maths changes for everyone.
Be aware that the same maths works in reverse. Resistance recruits. When teams sense that going back remains an option, and that neither deliberate inertia nor quiet sabotage carries any consequence, the resistant start gathering colleagues, and restraint builds its own momentum. A change programme is always compounding in one direction or the other. Your job is to decide which, before the room decides for you.
And the few who stay opposed after the results are in? That is a leadership decision, and it should be treated as one.
Most of our work starts where a change has stalled halfway. The pattern is almost always the same: the programme was negotiating with its skeptics instead of building with its believers.