When the Story Stops Making Sense

What We Resist When Resisting Change

On his third day as the newly appointed Vice President for Academic Affairs, Daniel sat quietly in the back of a weekly program directors’ meeting and watched a ritual unfold that made no sense at all.

For ninety minutes, faculty and staff went around the table offering updates about everything from course scheduling to accreditation to minor staffing shifts. They moved through upcoming events on and off campus to small personal notes— birthdays, retirements, whose kid had just gotten into what college—the kinds of details that had somehow become part of their weekly ritual.

To Daniel, each update arrived as a long, winding narrative that didn’t connect to anything that came before or after, let alone the meeting’s stated agenda. Decisions, when they were made, appeared briefly and then vanished.

As people gathered their things, Daniel spoke up. “Can I ask,” he said gently, “what outcomes are we hoping to get from this meeting?”

Several directors exchanged knowing glances as they stacked their papers with unnecessary care. Finally, a faculty member spoke up: “This is how we stay transparent. Everyone gets to hear what’s going on and chime in. We need everyone to feel informed.”

After the room emptied, someone else lingered by the door.

“I know this all probably seems wasteful,” he said. “But Academic Affairs values transparency above all else. We don’t want anyone to feel caught off guard. We want everyone at all levels to feel included.”

Daniel thanked her. Still, something about the meeting didn’t sit right. Everyone had described transparency, but to him it felt more like a routine people depended on for reasons other than work, even if it didn’t move anything forward.

He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but he sensed that changing the way this meeting was run (which was his job) was going to be harder than he thought.

Stories Hold Systems Together

To understand what Daniel encountered that day, let’s turn for a moment to Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher who studied how we make meaning out of our own lives. I read Ricoeur obsessively in graduate school, but after witnessing a meeting remarkably similar to Daniel’s this past week, his ideas suddenly felt practical.

Ricoeur wrote that human beings understand themselves through “narrative identity.” In brief, we construct stories about who we are, what we value, and how our choices fit together. These stories help us feel stable through time. They help us stay coherent.

Ricoeur described two kinds of identity:

1. Idem, our routines, patterns, and familiar habits.

2. Ipse, the part of us that acts, decides, and allows us to change.

   
   

You can see these same patterns inside that Academic Affairs meeting.

Over many years, the team developed its own storyline about transparency and the importance of “keeping everyone in the loop.” No one wrote the story down, but everyone recognized it. It met a need. It helped people understand their work. It gave everyone a sense of place inside a big, complex institution.

That story had become the team’s version of idem. It held things together.

Daniel’s arrival represented ipse. Presumably, he was hired to act and to change things that no longer worked.

So when he asked his simple question about meeting outcomes, he wasn’t questioning a process. He was questioning the story that helped people feel grounded in their work.

According to Ricoeur (who, by the way, never wrote on organizational behavior, decision making, or change management), people rarely resist change because they dislike the new. They resist it because the new disrupts the story they have been using to understand the old.

Until that story evolves, nothing else will. Daniel was starting to learn that the hard way.

When Familiarity Becomes a Substitute for Progress

Inside any long-standing organization, certain practices start to blend into the walls. They stop feeling like choices and become the natural order of how things get done (even if thing never really “get done”). A long meeting, a complicated approval chain, or a ritual no one remembers creating blends in like features of the landscape.

The weekly meeting survived not because it was useful, but because it was familiar. And familiarity, over time, becomes a kind of quiet justification for resistance to change.

Of course, if you had asked anyone in the room why the meeting required fifteen separate updates, you probably would not have received a straight answer. You would have heard something more tentative.

• “This is how we stay informed.”

• “This is what transparency looks like for us.”

• “It’s just how we do things here.”

These explanations are not reasons for resistance. They’re reassurances that the institution still works the way people believe it should. Reassurances that they still understand their environment. Reassurances in a chaotic world, some things still remain the same

So when someone like Daniel arrives with a different picture of the institution, his story competes with theirs, forcing everyone around the table to reexamine the script they rely on to navigate their world.

That is where resistance begins. Not with disagreement, but with disorientation.

If the meeting no longer serves a purpose, and if transparency doesn’t require this level of detail, and if Academic Affairs is not exactly what people thought it was, then the story that once organized their world starts to wobble.

And when a story wobbles, we hold on even tighter.

When Stories Become Organizational Armor

Over time, the stories we tell ourselves about our institutions don’t just guide our work. They protect us.

Every norm, habit, and legacy practice once solved a problem. Someone created it for a reason that made perfect sense at the time ( I certainly understand the need for that kind of transparency). As the years pass, though, the reason fades but the practice remains as it becomes part of the institution’s identity.

Once that happens, the practice becomes a form of armor:

• It helps us feel competent.

• It helps us feel oriented.

• It helps us feel like insiders.

So even the smallest suggestion from someone new can feel larger than it is. Daniel thinks he is asking about a meeting structure. The people in the room experience a threat to the coherence that anchors their world.

We often say people resist change. That is not quite right. People resist losing the sense-making structure that helps them understand the place they work.

The story does not only protect the institution. It protects the people inside it.

Leadership Practice: Map the Story Before You Move the System

If you want change to take root, you cannot begin with processes. You have to begin with the story that holds those processes in place.

Before redesigning a workflow or restructuring a meeting, try this:

1. Ask three people how they understand the purpose of the practice you want to change. You are not looking for accuracy. You are listening for coherence.

2. Notice the values that sit underneath their explanations. These often sound like belonging, openness, fairness or predictability. These values are the real anchors.

3. Create a bridge that connects the old story to the new reality. Something like:

   “We have always cared about openness. This change helps us continue that value, but in a way that moves the work forward.”

People do not need perfect clarity before they change. They need coherence. They need a story that makes the change make sense.

When we start with the story, we restore that coherence. And when coherence returns, change becomes far more possible. Not because we pushed harder, but because we helped people remain themselves while our institutions grow into something new.