Why Good Intentions Stall: Revisiting Kegan and Lahey's Immunity to Change

21 hours ago

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Most executive coaches have worked with a leader who sincerely wants to change and somehow cannot. The commitment is real, the plan is sensible, and the leader can often describe exactly what needs to happen. Months later, the same behaviors remain firmly in place. Harvard researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey spent years studying this pattern, and their findings reshaped how many coaches understand resistance. What looks like a failure of will, they argue, is usually energy directed toward a second, hidden commitment that quietly cancels out the first (Kegan & Lahey, 2001).

The Heart Patient Problem

In 2005, Fast Company's Alan Deutschman reported remarks by Dr. Edward Miller, then dean of the medical school at Johns Hopkins University, who observed that two years after coronary bypass surgery, roughly 90 percent of patients had not changed their lifestyle (Deutschman, 2005). These patients understood that their lives depended on new habits, and most of them still could not adopt those habits for long.

Findings like this are a natural starting point for understanding Kegan and Lahey's work because they remove the usual explanations. If the prospect of death cannot produce lasting change, then a shortage of information or motivation is unlikely to be the real obstacle. Something else is holding the old behavior in place, and the same force appears in boardrooms and executive suites every day.

What the Framework Says

Kegan and Lahey introduced the idea to a business audience in their 2001 Harvard Business Review article, "The Real Reason People Won't Change," and developed it fully in their 2009 book, Immunity to Change. Their central insight is that what managers label resistance is often an internal standoff. The person holds a genuine commitment to change while devoting real effort to a competing commitment that they have never consciously examined.

The immune metaphor is apt. A biological immune system exists to protect the body, and on occasion it protects the body from something it actually needs. The psychological version works in much the same way. Competing commitments are forms of self-protection, which is a natural and reasonable human impulse, and coaches who approach them with respect tend to make far more progress than those who treat them as flaws to be corrected.

The authors also draw on Ronald Heifetz's distinction between technical challenges, which can be met by acquiring new skills or information, and adaptive challenges, which require a change in how a person makes sense of themselves and their world (Kegan & Lahey, 2009). Telling a leader to delegate more is a technical prescription. Helping that leader understand why delegation feels threatening is adaptive work, and it is where executive coaching earns its value.

The Four-Column Map

The practical core of the framework is a single page divided into four columns, which Kegan and Lahey call the immunity map. To see how it works, consider a composite example: a chief operating officer who has told her CEO, her team, and her coach that she wants to stop being the bottleneck on operational decisions.

Column one, the improvement goal. The client names a change that matters to her personally and that others would also benefit from. In this case, the COO commits to letting her directors make more decisions without her review.
Column two, doing and not doing. The client lists, without judgment, the behaviors that work against the goal. The COO asks to be copied on every escalation, rewrites her directors' recommendations before they reach the CEO, and schedules check-ins that function as approvals. Coaches should resist the urge to convert this list into an action plan, since these behaviors are symptoms of something deeper.
Column three, hidden competing commitments. The coach asks what the client would worry about if she did the opposite of her column-two behaviors. The COO admits she would fear being blindsided in front of the CEO. Restated as a commitment, the worry becomes clearer: she is committed to never being caught without the answer.
Column four, big assumptions. Beneath every competing commitment sits an assumption the client treats as fact. Here it might read, "If I am ever surprised by an operational problem, the CEO will conclude that I am not in control, and my credibility will not recover."

Once the map is complete, the paradox becomes visible to the client. She is working hard toward two goals at the same time, and the hidden one has been winning.

A Contemporary Example

The same pattern shows up whenever leadership teams adopt new tools and ways of working, including artificial intelligence. Many executives publicly endorse new technology and then continue to route every meaningful output through their own review. When a coach works through the map with such a leader, the competing commitment often turns out to be a commitment to remaining the most knowledgeable person in the room, supported by an assumption that the leader's value lies in personally having the answers. That assumption may have served the leader well for most of a career, which is precisely why it is so durable.

The technology itself is incidental, because the same immunity would surface with any change that threatens the identity a leader has spent years building.

How Coaches Can Put the Framework to Work

Kegan and Lahey caution against trying to overturn a big assumption through argument or willpower. The work proceeds in stages, which coaches can structure across several sessions.

Observe before acting. Ask the client to notice when the big assumption is operating and what it costs, without trying to change anything yet. Clients who prefer quick fixes may find this phase frustrating, yet the self-awareness it builds is what later experiments depend on.
Look for counterevidence. Invite the client to recall moments when the assumption did not hold. The COO might remember a time when a director handled a crisis well and the CEO credited the entire team.
Trace the history. Ask where the assumption came from. Many big assumptions were accurate and useful at an earlier stage of a career, and recognizing that can loosen the client's attachment to them.
Design a safe, modest test. The experiment should be small enough that a poor outcome would be tolerable and specific enough that the result is clear. The COO might allow one director to present a decision to the CEO without her prior review and then observe what actually happens.
Reflect on the data. After the test, the coach helps the client interpret what she learned, revise the assumption where the evidence warrants it, and decide whether to run a larger experiment.

This approach suits executive clients well because it treats them as investigators of their own behavior. They gather evidence, draw conclusions, and update their thinking, which is a discipline most senior leaders already respect.

The Main Takeaway

Immunity to change explains why so many well-designed development plans fail quietly. Leaders who stay stuck are usually protecting something they value, often without realizing it. For executive coaches, the framework offers a practical way to make that protection visible and to test it with care. When a client finally sees the big assumption holding an old pattern in place, change begins to feel less like a contest of willpower and more like a reasonable next experiment.

For an introduction to the framework and additional examples, see our earlier article, Navigating "Immunity to Change".

References

Deutschman, A. (2005, May 1). Change or die. Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/52717/change-or-die

Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2001). The real reason people won't change. Harvard Business Review, November 2001, 85-92. https://hbr.org/2001/11/the-real-reason-people-wont-change

Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2009). Immunity to change: How to overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organization. Harvard Business Press.