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Response to Juan: Strategies for overcoming resistance to the NEW solutions. Posted by: Ravi

September 8, 2005

Juan says:

“In the real world there are ideas based on common sense, which are established in society and its organizations, offering the biggest resistance to any change. If you want to overcome that resistance, you have to:

First organize a new group of ideas.

Secondly, you have to express those ideas in a simple manner.

Thirdly, you have to share the data that proves those ideas right.

And finally (fourthly), you need to demonstrate that your practice works.”

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There is another strategy toward overcoming the existing resistance to change.

While this could work, it cannot be expected to overcome the resistance in a sustainable way. This is because the notions that provide the foundation for the beliefs and assumptions are themselves conceptual and buried in the minds of those who manifest the resistance.

As long as the notions that provide the foundation for the beliefs and assumptions that uphold the resistance remain secure in the minds that accommodate them, they can be expected to keep providing resistance in creative new ways, always undermining our efforts in the world.

So any lasting dismantling of the resistance is not possible with a strategy that ignores the conceptual foundation of the resistance we seek to overcome.

So we should also consider the alternative strategy, that of undermining, if not eliminating the beliefs and assumptions that provide the foundation of the resistance. This strategy also comprises four steps:

Firstly, find out the beliefs and assumptions that provide the conceptual foundation to the resistance to change.

Secondly, find out their origins, or the authority or evidence that that upholds these beliefs and assumptions.

Thirdly, undermine these beliefs and assumptions by uprooting the foundational beliefs and assumptions that provide their foundations – by providing their human carriers with facts that undermine these foundations.

And fourthly, keep reinforcing these corrective measures until the foundation of the resistance has dissolved away.