Beneath the surface: uncovering hidden resistance to change

I spoke to a client this week who shared how difficult it had been to shift team dynamics. Even when there’s goodwill, hope and consensus that change is necessary, moving the needle can feel nearly impossible.

We want to be innovative, bold, visionary – but end up doing almost the same as what we’ve always done. We want to break down silos, truly collaborate – but we see the same protection of turf no matter how much we talk about collaboration.

A key takeaway from our conversation was that lowering the waterline to see more of what’s really going on is a crucial first step. It’s impossible to intervene meaningfully if we don’t have a good sense of the underlying patterns and tensions that are creating the symptoms we’re trying to shift.

It reminded me of a humbling experience I had sailing in the UK.

From around aged 8 I’d been sailing on Sydney harbour and could reliably navigate the harbour adjusting the sails and direction depending on the wind, a reasonable record in winning a few races!

When I moved to the UK in my early 20s I was lucky enough to have the chance to sail Cowes week, one of the world's longest running regattas held on the Solent, the water running between England and the Isle of Wight.

Suddenly there were currents that were unfamiliar, and dependent on things like the depth of the water, tides, pressure systems, water temperature.

My eyes were untrained in this context – I had no idea how to see these currents or read the tide maps. The currents were often stronger than the winds and pulling in the opposite direction to the wind.

I was suddenly useless at navigation - we couldn’t get anywhere without understanding the currents at play.

The hidden dynamics of teams can feel like this.

We can look at the winds, adjust the sails and feel like we’re heading in the right direction – but unless we can see the forces that are playing out below the surface, we can find we’re actually making no progress – pulled another way by invisible currents - remaining hopelessly in the same place.

Immunity to Change, developed by Harvard psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, explains why individuals and organisations struggle to make lasting changes, even when they’re motivated to improve.

It highlights the hidden forces – known as 'competing commitments' – that work against change. These competing commitments are often driven by deep-seated assumptions and fears, like wanting to avoid failure, stay in control, or protect team harmony.

These hidden commitments create a subconscious "immunity" that keeps us stuck in old patterns, even when we consciously want to move forward. To break this immunity, Kegan and Lahey propose a process of uncovering and testing these underlying assumptions.

By bringing these hidden dynamics to the surface, we can shift thinking, test assumptions, and gradually open up to new possibilities - enabling genuine, sustainable change.

 Kegan & Lahey describes that

"when you begin to address that immunity, you will unleash a cascade of unplanned, unpledged behaviours that sweeps up the improvement goal (eg to be more innovative) and usually moves far beyond it.

Immunity to Change is one way of bringing these hidden dynamics to the surface to be able to see and work with the currents that are pulling against the progress we want to make.

Once we see them, we can identify the underlying assumptions and begin to experiment with testing these assumptions to shift the patterns and liberate energy towards new possibilities.

"even small changes in our Big Assumptions can have big implications for permanently altering our once-captivating equilibrium.”

- Kegan and Lahey

I run workshops with teams to surface the hidden currents that thwart real change – so they can unleash the energy and potential to enable bolder, more innovative ways of working together.

Get in touch if you’d like to learn more.