Social resistance to change

[sharovatov]

Why?

In my experience of implementing changes based on the testing economics model, I observed a pattern: very rational and well‑justified QA improvements in some contexts succeed, while in other contexts stall.

For instance, when I was a consultant, in most cases everything worked, but when I was just an engineer, the changes stalled. The suggestions were proposed and packaged in a very similar way, so this suggests some social and organisational resistance rather than technical flaws in the proposal. This research aims to explain those forces so engineers and leaders can diagnose why change stalls and make rational improvements more achievable.

Expected results

1. An explanatory map of the reasons why rational QA changes might stall, with some categorisation which can help prognose and estimate the success of a proposed change in a certain context.
2. A set of hypotheses about the dominant blockers (e.g., incentives, legitimacy, process ownership).
3. A collection of real‑world examples that can be mapped to the classification.
4. A basis for a later, practical guide to making rational changes happen.

Collaboration

"Atomic" collaboration ask:

"Share a 3–5 sentence story about a rational QA change that stalled. Please include: the change, the role of the person who proposed it, who stalled it, and your opinion on the main reasons it stalled."

Target artifact

A public research artifact similar in style to "Economics of testing", but focused on social resistance to QA change.

Background and additional information

I previously built the "Economics of testing" artifact to justify QA investments. When applying it in practice, I saw different outcomes: as a consultant the change landed; as internal QA it stalled. This motivated research into social resistance, not technical "feasibility".

I use CFIR as an organising lens because it is a research‑based taxonomy for implementation determinants. The artifact maps observed barriers across intervention characteristics, outer setting, inner setting, individual factors, and process.

The goal of this phase is explanatory: understand why rational change fails. A later phase will translate insights into practical guidance.

WIP ARTIFACT

[sharovatov]

I have discussed this topic with awesome Pamela Paterson yesterday on a call, she gave me plenty of advice, but what stroke me most was that she advised to consider looking at this whole topic from the Sales perspective, to think of a change suggestion as a product which has to be sold. I will unpack this perspective and my thought of this a bit later this week.

[sharovatov]

I've just published a companion guide for the economics of testing and this research, where I am giving advice on how to make things work.

I and @anupamck are planning to cover this topic in a conference talk. The draft of the outline is here.