People Don’t Resist Change, They Resist Being Changed

Most communicators assume that if people reject a message, they must not understand it. Lord David Evans argues the opposite. Backlash often isn’t confusion. It’s threat. When people feel insecure, unheard, or looked down on, they don’t lean in. They shut down. And in that moment, facts don’t persuade, values don’t inspire, and “better messaging” can make things worse.

In this episode Lord David Evans breaks down what political campaigning can teach PR professionals about trust, psychological safety, and why populist narratives spread so quickly. This isn’t about copying tactics. It’s about understanding what your audience needs before they will even give you permission to listen. 

Listen For

2:22 Who is Lord David Evans and why does his perspective matter right now?
3:54 Why is behaviour change almost never an information problem?
6:36 Why do people get drawn to extreme political movements?
10:36 Are politicians themselves fueling fear and insecurity?
12:48 Is social media pushing people into fight-or-flight mode?

Guest: Lord David Evans

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Doug

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Farzana

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Transcript

Emily Page (00:01):
People do not push back on change because they do not understand it. They push back when change threatens identity, trust, or a sense of control. One moment in music history shows how backlash often comes from a psychological threat, not misunderstanding.

Doug Downs (00:23):
In 1965, Bob Dylan walked onto the stage at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric guitar. Until that moment, Dylan was something very specific to his audience. He was acoustic. He was protest. He was tradition. He was theirs. And then he plugged in. The songs were louder. The band was electric and the crowd did not cheer. They booed. Not because they did not understand the music, they understood it perfectly. And that was the problem. Nothing about Dylan's talent had changed. His words were still sharp. His ideas were still his, but the meaning people had attached to him no longer felt safe. For many in the crowd, Dylan going electric felt like a loss. A loss of identity, a loss of control, a loss of something familiar that told them who they were. The backlash was not about sound, it was about threat. When people feel that something they trust is being taken away from them, they do not listen more closely.

(01:30):
 They retreat, they defend, they react. And that reaction often gets misread as ignorance or stubbornness or irrational anger. But often it is none of those things. It is fear. It is insecurity. It is the feeling that change is being done to them and not with them. That moment at Newport was not a rejection of change. It was a rejection of being changed. Today on Stories and Strategies, people do not resist change, they resist being changed.

(02:22):
 My name is Doug Downs.

Farzana Baduel (02:24):
And my name is Farzana Baduel. Our guest this week is no other than Lord David Evans joining us today from the House of Lords. Hi, David.

Lord David Evans of Watford (02:34):
Hi, hi. Great to be here.

Farzana Baduel (02:36):
We are so lucky to have you. You are a mastermind strategist and very well known in our world here in the UK. And so David is a political strategist. He is a peer in the House of Lords who served as general secretary of the UK Labour Party, helping reshape the party strategy and reconnect with key voters and bringing them into power. Now, you also now serve as senior adviser to the Progressive Policy Institute's project on the Centre Left Renewal, bringing decades of insight into behaviour, communication, and how to engage audiences across contexts. Your work focuses on why people react the way they do, how psychological safety shapes responses and how communicators can build trust rather than trigger resistance. And I just wanted to say that I was in Prague at a conference and David just blew away the audience. And so I just...

Lord David Evans of Watford (03:33):
Oh, you are too kind.

Farzana Baduel (03:34):
I just grabbed him afterwards and I said, "We have to have you on the show." So just starting off with lots of gratitude, David, for joining us today.

Emily Page (03:41):
It is a great pleasure.

Doug Downs (03:42):
It is amazing. And now my expectation levels are, they are way up here, right? So, okay. Well... And I have never talked with a Lord before, David, but you make it feel very, very, very natural.

Lord David Evans of Watford (03:54):
I will try and be noble. We try to be

Doug Downs (03:57):
Noble. I do, indeed. A lot of political and institutional messaging assumes that if people do not agree, they just do not have enough information. From your experience, why is behaviour change almost never an information problem?

Lord David Evans of Watford (04:17):
I first discovered this way back. It was 2006, and I was working in a London borough called Barking and Dagenham, which is a big working class suburb of London, and they elected 12 British National Party councillors. British National Party is a fascist party, absolutely explicitly. So I am not overegging that.

Farzana Baduel (04:44):
Yeah,

Lord David Evans of Watford (04:45):
It is right. And we were brought in to look at why this had happened and what could be done to address the threats, the genuine jeopardy that the prospect of a London borough, which is a population of about 300,000, actually electing a fascist run council. And we did lots of research talking to people and trying to understand why they had chosen to do this. And we started off with the presumption that what we needed to do was what is colloquially known here as myth busting, that it must be that they had got the wrong end of the stick. They did not really know what they were doing. It is just a case of giving them the right information and explaining it, and then the problem would go away. And not only did it not go away, but that approach exacerbated the problem and made it worse because we were implicitly calling people stupid because they had chosen to do, and they knew what they were doing.

(05:50):
 And what they were doing was expressing a deep, deep sense of insecurity, a profound narrative of loss. They were mourning the traditional working class community where people looked after each other and they felt that that was being threatened, their identity was being threatened. And so we realised right from then that we needed to get into rapport with people to earn the right to be heard. It was not a case of spouting information or telling them they were wrong or mad or bad. It was actually the first order of the day was to make sure we listened.

