By Natalie Johnson
In 2010, Tony Chatman was hired by the U.S. Army to help civilian employees prepare for one of the largest military reorganizations in decades. Bases were closing or being realigned, jobs were disappearing, and thousands of people faced decisions about whether to relocate, pursue another opportunity or leave careers they had known for years.
Chatman expected to spend much of his time on résumés, career strategy and the practical decisions that accompany a professional transition. Instead, he began having versions of the same unexpected conversation at installation after installation. Employees who had been given years to prepare still insisted their jobs would somehow remain untouched. At Fort McPherson in Georgia, he eventually sat with one employee and pulled up the installation’s website, where a countdown clock showed exactly how long remained until the base closed. The information was there, as were resources to help people prepare. Some used the time to earn degrees or certifications and plan for what came next. Others remained stuck even as the evidence became difficult to ignore.
“I thought I was there to teach job skills,” Chatman says. “I was actually there to confront resistance.”
For Tony Chatman, a keynote speaker, author and organizational culture advisor who has spent more than two decades working with leaders and institutions, that realization became more than a memorable moment from one assignment. It gave him a way to understand a pattern he had been seeing throughout his career.
The Pattern Beneath the Work
Chatman’s career had already taken him through environments that required very different ways of understanding people and problems. He trained and worked as a chemical engineer, spent years in ministry and later built a career speaking and advising organizations on leadership, culture and change. His work has included major corporations and federal agencies such as NASA and the U.S. Secret Service. His book, The Force Multiplier, examines how leaders bring more of their people’s potential into the work.
Across those settings, Chatman kept noticing a gap between understanding and action. Experienced leaders often knew what strong leadership required but did not consistently practice it. People understood the principles behind resolving conflict yet still postponed conversations they knew they needed to have. Organizations could recognize that change was necessary while struggling to translate that recognition into sustained movement.
“Resistance is this core thread that when you resolve it, it doesn’t fix everything, but it makes everything fixable,” he says.
What has emerged from that realization feels less like a change in direction than a clearer description of work Chatman has been doing for years. Resistance gives him a way to examine what happens after people know change is necessary but before they are able or willing to move.
What Resistance Looks Like Before We Call It Resistance
Resistance is easy to misunderstand because the word suggests open opposition. In an organization, that might mean an employee refusing a directive, a team rejecting an initiative or a leader arguing against a decision. Chatman is more interested in the forms that are much easier to miss.
“Resistance doesn’t stand there in a bright red suit that says, ‘Hey, I’m Resistance,’” he says. “It’s far more subtle.”
It can appear when a capable leader repeatedly delays a difficult conversation, when someone knows what needs to be done but cannot seem to begin, or when an organization announces a change that appears to have broad support yet never gains traction in practice.
For Chatman, resistance is the often-hidden protective response that keeps people attached to familiar identities, behaviors or ways of working even when they understand that change is necessary. He sees it as particularly powerful when people are being asked to move away from an established identity or a way of operating that once served them well. The old way may no longer fit, but familiarity can still exert considerable force.
The distinction can also prevent organizations from solving the wrong problem. More communication will not necessarily fix an issue rooted in trust. More accountability may do little for a team that has not reconciled what a change means for its role or identity. The visible symptom may be stalled execution, while the real source of friction sits somewhere underneath it.
Why Change Alone Is No Longer Enough
Chatman believes that distinction has become more consequential as organizations absorb an extraordinary amount of change at once. Artificial intelligence is altering jobs and business models while leaders are simultaneously responding to economic pressure, changing workforce expectations, geopolitical uncertainty and shifts within their own industries. One transformation may still be underway when the assumptions behind it begin moving again.
In that environment, Chatman questions whether it is enough to treat each transition as a discrete change that can simply be managed from beginning to end.
“If you focus on change, you’re in an uphill battle,” he says. “But if you teach people to overcome resistance so they can actually navigate it properly, then even as the goals shift, they can be productive and effective.”
His team has developed an assessment that examines resistance across seven areas within an organization, giving leaders a way to investigate where friction may actually be occurring before they invest heavily in solving something else. The point is not to declare resistance the explanation for every organizational problem. It is to recognize when resistance may be obscuring the problem leaders are trying to address.
Inside a modern organization, the same disconnect can be considerably harder to spot because it rarely arrives with a clock on a homepage.
Moving Before You Feel Ready
Chatman also sees an individual dimension to the idea, particularly for people familiar with the frustration of knowing what they want to do, understanding how to do it and still feeling unable to start.
One of the tools he uses is a simple framework called PAR: pause, assess, respond. Pausing creates enough distance to interrupt the cycle rather than continuing to ruminate on whatever feels difficult. Assessment means becoming curious about the hesitation. Is this resistance to something that still matters, or has new information changed the goal? Is an old pattern pulling someone backward, or is the hesitation signaling that the direction itself deserves another look?
The response can be intentionally small. Ten minutes of writing, one message or one conversation placed on the calendar may be enough to create movement. The aim is not to manufacture confidence before taking action, but to stop making confidence a prerequisite for taking the first step.
“We wait until we feel ready,” Chatman says. “Ready is not a feeling.”
That idea brings his argument back to what he first encountered in 2010. The employee facing a base closure, the executive postponing an important conversation and the organization struggling through its latest transformation appear to be dealing with very different problems. Chatman sees a common tension among them: the distance between understanding what comes next and actually moving toward it.
For years, that distance kept appearing throughout his work.
Now he has a name for it.
