"People just don't like change" is the most common explanation offered for resistance, and it's also the least useful one, because it doesn't point toward any specific response. Most resistance that gets labeled this way actually has a more specific, more addressable cause underneath it - and the fix for one cause often does nothing for another.
The more specific causes
Loss, not change itself. People rarely resist a new process in the abstract - they resist what they're losing in the transition: status, a skill that used to be valuable, a relationship built around the old way of working, autonomy they previously had. Naming the actual loss, rather than the surface-level change, is often the difference between resistance that fades and resistance that hardens.
Not enough information, filled in with the worst plausible version. In the absence of a clear explanation for why a change is happening, people don't default to a neutral guess - they tend to assume the least favorable plausible explanation. Silence about "why" reliably gets filled with something worse than the truth.
Legitimate disagreement with the change itself. Sometimes resistance is simply correct - the change has a real flaw, a dependency wasn't considered, or the people raising concerns have information the decision-makers didn't have. Dismissing this category as generic resistance discards genuinely useful signal.
Low confidence in the ability to succeed under the new way. Distinct from disliking the change - this is a skills or capability concern, often unstated because admitting "I'm not sure I can do this" feels riskier than a vaguer objection. This kind of resistance responds to training and support; it doesn't respond to more explanation of why the change is happening, because that was never the actual question.
Change fatigue from how the last one went. If a previous change was poorly communicated, walked back, or handled with the same reassurances that didn't hold up last time, resistance to the current change is often really about the last one. This is a trust problem, not primarily a resistance-to-this-specific-change problem.
Not trusting the process that produced the decision, separate from disagreeing with the decision itself. Someone can accept a decision's substance while still resisting because they had no voice in how it was made, or because the process felt closed or predetermined despite a stated invitation for input.
Why misdiagnosing the cause wastes the response
More explanation and reassurance addresses the "not enough information" cause well and does almost nothing for a skills-confidence problem - someone who doesn't believe they can do the new process isn't short on explanation, they're short on support and practice. Conversely, more training addresses a genuine skills gap and does nothing for someone who simply wasn't consulted and resents that fact regardless of how competent they already are. A single generic "manage the resistance" response, applied uniformly, predictably underperforms against several of these causes at once.
Finding out which one you're actually facing
The most direct approach also tends to be the most effective: ask. "What's the biggest concern - how it works, what it means for your role, or something else?" surfaces which category you're in far more reliably than guessing from the outside. The accountability planner's AI-implementation-resistance mode is built around exactly this question, since the same visible resistance to a new AI tool can come from a skills concern, a trust concern, or a legitimate quality concern - and those three call for genuinely different responses.
Planning the rollout itself, not just the conversation about resistance to it? MBA Lab's Change and AI Readiness Assessment covers the 12 things worth having in place before you introduce the change in the first place - several of which, left unaddressed, are exactly what produces the resistance this page describes.