The Misread

Why Structural Friction Gets Read as Individual Resistance

Issue 285, October 8, 2026

Somewhere in your organization right now there is an initiative that isn’t landing. Adoption is thinner than the plan said it would be. The middle of the building has gone quiet. The people you were counting on are asking a lot of procedural questions and almost no enthusiastic ones. So a meeting gets called, and somewhere in that meeting somebody says the word. Resistance. Or they say it more gently. Change fatigue. A communication problem. Not everyone is bought in yet.

With that one word, the problem moved. It stopped being something about the organization and became something about the people inside it. And the fix follows the diagnosis, more training, better messaging, a session on adaptability and resilience. What almost nobody says in that meeting is that the conditions those people are working in would produce the same behavior from anyone, including everyone sitting at the table.

I have written a lot about resistance over the years, including the twelve kinds you can’t see and the way it works as identity protection rather than opposition. This issue is about the other half of the problem, the one I spent an hour on this week with Jenny Vazquez-Newsum for this week’s episode of The Human Factor Podcast. A lot of what gets called resistance isn’t resistance at all. It is friction built into how the organization works, and it gets read as a people problem because people seem easier to fix. That is the misread, and it happens in organizations of every size and type.

The Word Does the Work

In 1977 a Stanford psychologist named Lee Ross described something he called the fundamental attribution error. When we watch another person’s behavior, we overweight what we assume about the person and underweight the situation they are standing in. And it is exactly what a leadership team does when a rollout stalls. It looks at the behavior and reaches for something about the people, somebody to point a finger at.

The management research goes further. In 2008, Jeffrey Ford, Laurie Ford and Angelo D’Amelio published a paper in the Academy of Management Review called Resistance to Change: The Rest of the Story. Their argument was that the people running a change contribute to the very behaviors they then label as resistance, through their own actions and inactions, and that reaching for the word resistance is self-serving for them, because it keeps the problem on the other side of the table. They also made the point that resistance, when it is real, is an indicator of engagement and a valuable source of feedback. People who have checked out don’t push back. They comply and wait.

Once the word is said, the fix is already chosen, and that is what makes the misread expensive. Not the meeting and not the label, but the six months of training, messaging and resilience workshops that follow, all aimed at people who were never the problem in the first place.

What the Friction Usually Is

Jenny has spent two decades on this gap. She came up through Coro Southern California building cross-sector leadership programs, holds a doctorate in education from UCLA, has worked with more than 500 leaders across more than 200 organizations, and wrote Untapped Leadership in 2023. Then she built a method, which she calls contextual agility: the capacity to read an environment, understand its history and nuance, and choose a response that fits the moment rather than relying on habit or a universal formula.

When I asked her what she finds underneath a people problem, her answer was that no challenge is just a people challenge. It’s also a systems challenge, so everything she designs is a people-plus-systems intervention. You can run a training on Monday, and the question that matters is what happens the next day when those people go back to a system that was never set up to let them use what they learned.

Her example was a trust problem, which is a conversation she has often. A team says the trust isn’t there. They aren’t wrong, and some work has to happen around that. But she makes them go further and point to where in their processes, their rhythms, their feedback cycles, trust is being eroded by the design of how the work gets done. The team is usually right about the symptoms. The cause, though, sits a level down, and almost nobody thinks to look there.

Most of us have seen a version of this, even if it looked a little different at the time. An organization decides its middle managers need to get better at giving feedback, so it runs a program on giving feedback. Reasonable. But those managers are compressed in their roles, told they have authority they don’t actually have, and sitting inside a set of power questions nobody will say out loud. The program lands on top of all that and changes nothing, and six months later the organization concludes the managers didn’t take it seriously. That is the misread. The feedback problem was a role design problem that looked like a people problem. Last week I wrote about what happens to the middle when the tools free up a manager’s time and the organization just hands them more. This is the same middle, read wrong by leadership.

Jenny told a story about a regional philanthropic organization that brought her in to fix hiring and onboarding after a hire that didn’t pan out. The COO knew something could be better and couldn’t say what. What she found, once she had talked to the people doing the hiring and looked at what came before, was that the organization had a strong relational culture, hiring managers with a lot of ownership, and no connecting architecture at all. Nobody had defined what it meant to succeed there. The organization sought out a fix for a hiring problem and found its culture was really the issue. That happens more often than anyone would think.

The View From the Top Is the Narrowest One

So why does the organization get the reading wrong? Part of the answer is that the people with the authority to name the problem are the people with the least accurate view of it. Leadership often doesn’t have the detailed knowledge of what happens day to day.

