Resistance Is Relational, Not Just Personal

The workshop that went nowhere

You have probably seen this one. The team sits through a workshop on pair programming and lightweight peer review. The reasons are sound — quality is uneven, knowledge is siloed, and work slows whenever one of the senior engineers is away. In the room, nobody openly fights the idea. People nod. A few ask sensible questions. The session ends on what looks like cautious agreement.

Two sprints later, nothing much has changed. Pairing happens once or twice, mostly for show. Pull requests still get waved through by the same two people. The team goes back to solo work. Leadership starts using the usual language: the team is resistant, the senior engineers are territorial, people are stuck in their ways.

That reading is common because it is convenient. It gives us a person to work on. It also misses a lot. What if the team is not simply refusing change? What if the resistance is carrying information — about fear, safety, authority, hidden contracts, and competing commitments? What if the pattern makes more sense when we stop asking who is the problem and start asking what the system is making risky? That is where co-creative Transactional Analysis helps.

Why the usual story is too small

When a change effort stalls, personal explanations rush in fast. This developer hates collaboration. That manager cannot let go. This team is passive-aggressive. Those people do not want to grow. Sometimes there is a grain of truth in those statements. But if we stop there, we reduce a live system to a character flaw. We act as if the pattern sits inside a person rather than between people.

That move creates three problems.

First, it individualises what may be systemic. A team may resist a change because the sponsor wants speed while the team is trying to protect quality. It may resist because nobody has clarified decision rights, or because people are told to self-organise while still being judged by command-and-control measures. In those cases, what looks like attitude is often a sensible response to the actual setup.

Second, it pulls everyone into familiar drama. Once resistance is personalised, somebody becomes the problem and someone else gets cast as the fixer. The coach starts rescuing the team from leadership, or quietly joining one side against the other. TA has good language for these moves — the triangle of persecutor, rescuer, and victim forms quickly when tension rises and nobody names the system producing it.

Third, it blinds the coach to their own part in the pattern. Co-creative TA rests on we-ness and shared responsibility. The coach is not standing outside the field like a neutral technician. The coach can make resistance worse by overexplaining, pushing too hard, keeping side conversations with the sponsor, or treating persuasion and coaching as the same thing.

"The difficult-people story feels efficient. It usually hides the more interesting truth."

This is one place where co-creative TA parts company with classical approaches. A classical move can tempt the coach to ask which script, ego state, game, or discount is operating inside the most problematic person. That can be useful later. In organisations, it can also narrow the frame too early and turn a live system into a story about one person's psychology. Co-creative TA changes the unit of attention: What is being created here, between these people, in this sponsor-team-coach triangle, under these pressures, right now?

Resistance is produced in a field

Co-creative TA draws on field theory and social constructionism. In plain language: meaning is made in dialogue, and patterns are shaped by context, power, and relationship rather than by isolated individuals acting alone. The field is not mystical — it is the practical web of who has authority, who feels safe, who gets rewarded, what can be said, and what people think they have to protect.

This matters because teams do not resist change in the abstract. They resist what the change comes to mean in their setting. The same pair programming practice can mean three different things in three different teams: shared learning in one, surveillance in another, loss of the last thing that gives a senior engineer status in a third. The practice has not changed. The field has.

Co-creative TA gives us four lenses for reading the field.

What resistance may be protecting

When a team resists, the first useful question is simple: what is being protected here?

Fear is often the first answer, though not in the obvious form. Teams do not usually say, "We are afraid." They talk about practicality, speed, time pressure, and quality risk. In the team that will not pair, a senior engineer may be protecting more than efficiency — she may be protecting competence, face, and identity. If she has spent years becoming the person people rely on, then shared ownership can feel like a step toward being ordinary. Fear in teams is social: people are not only afraid of being wrong, they are afraid of what being wrong will do to their standing, their safety, and their belonging.

