Most organizations have someone they would call a Destroyer.
Not by that name, usually. They call them "resistant to change." They call them "difficult." They call them the person who, when a new initiative launches, immediately starts building the case for why it won't work. They slow adoption. They argue in meetings. They discourage others from engaging. If you lead a team, you know who I'm talking about. You can probably picture their face right now.
Here's what I want you to do with that picture: set it aside. Because what I'm about to tell you is going to challenge the story you've been telling yourself about that person.
InceptionU's 2025 Innovative Talent Study surveyed more than 3,000 workers across Canada, the US, and the UK. We asked them how they respond during times of organizational change and sorted them into five response patterns, from those who actively shape change to those who work to stop it.
A note before we go further: these are patterns of response, not personality types. They describe how people are showing up under current conditions, not who people are. The same person can show up differently in different conditions. That distinction matters for everything that follows.
The finding most people expect: the people shaping change are engaged. The people resisting it are checked out.
The finding we actually got: the people most actively resisting change were twice as likely as those in the middle of the spectrum to say they are motivated and engaged at work. Their resistance is not indifference. It is engagement directed at protecting something they have at stake in the current system.
Read that again. The people most actively working against change in your organization may be among the most engaged people in it.
The conventional response to someone resisting change is to manage them out, work around them, or wait for them to leave. That response makes sense if you believe their resistance is a character problem or a motivation deficit.
The data points somewhere else. The single biggest predictor of whether someone will lead change or undermine it isn't personality, generation, or cultural fit. It's whether their learning environment was designed to build capability, or designed to deliver content. 43% of those actively shaping change said their training was directly applicable to their work. Only 21% of those actively resisting said the same. Same companies. Same training spend. Different design. Different outcome.
What that tells us: the gap between leading change and blocking it tracks closely with the design of the learning environment. When we see that pattern across 3,000 workers, it raises a question worth sitting with. If the learning conditions were designed differently, would the same people show up differently?
Our experience across twenty years of organizational work says yes. When people have the cognitive equipment and the organizational conditions to channel their engagement into building rather than blocking, most of them do.
That is the leverage point. And it's why this work matters.
Here's where it gets sharper. When we asked workers which skill they most needed training in, 44% named collaboration. More than any technical skill, software certification, or industry-specific competency. And the decision-making data was striking: 70% of those resisting change reported making big decisions alone, compared to 44% of those leading that change.
The people who decide alone produce fundamentally different outcomes than the people who decide together. We've spent generations training individual performance and calling it leadership. Many of the people resisting change in your organization are highly engaged people operating without the collaborative infrastructure to do anything productive with that engagement.
This has a direct implication for your organization's most significant initiatives, including AI implementation and your workforce's readiness for it. AI is the most collaborative tool the workforce has ever had access to. It only works if the humans using it know how to collaborate. We're deploying AI into workforces that haven't been trained to collaborate, and then we're surprised when the deployment doesn't land. AI sabotage is a collaboration failure long before it's a technology failure.
Before you audit the person, audit the soil they landed in.
Take your most significant training investment from the past 12 months. Don't ask "who is leading and who is resisting." Ask "what did each person actually do after the training?" Look for observable behaviour. People shaping change apply the new approach to real work, share it with peers, surface second-order opportunities. People resisting change actively argue against the new approach, slow its adoption, discourage others from engaging.
Then check yourself. Are you observing behaviour, or confirming impressions you already held? If you find yourself labelling someone you don't get along with as a resistor, pause. Ask whether what you're seeing is the response to conditions, or whether the relationship is colouring the assessment.
And then ask the harder question: what conditions in your organization make it difficult for capability to develop and then continue to grow? That question gives you a different kind of answer than "what skills are missing." Different question. Different leverage.
76% of Canadian workers completed training in the past year. Only 30% said it applied to their work. The gap between those two numbers is not a training problem. It's a capability problem. And the people resisting change in your workforce are often the clearest signal of where the conditions are failing first.
They're not checked out. They're not lost causes. They're telling you something about your organizational soil.
What would it look like to listen to that signal differently? To ask what the resistance is pointing at, instead of who is causing it? That's where a different kind of conversation begins, and where different outcomes become possible.
The findings in this post are from InceptionU's 2025 Innovative Talent Study (3,207 workers across Canada, the US, and the UK). If you're an HR leader wondering what this looks like in your organization's specific landscape, book a 30-minute conversation. No pitch. Just a clearer read on whether your conditions need this work.