Chicago is on fire (but in a good way this time).  Five million people lined the streets and filled Grant Park to celebrate the Chicago Cubs World Series win.  Even people who aren’t baseball or Cubs fans seem to have been swept up in the excitement.

But wait a minute.  According to what I regularly hear about Change Management, this shouldn’t be the case.  The Cubs haven’t won a World Series in one hundred eight years and haven’t even appeared in one in one for seventy-one years.  This is a major change.  Aren’t people supposed to be scared of change?  Aren’t they supposed to resist it?  After all, there are a lot of unknowns here.  Cubs fans don’t know how to act like winners.  We have a strong underdog/loser culture.  And, what’s going to happen to ticket prices?  Surely they are going to go up.  It’s also probably going to be harder to get tickets to games next year.  Seems like a lot of downside.  Would we have been better off with the status quo?

The Cubs victory serves as a great reminder that people don’t automatically resist and oppose change.  Cubs fans have been seeking and hoping for this change for decades.

People don’t mind change.  What bothers them are threats.  Threats to their livelihood, threats to their credibility, threats to their sense of accomplishment and purpose, and threats to their desire for fairness.  If your change initiative creates these threats, then people are going to react negatively.

The reason that so many change efforts fail is that leaders don’t pay enough attention to the threats that they or their change efforts create.  It doesn’t matter how great the value proposition is if an individual feels like they are going to be left behind or worse off as a result of it.

Believing that people automatically resist change is a cop-out.  It gives leaders an excuse to not put enough effort into ensuring that their change efforts place the LEAST amount of burden on their people.  As a result, the burdens of the change are often passed on to the people. That’s when there is resistance.

The Cubs victory reminds us that people will always be happy to change for the better.  If people are resisting your change efforts, maybe it’s because you are making things worse.

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Brad Kolar is an executive consultant, speaker, and author with Avail Advisors.  Avail can help you better understand, manage, or eliminate the threats that your people face during times of change.  Learn more about how Avail can help you lead through times of change and uncertainty.