When a business changes, people push back. This is about reading why someone is resisting, because the reason behind the resistance should shape how a manager responds.
Greendale is a national supermarket chain. A new Chief Executive has just arrived, and she has announced a programme of changes across every store, decided at head office and rolled out quickly, with little consultation. It covers a wider use of self-service checkouts, new shift patterns, smaller in-store cafes, and changes to staff bonuses. On paper, head office says it will make the chain leaner and more competitive. In the stores, not everyone is happy.
You will meet your unhappy staff, sort each one into the reason driving their resistance, then decide how to handle each of them. Takes about 6 to 8 minutes.
Greendale, its new Chief Executive, Tess Coe and the staff are all fictitious and purely illustrative. The changes in the scenario (self-service checkouts, shift patterns, in-store cafe space and staff bonuses) are common features of UK supermarket operations, used here only as a realistic backdrop. The framing is neutral: the sim does not argue that imposing change without consultation is right or wrong, it asks you to read why people resist and respond well. Example data, as of June 2026. The framework taught here is Kotter and Schlesinger's four reasons why people resist change.
0 of your 4 key people came with you.
Resistance to change is never just one thing. Kotter and Schlesinger's four reasons (parochial self-interest, misunderstanding and lack of trust, a different assessment of the situation, and low tolerance for change) each come from a different place, so each needs a different response.
A fear of personal loss needs an honest answer about that person's future. Wrong information and distrust need clear facts and a manager whose word can be trusted. A genuine difference of opinion needs to be heard and weighed on the evidence. Discomfort with change itself needs time and patient support.
The manager who treats every objection the same way, usually by repeating the same facts a bit louder, tends to lose the people who needed something else entirely. Reading the reason behind the resistance, and matching the response to it, is what turns a change programme that stalls into one that sticks.