Jenny uses a picture for this with leadership teams. A large elephant, surrounded by people in white lab coats, each pressed up against one part of it, each announcing what they have found. A rug. A plant. A hose. All of them wrong and all of them confident, because each is looking at the part they can reach. The people who can tell it is an elephant are the ones standing back, and in an organization the ones standing back are usually the ones on the margins, by rank, by tenure, by function, by whatever keeps them from being fully inside. All of us, she says, are too close to an elephant somewhere. And the higher you sit in an organization, the closer you are, because the position itself narrows the view. She is direct with executives about this, and she says they take it well once they understand it is the nature of the chair and not an attack on them.

The picture has research behind it. In 1986, the sociologist Patricia Hill Collins described what she called the outsider within, people granted close proximity to a group’s inner life without ever being granted membership in it, and argued that this position produces a distinctive and useful angle of vision. Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe, studying aircraft carriers, nuclear plants and firefighting crews, found that the organizations that avoid catastrophe share a habit they called deference to expertise: when something is going wrong, decision authority moves to whoever has the relevant knowledge, including downward to people with no rank at all, and moves back when the event is over. And a 2008 study in Personnel Psychology by Subrahmaniam Tangirala and Rangaraj Ramanujam followed 606 nurses across 30 work groups and found that whether a committed, engaged person actually spoke up about a problem depended on the procedural justice climate of their unit. Same person, different unit, different behavior. The silence came from the unit, not the nurse.

So the people who can see the elephant are the ones the organization listens to least. The organization has, often without meaning to, taught them to stay quiet, which I wrote about in Structural Silence last spring. And when they do speak, two people can describe the same problem and one gets treated as a finding while the other gets treated as an attitude. The difference is very rarely the accuracy of the description.

Pushing the Right Place in the Wrong Direction

Even a well-meaning organization that sees the problem clearly can make it worse.

In 1999, Donella Meadows wrote a paper called Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, ranking twelve places you can push on a system from the weakest to the most powerful. In it she tells a story from her teacher, Jay Forrester at MIT. Forrester said people know intuitively where the leverage points are. He would analyze an organization, find the leverage point, go in, and discover that everyone was already paying enormous attention to exactly that spot, and pushing it in the wrong direction.

That is what resilience training is when it gets offered as the answer to a structural problem. The organization has correctly noticed that something is happening to its people, and then it responds by asking those people to absorb it better rather than changing what they are being asked to absorb. It found the right leverage point and pushed it the wrong way. Jenny’s four lenses- lived insight, systems thinking, personal agency and shared vision- are meant to be held together, and she says the mistake leaders make most often is reaching for personal agency first, the let’s-go lens, because action feels like leadership. Her other finding is the one that stayed with me. She runs an index built on the four lenses with organizations, and systems thinking comes back lowest, consistently. Her explanation is that the systems questions are the questions about power, and we don’t talk about power in organizations. We hold it, resist it, or work around it, and almost never examine it in a neutral way. I agree with her completely. People are afraid of that conversation, and the misread lives in the space that fear leaves open. I have watched it for years, in my own experience, and it rarely gets called out.

I have called the broader habit uninformed urgency for years, and for a while it was my favorite topic to explore and write about. The pressure a leader feels is real and it begets action, and the action is often not preceded by the thinking that would point it in the right direction. Jenny put it this way: she doesn’t want to slow anyone down; she wants to stop the speed that runs over the insight that would have gotten them there faster.

When the Reading Is Done by a Machine

There is a newer version of the misread that most organizations are walking into right now, and it comes from the reading being done by software. Engagement scores, sentiment dashboards, adoption metrics, the AI summary of the pulse survey. Those tools are good at the surface, and the surface is where the misread lives. A dashboard can tell you that adoption in a part of an organization is thirty points behind. It can’t tell you that the manager was handed two other teams in the spring, that the system went live right before the busiest month of the year, or that the one person who tried to say so was told to be more positive. The number is accurate and the reading is wrong, and a number like that is more dangerous than no number at all, because nobody argues with it. Remember how we default to numbers as truth. They provide an element of clarity.

Robert Austin, writing in 1996 and building on Peter Blau, called this measurement dysfunction. The moment a number starts being watched, people work toward the number, honestly and in plain sight, and the number quietly stops standing for the thing anyone cared about. An index of conditions is not immune to that. The moment a leadership team starts watching a score about its own conditions, the conditions start performing for the score. Jenny’s answer to that is worth repeating. Not measuring is its own failure, so you measure, and then the work begins. The index surfaces something, and the organization has to go and look at what it surfaced with the people who live in it. The survey that gets taken and then nothing happens isn’t a measurement. It is a ritual, and people figure that out really quickly.

I asked Jenny what a method built on reading conditions does in a world where the reading is increasingly done by something that cannot read a room. Her answer was that she finds a kind of protection in the fact that context changes tomorrow, and changes from her to you, and that a machine is not going to read that. AI can be a tool, she said, and it can be useful at a certain level. What it is good at, unfortunately, is the easier answer, and the easier answer is the misread. Her practice is read the context, act, then read it again, because the moment you act, the context has changed. That is slower than a dashboard, and it is the only version that is actually looking at the elephant.

