How to Plan for Resistance
The Change Signal with Lisa Reynolds
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Lisa Reynolds leads change management at Christus Health, where her small team punches way above their weight across a massive healthcare system. She's learned that change work is fundamentally about relationships, not processes.
Her approach flips conventional wisdom. Instead of treating resistance as the enemy, she sees it as valuable feedback that can be mitigated by 50% through proactive people strategies. Rather than rolling out enterprise-wide initiatives, she focuses on the individual human experience of walking through change.
The conversation gets delightfully practical. Lisa shares everything from "potty training" (posting flyers in bathroom stalls for busy nurses) to the symbolic power of cutting down dead trees on day one of acquisitions. She reveals why face-to-face communication trumps system emails every time.
But it's her philosophy that shines brightest: change is humanistic at its core. You can't bypass the relationship-building work, and you can't skip the grief process when people leave familiar systems behind.
This is change management stripped of corporate speak and grounded in what actually works with real humans.
Three big questions that arise from this Change Signal conversation with Lisa Reynolds:
Are you actually enabling resistance?
When did you last grieve something?
How many individual changes are you actually managing?
ABOUT JULIE:
Lisa Reynolds leads change management at Christus Health, guiding large-scale transformation with a small but mighty team. Her secret? Building trust, honouring emotion, and treating people like people. She’s a master of the practical and the relational — both grounded in experience.