Loss of control sits close to fear. Agile change is often sold as empowerment and introduced as mandate. That contradiction lands hard. We tell teams they are being trusted more while changing the rules under which they work. We ask managers to let go without saying what authority they still hold. Then we act surprised when people push back. What gets labelled as control issues is often a protest against unclear authority.

Competing commitments are where resistance gets interesting — because they can coexist with sincere agreement. A team can mean it when they say they want better quality and less siloed knowledge. They can also be governed by stronger hidden commitments: "do not slow down," "do not look incompetent," "do not challenge the strongest person in the room." The team is not only carrying explicit goals. It is also carrying scripts, covert agreements, and ways of securing safety that were learned together and are still rewarded now.

Recognition belongs in this picture too. TA gives us a practical word for it: strokes — a unit of recognition. Under pressure, teams do not only chase progress; they also chase recognition, safety, legitimacy, and permission to matter. If positive recognition is scarce, people will protect the few reliable ways they know to get it. The senior engineer may not only be guarding expertise — she may be guarding the last dependable source of recognition available to her.

"The team says yes to pair programming because the case is solid. The same team says no in practice because several other commitments are still running the show. That is not hypocrisy. It is a field problem."

How systems teach teams to resist

Once you start looking for the field, you see how often resistance is built into the change process itself.

Agenda mismatch. A sponsor wants more throughput. The team wants less churn and fewer defects. Both say they want improvement. They are not talking about the same improvement. If that mismatch stays hidden, resistance will show up as a side effect of the disagreement nobody has contracted for.

Authority confusion. Teams are told to own more of the work while major decisions still move through informal hierarchies. Self-management is often announced as if the announcement itself settles authority — it does not. The Product Owner is told to decide priority, but stakeholders still go around them. Line managers say they are stepping back, then override in the name of delivery. Teams are asked to own outcomes while being shielded from some decisions and punished for others. People learn quickly which authority is real. Resistance grows in the gap between Agile rhetoric and lived decision rights.

Psychological distance. If the coach keeps private conversations with the sponsor and then arrives carrying a new agenda, the team will defend itself. If the coach becomes the team's ally against leadership, leadership will push back somewhere else. Weak contracting creates the very resistance the coach later tries to solve.

The coach's own participation. Coaches can create resistance by moving too fast, interpreting too early, wrapping pressure in warm language, or acting as if more explanation will solve what is actually an authority problem. A coach who keeps trying to convince a team may be teaching them that their no does not count. Sometimes the resistance has already moved into the coaching arrangement itself — which is one reason supervision matters. Not because the coach has failed, but because entanglement is easier to see with help than from the middle of it.

From blaming people to designing conditions

None of this means resistance is harmless. It can waste time, freeze learning, and keep teams stuck for months. Coaches should not romanticise it. Sometimes resistance is defensive, stale, and costly. Sometimes people do cling to patterns that no longer serve them.

But if we treat resistance only as a defect in difficult people, we stay at the wrong level. We keep trying to win an argument with individuals when the system itself is telling us that something about safety, power, pace, meaning, role, or contract is off.

That is the practical value of a co-creative TA lens. It helps us read resistance more accurately. We stop asking, "How do I get this team to comply?" and start asking, "What conditions would make a different response possible here?" That shift changes the work. It moves the coach out of the business of pushing people over the line and into the harder, better work of redesigning the field.

This lens does not deny individual psychology. It resituates it inside relationship, role, and field. Individual dynamics still matter — they are just read inside the system that is evoking, rewarding, and repeating them.

There is one final discipline worth keeping. This lens is strongest when the problem is relationally stabilised — when the same pattern keeps repeating through different meetings, different people, and different process tweaks. It is less useful when the problem is plainly structural. If the team lacks capacity, if governance blocks real decisions, if tooling is broken — no amount of relational interpretation should pretend otherwise. TA can help you see how people organise around those constraints. It cannot replace the need to fix the constraints themselves.

In the end, resistance usually tells us less about whether change is right and more about whether the current conditions support what the team is being asked to own. That is a better question. It gives us somewhere useful to work.