The Minimum Viable Reading

Everything above takes time, and the moment a leader most needs an accurate reading is usually the moment they don’t have time to get one. So I asked Jenny what she tells a leader who has forty-eight hours, a decision that can’t wait, and no real read on the conditions. Her answer was that there is a minimum viable reading, and it is four questions.

Who is closest to the consequences of this decision?

Who is shaping the response, and who is left out?

What happens in the system when I make this choice; what gets rewarded and what gets squeezed?

And how does this connect to what we are all here for?

That takes a few minutes, not six weeks, and the point is to build the habit when things are quiet, so it is there when they aren’t.

And the one assumption she wishes leaders would stop making, after 500 of them, is that the people experiencing the problem don’t have the answers. The leader believes it’s theirs to solve on behalf of everyone else. The people living inside the friction usually know exactly what it is and how they could work best, and most of what they know would come out as feedback, up and sideways, if anyone had built a place for it to go.

So if there is an initiative in your organization right now that someone has described as a resistance problem, a few things to look at before the next meeting.

Who decided what the problem was, and where were they sitting when they decided it?

When the fix was chosen, was it chosen for the people, or for the conditions they are working in?

Is anyone in the room standing far enough back to see the whole elephant, and if that person exists, has the organization taught them to stay quiet?

And when somebody describes the same stalled rollout you are looking at, do you hear a finding or an attitude?

Season 3 of the podcast opened with a question about what organizations count and who decided. Jenny’s work asks the question that comes one step before that. Before you count anything, and before you choose any intervention at all, who decided what the problem actually was, and what were they standing on when they decided it?

Related Reading

The Resistance You Can’t See (Issue 238). Twelve hidden types of resistance and how to redirect them. This issue is the companion: what to do when it isn’t resistance at all.

Structural Silence (Issue 256). Why organizations train people not to speak. The misread depends on it: the people who could correct the reading are the ones who have learned to keep it to themselves.

The Disappearing Middle (Issue 284). Last week, on the managers in between. Told they have authority they don’t have, and then read as the problem.

Receptacle or Receptor? (Issue 283). Conditions, not types. The same employee is a receptor in one meeting and a receptacle in the next, and the organization decides which.

Invisible Friction Is Slowing Your Strategy (Issue 231). From last fall, on the capacity, capability, culture and behavior gaps that stall a strategy, and the way human responses get mistaken for character flaws.

The Misfortunes of Uninformed Urgency. On urgency that begets action before thinking, which is where most misreads are born.

On The Human Factor Podcast

The Misread, Season 3 Episode 036. The conversation with Jenny Vazquez-Newsum this issue comes from: what is underneath a people problem, the elephant, whose reading counts as data, the Untapped Capacity Index, and the forty-eight-hour decision.

Structural Silence, Season 2 Episode 019. Why organizations train people not to speak.

Research Sources

1. Vazquez-Newsum, Jenny (2026). The Human Factor Podcast, Season 3, Episode 036: The Misread. Recorded September 2026. Direct quotations and examples from the recording transcript. Jenny’s book is Untapped Leadership: Harnessing the Power of Underrepresented Leaders (Prometheus, 2023); her method and the Untapped Capacity Index are at untappedleaders.com.

2. Ross, Lee (1977). The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, volume 10, pages 173 to 220. Academic Press. Source of the fundamental attribution error.

3. Ford, Jeffrey D., Ford, Laurie W., and D’Amelio, Angelo (2008). Resistance to Change: The Rest of the Story. Academy of Management Review, volume 33, number 2, pages 362 to 377. Source for change agents contributing to the behaviors they label as resistance, the label as self-serving, and resistance as feedback.

4. Collins, Patricia Hill (1986). Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought. Social Problems, volume 33, number 6, pages S14 to S32.

5. Weick, Karl E., and Sutcliffe, Kathleen M. (2007). Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty, second edition. Jossey-Bass. Source of the five principles of high reliability organizations, including deference to expertise.

6. Tangirala, Subrahmaniam, and Ramanujam, Rangaraj (2008). Employee Silence on Critical Work Issues: The Cross-Level Effects of Procedural Justice Climate. Personnel Psychology, volume 61, number 1, pages 37 to 68. 606 nurses across 30 work groups.

7. Austin, Robert D. (1996). Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations. Dorset House. Builds on Peter Blau’s definition of dysfunction; source for the point that people optimize for what is counted and the measure stops representing what was intended.

8. Meadows, Donella (1999). Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. The Sustainability Institute. Source of the twelve leverage points and the Jay Forrester story.