Every change management playbook starts with the same assumption: resistance means people don’t understand, don’t care, or weren’t told soon enough. So why does the strongest resistance come from informed, engaged, and motivated teams?
Early in my career, I got pulled into a client engagement that I’ve thought about more than almost any other.
A large organization had just rolled out a new financial system. It was a significant investment and a massive change for the analysts who were used to managing their data in spreadsheets they custom-built just for themselves.
Which is why I was surprised that technically, we had 100% adoption in the first-wave rollout. The consultants leading the project were skeptical too.
So after doing some digging, here’s what they uncovered:
- The minimum required fields were being completed.
- The data was entered on time.
- And every single analyst was still maintaining a secret spreadsheet on the side.
Not the underperformers or the people who’d been dragging their feet. The best people on the team were doing double the work just to avoid relying on the system they’d been told to use.
If you run a PMO, you’ve probably seen some version of this. You’re accountable for the adoption of changes you didn’t design, using tools and processes someone else chose, on a timeline someone else set. And when the right behavior doesn’t follow the rollout, the question always comes back to you:
What happened?
By all models, we’d done change management well. Early notice, through multiple channels over several months. In-person, well-designed training. Visible executive sponsors who communicated and reinforced the reason and importance of the change.
But still, one of the most motivated and engaged teams I’d worked with refused to trust the new way of doing things.
That project planted something that’s been growing ever since: a suspicion that “best practices” in change management are table stakes. They aren’t nearly enough to pull off successful, large-scale change.
And I think after many years, I finally understand why.
Traditional change management solves the obvious problems
I want to give traditional change management a fair hearing, because I’ve used it for most of my career…and I’m not here to throw it out.
The standard model has a logic that makes sense: people resist change because they don’t understand it, don’t know the reason, or weren’t told early enough. The fix follows naturally—ask for executive support, train more thoroughly, and communicate earlier (and more often).
That works a lot of the time. But not enough to keep up with the pace of change. McKinsey’s 2023 research found that the average employee now experiences ten planned change programs a year—five times more than a decade ago. When adoption stalls because nobody told the field team what was changing, or because the training was a 90-minute firehose on a Friday afternoon, the playbook earns its keep.
But those analysts had all of it. They were informed, trained, and supported. And they were still maintaining secret spreadsheets.
I think the playbook is good at removing obstacles in the road. Someone didn’t know about the change? Tell them. They weren’t trained? Train them. Leadership wasn’t visible? Fix that.
Those are real barriers, and they’re worth clearing.
But when you’ve cleared all of them, and people are still working around the system, you’re not looking at a road obstacle anymore. You’re looking at traffic patterns. A system that’s routing people toward the workaround. And that requires a different kind of diagnosis.
Behavior follows the decision environment
Every day, people make hundreds of micro-decisions about how to do their work:
- What should I work on right now?
- What can wait?
- How closely do I need to follow the process?
- Is this worth escalating, or should I just handle it on my own?
- Should I do the minimum and move on, or take my time and get it right?
These decisions happen constantly. And they’re harder to control than we think.
Most of them don’t happen consciously. People are responding to the environment they’re operating in, balancing expectations, constraints, risk, and time.
Each decision makes sense on its own (at least to the person making it). But taken together, these micro-decisions determine whether a change moves forward or drifts off course.
That is why adoption problems are often hard to diagnose. Nothing visibly breaks. There is no single failure point. Progress just bends, gradually and predictably, toward whatever feels most workable.
Over time, I noticed that the same three questions kept shaping those decisions.
People may not say them out loud, but they are almost always answering them.
The VES test
I have come to call these three questions the VES test:
Is it valuable?
Is it easy?
Is it safe?
If the answer to any one of them is no, behavior starts to drift.
1. Is it valuable?
People are constantly judging whether something feels worth doing right now.
- Is this task worth the time?
- Is this meeting worth paying attention to?
- Is following this process worth the effort?
- Should I do this thoroughly, or just do enough to get by?
When the connection between effort and meaningful outcome is strong, people usually don’t need to be chased. When that connection feels weak, work gets delayed, scaled back, or treated as mere compliance.
Clarity around value is often more powerful than pressure.
2. Is it easy?
People are also making a fast assessment of how much friction the work will create.
