Managing Resistance in Complex Digital Transformations: A Comparative Study of Change Management Models in Complex Organizational Systems

Organizational Advantages of Digital Transformation: Forced to keep up with the competition, many businesses are under pressure to undergo a company-wide digital transformation. In federal and non-federal systems, addressing resistance to change is an important factor for implementation success, specifically as organizations introduce costly and disruptive change to complex sociotechnical ecology, legacy systems, and regulatory environment, whilst managing multiple stakeholders. This paper compared and analysed eight well-known change management models Lewin’s Change Management Model, Bridges’ Transition Model, the ADKAR Model, the Kübler-Ross Change Curve, the Satir Model, Plan-Do-Check-Act method (PDCA), Kotter’s 8-Step Change Theory, and the McKinsey 7S Framework—against their effectiveness in managing resistance for complex digital transformation projects. An unwillingness to change is a psychological as well as structural, cultural, and procedural-related roadblock. The McKinsey research illuminates the scale of the problem, too, with only 38% of transformation programs being judged as being entirely or mostly successful, where resistance is cited as an important cause of failure. In this paper, we argue that success in complex digital transformation can be attributed not only to tech-savvy but also to successfully applying change management models and frameworks dealing with human behavior, organizational resistance, and system alignment.