Stories teach us about five types of resistance that a storyteller must take the main character through in order for him or her to transform. If you want to turn a frog into a prince, and not just dress the frog up in princely garb, you must guide that frog through. And your strongest ally in this journey is information. People need information – five types of information, matching the five types of resistance:
1. Personal Resistance – Why me? How is this relevant to me?
2. Relational Resistance – Why you? Why would you know how to help me?
3. Social Resistance – Who is in this with me? Do I belong with them and they with me?
4. Practical Resistance – How is this going to work? What is the process and the strategy?
5. Cosmic Resistance – What happens when things don’t work out as planned? If it or I fail?
When you are the speaker, facilitator or coach, you are the story weaver and your client or audience is the princely frog.
I spoke this morning at the Knowledge Resources Organisational Development Conference about these five types of resistance. I devised an ingenious interactive process to illustrate it and cleverly used The Shawshank Redemption and The Great Escape as metaphors for breaking through (or out of ) the prison of resistance.
But it bombed.
No, it did not bomb, it actually went just fine, but it did not wow the way I dreamed it would (being so clever and all J). ‘Just fine’ is just not good enough.
Why did it not work?
At first I thought it was because I failed to get two thirds of the audience over the first kind of resistance. Read the rest of this article on my personal blog.