The Familiar Always Wins Unless You Make It Lose

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Written By Jeff Winter

Why progress rarely collapses at the “go” decision, and why manufacturing feels this pain first.

Progress doesn’t fail because people resist change. It fails because the familiar is allowed to keep winning.

That sounds obvious until you have watched a plant launch a new way of working on Monday, celebrate it on Tuesday, and quietly “make an exception” by Thursday. The exception becomes a workaround. The workaround becomes the new normal. A month later, the transformation is technically still alive, but functionally optional. No sabotage. No villain. Just gravity.

Most resistance to change does not look dramatic. It looks reasonable, practical, and even responsible. It sounds like “this is how we’ve always done it,” or “that system still works,” or my personal favorite: “let’s not break what isn’t broken.”

Reasonable language is powerful because it usually contains a truth. The old process did work. The legacy system is still running. The current shift handoff does get product out the door. In manufacturing, where risk has real consequences, reasonable often wins by default because reasonable protects throughput, quality, and safety. That is the dilemma. What protects today can quietly tax tomorrow.

The Elastic Band in Every Transformation

I think of familiarity as an elastic band. It pulls organizations backward, not because people are lazy or anti-innovation, but because existing systems, processes, and habits were optimized for a different moment in time. Left alone, they will always try to snap back into place.

In manufacturing, the elastic band is thicker. The operating system of the plant is designed to reduce variation. It rewards repeatability and punishes uncertainty. When you introduce a new workflow, a new digital tool, or a new way of scheduling, you are not just asking for “buy-in.” You are asking a system built for stability to temporarily tolerate instability.

That is why transformation is exhausting. It is rarely exhausting because the vision is unclear or because the technology does not exist. It is exhausting because once you decide to move forward, the real work begins: stopping regression. Preventing the old operating model from sneaking back in. Preventing yesterday’s constraints from redefining tomorrow’s decisions.

From what I have seen, transformations do not usually fail at the moment of decision. They fail later, when the dust settles, the program team moves on to the next fire, and no one is left holding the line.

The “Go Live” Myth and the Quiet Return of Old Habits

There is a comforting fantasy that transformation follows a clean arc: define, design, deploy, done. In a deck, it looks like progress. In a plant, it looks like this:

  • A new process goes live.

  • The first production crunch hits.

  • Someone uses the old method “just this once.”

  • The old method becomes the safety net.

  • The safety net becomes the main road.

This is not a moral failure. It is a system response. People will always choose the path that feels safest under pressure, especially when they are measured on output, not adoption.

And that is why I do not buy the lazy explanation that “people resist change.” People resist friction. They resist ambiguity. They resist extra steps that are not matched with extra support. They resist initiatives that feel like a side project bolted onto an already full-time job.

It’s tempting to blame “resistance.” But the more interesting issue is trust, specifically, trust in change. Gartner found that only 32% of mid-to-senior leaders said the last change they led achieved “healthy change adoption” (employees acted on the change, on time, without damaging performance or engagement). In the same research thread, Gartner reported that 79% of employees had low trust in change. When employees do not trust organizational change, sticking with what they know is not about comfort. It is about safety. The familiar becomes a form of risk control. The current way of working may be imperfect, but it is predictable. And in environments measured by yield, safety, and downtime, predictability is incredibly hard to give up.

Gartner’s alternative is quite practical: routinize change. Make change adoption part of normal work. When leaders routinize change, Gartner’s model predicts employees are three times more likely to adopt changes on time and in a healthy way, even when change trust is low.

Change Management Is Not a Department. It Is the Reinforcement Layer.

In too many transformations, change management is treated like a communications plan and a training calendar. Those are necessary, but they are not sufficient. The real job of change management is reinforcement, especially after the initial excitement wears off.

Prosci’s research is helpful here because it ties change management effectiveness to outcomes in a way operations leaders can respect. In their correlation data, 88% of participants with excellent change management met or exceeded objectives, compared to 13% with poor change management. This means that companies with excellent change management, projects are approximately 7 times more likely to meet objectives than with poor change management.

Prosci also links effective change management to delivery discipline. With excellent change management, projects are nearly 5 times more likely to be on or ahead of schedule than with poor change management, and nearly 1.5 times more likely to stay on or under budget.

