That distinction matters because it changes what you do. If someone is resisting the change, you argue the case for the change. If someone is protecting something, no amount of argument touches it.
The two questions people ask first
Before anyone trusts something new, they are asking two things about the people bringing it.
Why are you really doing this? That’s a question about motive, and it maps to fairness and consideration: do I believe you have my interests anywhere in this.
Can you actually deliver it? That’s a question about capability, and most people have watched enough change programmes fail to ask it in good faith.
Change leadership has to answer both. Being genuine about the why does nothing if people doubt you can run it; competence does nothing if the motive looks self-serving. And the order you put your reasons in tells people which one is really driving it. Corporate communication is deliberate and vetted, so people read the sequencing as a signal. Lead the announcement with shareholder value and the message received is that shareholder value is the reason, at which point the honest internal question is why anyone should learn, adapt and absorb the disruption for something of little benefit to them.
What the change might be threatening
David Rock’s SCARF model is a useful lens here, not because it’s a trust framework but because it names five things people are commonly sensitive to, and it helps with the part the definition of trust makes hardest: working out what the other person actually cares about when it isn’t obvious to you.
Status. Am I losing standing, expertise or the thing I was known for? Certainty. Do I understand what’s happening and what comes next? Autonomy. Do I have any choice or control in this? Relatedness. Am I still included, still part of the group? Fairness. Is this being applied evenly and reasonably?
Someone whose expertise in the old system was their standing in the team isn’t being difficult when they find fault with the new one. They are defending status, and their objections keep arriving as technical concerns because that is the form available to them. Address the technical concerns one by one and you’ll be there all year. See the status threat and there’s often a move: ask them to test the new system properly and to break it if they can, and the person with the most to lose becomes the person with the strongest claim on it.
Why top-down change struggles in particular
Trust is formed through the interactions and conversations people actually have. Scale that up and a problem appears: everyone holds a slightly different view of what matters and what’s reasonable, and those standards live inside the group rather than above it.
Change announced from the top gives people no room to work it through at their own level. Their experience of what is happening never meets the reasoning behind it, so the motive looks organisational rather than about them. The fix isn’t more communication in the same direction; it’s making room for the change to be adapted and argued at the level where people actually hold their standards.
The practical takeaway
Before you label anyone resistant, ask what this change threatens for them, and whether you could protect that thing while still moving forward. It’s a better question than “how do I get buy-in”, and it more often has an answer.
SCARF is David Rock’s model, widely used in practice; its neuroscience claims are debated and we treat it as a useful lens rather than as evidence. It sits underneath our definition of trust as a way of asking what someone may care about. It does not replace the five Trust Questions.