Why Meeting People Where They Are Isn't Enough

Ken Rickard, co-author of The Six Big Ideas of Adaptive Organizations, makes a subtle but important shift — away from meeting people where they are, and toward meeting people where they need to be.

Meeting people where they are ensures failure. Coupled with a few other no-no's, it can be a spectacular failure that's frustrating for everyone.

Common Anti-Patterns That Make It Worse

• Imposing change over co-creation — Take people's voice away, or worse, humour them by making them think you're co-creating for the sake of optics.
• Fixing people over fixing systems — Blame people for resisting and judge them based on their reaction to the change.
• Following the plan and ignoring the feedback — Create a big plan, with lots of measurements, at least a year in advance. That'll make sure stakeholders feel good… until they step back into the reality of the organization.

Real empathy doesn't avoid discomfort; it accompanies people through it. It listens without collusion, cares without coddling, and offers truth as a gift, not a weapon.

Why This Matters for Modern Change Management

Traditional change management frameworks often default to "meet people where they are" as a comfort-first strategy. The problem is that comfort doesn't create movement. If people are stuck, validating their current state keeps them stuck.

In the Lean Change approach, we use the Insights–Options–Experiments cycle to surface tension productively. Instead of smoothing over resistance, we treat it as valuable feedback about the system — not a character flaw in the people affected by the change.

Ken's reframe challenges change agents to hold space for discomfort while still moving people forward. That's the difference between empathy as a strategy and empathy as avoidance.