What’s Old is New: Resistance to Change Hurts Resiliency

Resistance to changing the status quo is probably one of the oldest and most common challenges that organizations face whenever programs try to grow. It seems like whenever companies are trying to bring forward a new program (or improve an existing one), factions coalesce bringing up reasons why the change shouldn’t happen.  Admittedly, sometimes those objections are legitimate, such as concerns over budget or resources, but just as often in my experience, those legitimate seeming options are just proxies for the real objection — people just don’t like changing the way they do things. This is the seventh blog in my “What’s Old Is New” blog series.

“People don’t resist change. They resist being changed!”

Peter Senge, Founder, Society for Organizational Learning

Resisting Change

In an extreme example of this, a now-bankrupt company I used to work at ran all of their profit-making business operations through a then-25-year-old, custom-built VAX application.  It was THE system that ran their business.  It was slow, it relied on nightly batch processing so real-time data wasn’t available, finding replacement parts for that server would have been difficult-but-not-impossible if it went down, and it predated Windows by about a decade so the only interface option they had was through green-screen terminal emulation.  There was even a high-level manager in the IT organization who had, decades before and several jobs ago, played a part in writing that original application as a contractor.  The IT organization desperately wanted to migrate off that system, but there were powerful factions that kept finding reasons to keep the old one in place. One group of users didn’t want to learn about a new system, so they complained about specific features that would be unavailable in any newer systems on the market. Another group of users at remote offices didn’t want to have to learn a new interface, so they developed bloated requirements lists for any potential new application that would make it accept the same sequence of keystrokes that long-time users had memorized to quickly navigate the green-screen interface. Another significant part of the IT organization was against moving off the old application because they had invested years into cobbling together interfaces between the current system and other applications needed to run the business (like their inventory and payroll systems).  New systems were expensive too.  So, that ponderous old application stayed. As far as I know, it had just celebrated its 30th birthday when the company finally went bankrupt.

This sort of resistance to change is, in my opinion, the worst kind of Technical Debt because it’s both deliberate AND reckless.  That server was so old they couldn’t easily buy fresh backup tapes for it anymore.  I wonder what that company would have done if they had some sort of catastrophic system failure, given the lack of Resiliency.  (Then again, there were a few people there that were out of touch.  I remember having a conversation with a Senior System Architect there who genuinely thought that resilience, redundancy, reliability, and recoverability were all basically the same thing.)  I also can’t help but wonder if the company would have survived if they had invested in a modern ERP Application at some point to help them streamline their operations and make better use of their data.

“Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up.”

James Belasco and Ralph Stayer, Authors Flight of the Buffalo: Soaring to Excellence, Learning to let Employees Lead

The Impact of Resistance on Business Resiliency Programs

I think the resistance to change is also the downfall of many Business Resiliency Programs that are trying to get off the ground. You have established managers governing established processes in a lot of companies, zealously guarding their own fiefdoms and putting up barriers to any sort of change that might impact the way they currently work. Building a Resiliency Program inevitably touches all parts of the business if you are doing it correctly, so those managers start to feel threatened when new processes come along (especially if they are worried that the new processes will create more work for them).  I’ve seen managers be passive aggressive, refuse to do work, complain to their superiors, or even try to push work and responsibilities off to other departments, all is a part of their resistance to whatever the new Resiliency Program is trying to do.  Ego can play a big part in this. I’m not going to name names, but I’ve seen this sort of resistive reaction to Resiliency-program-related work at seven or eight Fortune 500 companies in a variety of industries (and several smaller companies too).  This sort of resistance to change, in my opinion, is counterproductive to the long-term health of any company.  

This sort of resistance could hurt any project, but it hurts Resiliency Programs in particular. For the policies and methodologies of a redundancy program to stay relevant, they need to be able to adapt to the needs of the business continuously. Businesses tend to expand and contract with the business cycle; employees come and go. Suppliers change, and IT systems get upgraded. If your Resiliency Program is resistant to adapting its methodologies to changes in that dynamic environment, it’s going to get left behind. A backup and restore strategy that may have been “good enough” seven years ago is probably not going to be adequate to recover the business from today’s typical ransomware attack. A decade-old handshake agreement with one vendor to keep your manufacturing line supplied if another vendor comes up short may not be enough to keep your business running anymore. The same old process for creating the same old plans may not be good enough to protect your business. (This may be especially true if you are in one of the Federally-designated Critical Infrastructure Sectors that are now required to provide a quick turn around on high quality reporting following an incident.)

In short, the world continues to change, and businesses need to be willing to change along with it. This willingness to change is especially true in the world of Resiliency management, because in some cases your Resiliency Program is your “last line of defense” against going out of business.  Experts also say that Resiliency Programs can be a strategic advantage in the marketplace. I’m not saying that you should jump on every bandwagon or fad that comes along, but a willingness to change brings a higher level of adaptability to your business.  That adaptability makes your business stronger, and helps it be much more resilient.

“The path of least resistance is what makes rivers run crooked.”

Elbert Hubbard, American Author

Sometimes this can be a difficult path to navigate though, especially when you’re trying to distinguish the latest fads from the latest facts. Want to get the most for the resources you spend updating your business? Trying to get more bang for your buck? Sayers is here to help.  Our Modern Data Center Engineering Team has decades of experience in helping businesses like yours successfully navigate change, and become more resilient.