Resistance costs more than change

Every time we integrate a new company into the group, the hard part isn't technical. Systems we migrate, networks we connect, processes we redesign. The hard part is people — myself included — wanting things to stay as they were.

It happens at every level. A team that had one way of selling and now needs another. A manager who proudly built a process and watches it become legacy in six months. Me, defending for too long a decision the facts had already disproved.

It took me a while to understand something simple: most of the time, it isn't the change that hurts — it's the resistance to it. Change is just the environment. The market shifts, technology turns over, the customer starts wanting something else. None of that asks my opinion. What's under my control is how long I take to stop fighting what has already changed.

Day to day, it became a practical question I ask myself and my teams: what are we keeping standing only because it has always been this way? There's almost always an answer — a report no one reads, a step that exists out of inertia, an assumption that held three years ago and doesn't anymore.

Adapting, in this sense, isn't giving up conviction. It's separating what is principle (and doesn't change) from what is habit (and should). Whoever confuses the two gets stuck: defending the habit as if it were a principle, burning energy holding on to what time has already taken.

I don't romanticize change for its own sake — swapping for the sake of swapping costs as much as freezing. The point is different: to look at what has already changed in the environment and adjust before the adjustment is forced on you. That holds for an operation of 1.35 million subscribers and for a small decision on a Tuesday afternoon.

The question stays the same: what are you holding on to today that has already ceased to exist?