That is the elastic band problem, quantified. Reinforcement is how you keep the band from snapping back.

Why Manufacturing Transformations Feel Heavier Than Everyone Else’s

Manufacturing transformation is not just a change in tools. It is a change in how decisions get made, how work gets sequenced, and how accountability flows across shifts. That makes it fertile ground for regression.

It is also happening during a real human capacity crunch. Deloitte’s 2025 Smart Manufacturing and Operations Survey found that 48% of respondents reported moderate to significant challenges filling production and operations management roles, and 46% reported the same for planning and scheduling roles.

That matters for transformation because the people who “hold the line” are often the same people already stretched thin: operations managers, planners, schedulers, supervisors, maintenance leaders. When they are overloaded, reinforcement gets deprioritized. Coaching slips. Audits get skipped. Exceptions multiply. And the familiar wins, not because anyone chose it strategically, but because the organization ran out of oxygen.

This is also where fatigue becomes a cause, not just a symptom. Emergn’s August 2024 research on transformation fatigue reported that nearly 60% of employees feel burnout from the additional work created by change programs, and 50% of employees said leadership failures contribute to transformation failures. Emergn also reported that poor communication leaves many employees unclear on objectives, including a quarter who feel uninformed about the reasons behind transformations. In a plant, burnout looks like shortcuts. It looks like “just get it done.” It looks like a smart operator building a workaround because the system is slower than the line. Workarounds are not rebellion. They are a local optimization. Enough local optimizations add up to a strategic loss.

How to Make the Familiar Lose Without Declaring War on Your People

If familiarity wins by default, then leadership has to change the default settings. Not by forcing compliance, but by shaping the environment so the future has a fighting chance once the pressure shows up. These are the moves I have seen separate “we launched it” from “this is just how we work now.”

  1. Remove the easy exits.

    If the old way is still easier, faster, or emotionally safer, people will use it the moment things get tight. That is not resistance. That is survival instinct doing its job. Parallel processes, backup spreadsheets, and unofficial side paths quietly teach the organization what really matters. You do not need to rip everything out on day one, but you do need to stop pretending those escape hatches are harmless. Leaving the old road open right next to the new one and hoping traffic magically reroutes is not a strategy.

  2. Make reinforcement boring on purpose.

    Reinforcement that relies on energy, enthusiasm, or charisma will disappear as soon as production pressure shows up. What actually works is dull consistency. The same questions in the same meetings. The same expectations reinforced week after week. This is not about motivation. It is about repetition. No one cheers for it, but it is exactly why the change survives after the kickoff glow fades.

  3. Turn the new way into habit, not agreement.

    Most transformations assume that if people understand the change, they will follow it. In reality, people follow what feels familiar under stress. That is why practice matters more than persuasion. Build small, recurring moments where teams use the new process, even when it feels slower at first. Rehearse it until the old way starts to feel awkward. Inspiration has a short shelf life. Muscle memory does not.

  4. Protect the middle like it is load-bearing, because it is.

    Supervisors and operations managers live where strategy meets reality, usually at full speed and with limited margin for error. They are expected to absorb new ways of working while still hitting today’s numbers, covering staffing gaps, and putting out fires that do not wait for transformation roadmaps. If they are underwater, the familiar will always win because it is faster and safer in the moment. Give this layer clarity, air cover, and fewer competing priorities. If leadership is the engine and the workforce is the wheels, the middle is the transmission. Ignore it, and nothing moves no matter how hard you press the gas.

  5. Name regression early, while it still sounds reasonable.

    Regression rarely announces itself as going backwards. It shows up as “just this once,” “temporary,” or “until things stabilize.” Those phrases feel harmless, but they are how the old model sneaks back into control. Call it early. Make it visible. Talk about it without blame. Celebrate the teams that hold the line under pressure, not just the ones that hit the number. By the time regression is obvious, it is usually already institutionalized.

None of this requires fighting your people. It requires recognizing that the familiar is patient, persistent, and very good at waiting you out.

If It Feels Heavy, Good.

If transformation feels like you’re pushing against something heavy…

That’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. That’s a sign you’re actually changing something. Because real progress isn’t the moment you decide. It’s the weeks after, when the familiar shows up (calm, confident, reasonable) and asks to be put back in charge.

References:

Jeff Winter
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