Zones of Antagonism — What Lichen Can Teach Us About Change Management

Recently my family and I were watching a worldwide bio-diversity seminar online and during one of the segments on Lichen (yes it was fascinating) the presenter talked about how Lichen grew and as they grew they formed what she called Zones of Antagonism around their area.

The Zone of Antagonism formed a barrier around their space and would ward off any encroachment from another competing Lichen organism for their food source.

This concept immediately got me thinking about how organizations often operate with zones of antagonism as well. We see and deal with them all of the time though we often refer to them as the politics of an organization.

Due to the siloed design of organizations in general, people often form what might look like zones of antagonism around their functional areas. They manifest themselves in many ways but are often revealed when an organization goes through any type of change management, such as an Agile Transformation.

Change forms a threat to the status quo, to the sphere of influence built up in the organization's current structure. Power influences outcomes and outcomes drive behaviors. Your organization operates by way of these influences.

People who lead the various parts of your organization have been successful in what they do and look to protect how things work because they have been successful. Change threatens that and when an outside force, such as an organizational change occurs, then the human response is often one of protection, just like the Lichen.

What we as change agents refer to as resistance might also be called a zone of antagonism instead. It’s not that people are resisting as much as they are protecting against either something they don’t know or something they don’t believe in. Either way unlike the Lichen we need to find a way to remove the zone of antagonism that might be in place to achieve success with our transformation.

As an Agile coach, we need to put ourselves in the place of the individuals we are coaching and ask if the organization has made clear the vision of why Agile is the way to go and what the organization and the people within it will get out of supporting the move to it?

If leadership for an organization has not made clear the game plan for engaging in change, Agile or otherwise, then people, much like Lichen will respond by establishing their zones of antagonism as a way to delay, thwart or even kill the transformation overall.

However, we know resistance to change is real before condemning the resistance seek to understand it first and then find a path forward with informing how they can engage. This is the first step in your journey to help people adopt a new way of working.

Too often as coaches, we are transactionally hired to come in and teach Scrum, SAFe, or any of the other myriad of frameworks used to ‘implement’ Agile.

The problem is that the frameworks won’t make you Agile, only the mindset of change combined with the vehicle (frameworks) can move you from simply going through the motions and ‘Doing Agile’ to the place we want to be of ‘Being Agile’, where operate in a new normal.