- When work feels valuable, and friction is low, people do it.
- When work feels valuable but difficult, they hesitate or look for shortcuts.
- When work feels low-value and hard, it usually does not get done well.
Not all work can be made easy. Some work is inherently complex. But all work can be made as easy as possible.
And this is where many well-intentioned change efforts go wrong. In the name of rigor or control, they add steps, tools, handoffs, or documentation that increase the difficulty of doing the work without increasing its perceived value. People respond predictably. They simplify. They minimize. They route around the obstacle to keep moving.
If the workaround is easier than the process, the workaround will win.
3. Is it safe?
This is the least discussed question and often the most powerful.
- Will I get blamed if this goes wrong?
- Will this expose gaps, uncertainty, or conflict?
- Will following the process slow me down or make me look incompetent?
When work feels safe, people raise issues early. They ask questions. They surface bad news while it is still fixable.
When work does not feel safe, people hedge. They stay quiet. They avoid visibility. Problems remain hidden until they become expensive.
No amount of governance can compensate for a lack of safety.
In fact, heavy governance often makes the problem worse by teaching people that visibility carries more risk than silence.
How the spreadsheets finally disappeared
For that financial system, we didn’t retrain the analysts or send another email from the executive sponsor.
We went back to two power users with the most unique reporting needs and made them a promise:
We will not stop supporting you until the new system performs as well as your spreadsheets for two full cycles.
That mattered because it created safety.
They weren’t being asked to trust a system they hadn’t vetted. Two full cycles meant they could validate the data against their own methods, on their own terms, before anyone else depended on it.
But those two users also worked differently because their leaders wanted different outputs. One of them put it plainly:
“What my boss wants, her boss hates.”
So we facilitated a negotiation around an approach that would meet both leaders’ needs inside the system itself. No exporting to Excel. No cleaning up reports behind the scenes. No double work to satisfy competing preferences.
That made the work easier.
Then we told those same users they would train their teams on the new approach.
That raised the stakes. It gave them a reason to really invest in learning the system, because their reputation was attached to it. The exercise went from “adopt this tool” to “own this tool.”
That made the work more valuable.
Within three months, the spreadsheets started to disappear.
Not because we pushed harder. Because we changed the environment in which people were deciding.
The VES test has completely changed how I approach consulting. But it’s not just my theory. A 2021 meta-analysis published in PNAS reviewed over a decade of research on decision environment design and found consistent evidence for exactly this:
Change the environment people decide in, and behavior follows—across populations, industries, and contexts.
Why this Matters for PMOs
PMOs are in a unique position to see this pattern because they see behavior across initiatives, not just inside one project or within one team.
If one project has an adoption problem, it might be a project-level issue. But if you’re seeing workarounds, low-quality compliance, and “adoption” that doesn’t translate into real behavior change, you are probably looking at an organizational decision-environment problem.
That’s actually good news.
It means the answer isn’t running better change management on every individual project. It means naming the organizational patterns that are shaping behavior across all of them—and bringing that diagnosis to the leaders who control the levers.
You’re the ones who can walk into a leadership meeting and say:
“We are compressing requirements gathering into two weeks and pulling business analysts off projects as soon as requirements are done, which is too soon. On multiple rollouts, this has forced teams into poorly designed workarounds during build. Those workarounds make day-to-day work harder. If we keep doing this, we’ll struggle with real adoption every time.”
That’s a conversation most PMOs aren’t having yet. But it’s the one that changes things.
Because often, they are not resisting the idea of change.
They are responding rationally to an environment that makes the right behavior feel low-value, high-friction, or unsafe.
If You Only Do One Thing
Pick one change that isn’t working.
A process people work around.
A tool that has “adoption” but not actual use.
A behavior you keep reinforcing but don’t see.
Then run the VES test.
Is it valuable?
Not in the business case. In the lived reality of the person doing the work. On an ordinary Tuesday, with six other demands competing for attention, does this feel worth doing well?
Is it easy?
Or have we added so much friction that the workaround is more efficient than the process?
Is it safe?
What does the person risk by doing it right, and what do they risk by skipping it?
If any answer is no, you’ve found your drag.
And you have probably found it in a place where more communication, more training, and more accountability will never fully reach.