Say I ask you how to lose weight. You look at what I eat and tell me to stop eating bagels, because the bagels are what's keeping me heavy.
And I tell you not to tell me how to live my life.
I came to you. I asked. You gave me the correct answer, and I got hostile about it. That's funny right up until you notice it's most of what happens when anyone tries to help anyone, and then it stops being funny.
Here's why it happens. You didn't ask me to change a fact about my situation. You asked me to change a behavior I chose. The bagels aren't a condition I'm suffering. They're a decision I make, repeatedly, knowing what it costs me. Telling me to stop means telling me that a thing I keep choosing is wrong.
That's the easy version of this problem.
Now make it a process
Take everything above and add three things.
They designed it. It isn't a habit they drifted into. They sat down and built it, and building it was work they were proud of at the time.
They committed to it in public. They presented it to their peers. They rolled it out to the people who report to them. They told their boss this was the plan. There's a version of them on record saying this is how we're going to do it.
Other people's behavior depends on it. Changing it isn't changing what they do. It's changing what nine other people do, which means going back to all of them and revising an instruction they've already absorbed.
Now come in and suggest a better way. What you're actually asking for is that they stand in front of the same room and revise themselves.
The resistance you get is not proportional to how good your idea is. It's proportional to how publicly they committed to the old one.
What it sounds like from the outside
It sounds like obstruction.
You propose something that would obviously improve the customer experience, and back comes: that won't work operationally. We don't have the capacity. That's going to be too hard. We'd have to change too much.
The reflex read is that they're being lazy, or protecting their comfort, or trying to do as little as possible. I've made that read out loud in a meeting, and I was wrong when I made it.
Almost nobody is defending the process because they think it's good. They're defending it because they built it, and the conversation has quietly become about them rather than about the work.
Once you see that, the objection stops being an obstacle and starts being information. Operational difficulty is the language available to someone who can't say the true thing, which is that agreeing with you costs them something you're not accounting for.
The move
Two things, and the second one matters more than it looks.
Separate the person from the artifact, out loud. The process wasn't wrong. It was right for the company that existed when it was written. That's usually true, and it's the difference between a revision and a repudiation. You're not correcting their judgment. You're telling them the thing they built worked well enough to get the company to a size the thing can no longer carry.
Have the conversation without an audience. This is the one people skip because it seems like a nicety. It's the whole game. If you raise it in the room where they committed to it, in front of the people who watched them commit, you have made agreeing with you the most expensive thing they could do that day. Nobody revises themselves in front of their own team on the spot. They'll defend it, and now they've defended it publicly, and you've made the next conversation harder than the one you just had.
Get them alone. Give them the version where they get to bring the change to their people as their own idea, because it will be by then, and because that's the only route that doesn't cost them anything to take.
The part that goes all the way down
This is not a thing that happens between you and one stubborn executive.
It's what you're asking every customer to do. Every process you want them to adopt replaces one they already have. Somebody there built that one. That person is in the room, or is going to hear about it.
And it's what they're asking of their customers. All the way down.
Customer success rests on a genuinely absurd premise when you say it plainly: get people to do things they don't want to do, can't easily do, would rather not do, and won't do as well as an expert even when they try. That's the job as usually described, and it's already hard.
This makes it harder, and more interesting. The thing you're asking them to change is almost never a blank space. It's occupied by something a specific person put there, on purpose, in front of witnesses.
Plan for that, or keep being surprised by resistance you've decided is irrational.
Lincoln Murphy formally named and popularized Customer Success starting in 2010 and has spent 15 years connecting it to expansion revenue and commercial outcomes. Read The Premise.