Farzana Baduel (06:36):
I learned an awful lot from you, David, when we had lunch, and we were talking about the rise of the extreme movements and people were drawn increasingly to these populist movements. And a lot of people dismissing them as they are misinformed or irrational or looking down upon them. That happened obviously in the US when you had Hillary Clinton who sort of referred to people as deplorables. That happens. Some would argue the sort of liberal elite here in London and Islington looking down upon working class voters for voting far left or far right. And what was really interesting is David really helped me understand that actually you have got to have compassion and empathy and understand that sometimes people are fearful. Sometimes there is an issue that there is a signal of unmet psychological needs. And I wanted David, you, to share that with Doug and our listeners, the insight that you gave me.

Lord David Evans of Watford (07:37):
Sure. My erstwhile colleague, John McTernan, who is a very good analyst, if you come across his work, he worked in Number 10 when Tony Blair was prime minister. John said that all politics is Maslowian. And I agree with him that Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which just in very simple terms, states that your first need, you need to feel safe and secure. And unless you can feel safe and secure, you cannot aspire. You cannot aspire. And unless you can aspire, you cannot learn more about yourself and strive towards a benevolent society. That is very, very crude shorthand for what we found was that many people for a variety of reasons, and it is not just as simple as economic poverty or social class, it is more complex than that. But the poorer you are, clearly, the more likely you are to feel unsafe and insecure. And if you can think to the last time you felt genuinely unsafe, it physically locks the brain down.

(08:56):
 You are in fight or flight mode. The parts of the brain that kind of take in information are locked down for very good reasons. And this is where I think communicators and professionals in politics, but also in any role, we often just make the mistake of not really reaching out and understanding where people are and what is their unmet psychological need and finding that and finding that as the basis, not to change our message or values or principles, but understand that we need to frame things in a way that will be received by somebody where they are. I think Einstein was misquoted as saying, when the facts do not fit our story, we change the facts, but that is what we all do. And if our story of the world and what is happening to us and why it is happening, if that principal unmet psychological need for, say, for me at the moment happens to be feeling unsafe, that will create a prism through which I will see the world.

(10:06):
 And if you start to communicate with me about, oh, let us create a benevolent society, I will tell you to get lost because it does not fit my story or how I am feeling. And so in politics, it is a case of understanding, first of all, and really devoting a lot to understanding that what that frame is, and then taking care to build that trust rapport by respecting that and respect is the word.

Doug Downs (10:36):
David, I love everything you just said, fits perfectly, but David, you work in politics. Are not politicians the ones pushing the insecurity and the fear?

Lord David Evans of Watford (10:52):
Yeah, politics is a fight. It is a fight. And at the moment, there is great jeopardy, I think, to mainstream politics, which is where I stand, and to our democracy, I am somewhat hesitant to use the word populist in terms of populist right, populist left. I think almost that word almost takes us into a place where we are being pejorative about anyone who might be taken in by a populist, what might be described as populist line when I think we have to take it on the chin, the mainstream... If people are choosing to go for other parties that are our own, the first responsibility is on us. It is not on the voters. The voters are always right.

(11:49):
 And so we need to really, really get that. But yeah, politics is one of the few disciplines where things are weaponised, where your opponents can explicitly say, "I want to do you in." And so you have to learn to operate under fire, not literal fire, but political fire. And in those circumstances, there are atrocities and these successes committed that I think degrade and contribute to the corrosion of trust. And there is lots of evidence to show that decline in trust. People now in the UK are certainly far less likely to always vote for the same party. And again, we have just got to take that on the chin. We cannot moan about that. We have created it by losing the connection with people and we need to get it back.

Farzana Baduel (12:48):
David, as we were discussing earlier about psychological safety and how people who are from low income backgrounds, they suffer more in terms of the lack of psychological safety. What about the information environment that we are now operating in? So when I was growing up in the UK, we had a couple of broadcast media, we had a few sort of newspapers, and now all of a sudden everything is completely changed. And my daughter's got all these TikTok and Snapchat, and I myself am swimming around in these social media sort of bubbles. And I feel myself, before I go to bed, I do not want to watch the news. I do not want to actually even build on social media because it interrupts my sleeping. And it just made me think, do you think that this new information ecosystem that we are now in contributes to that fight or flight mode where we are feeling psychologically insecure because of the way the algorithms are and they favour extreme content and then all of a sudden you lose perspective?

Lord David Evans of Watford (13:56):
I absolutely agree. I think they pour petrol on it and they get that insecurity in a way that maybe you rightly point out that mainstream politicians, mainstream politicians do not. There is a live debate at the moment in the UK about banning social media for under 16s. So I went back to my... I spoke at my old school two weeks ago, and they had just had a debate in the school where they had carried a motion to agree with the banning of social media for under 16s. And so this is kids voting. I am surprised. Yeah. Yeah. The motion carried. And I certainly feel that if I think back to my younger self, God, it was difficult enough. It felt like a zoo, me trying to find myself and worried about what my mates thought about me, what girls thought about me without social media. God, I cannot imagine how I would have coped

(15:03):
 Growing up. And I think it is... Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think we have to be careful about blaming too much on misinformation because again, it can imply that, look, gullible, stupid people believing that when actually we are capable of being just as gullible and stupid as they are. And so this kind of insight and awareness is self awareness as well about the flaws and how I have got a prism through which I see the world, which is not true. I am not sure if this will work, but when I introduce people and take people round, and Farzana and I met here, Doug, you would be most welcome if you come here. But I always tell them the story of Big Ben, and I ask people to look at the clock face and tell me what is wrong with it, and people stare at it and they cannot tell me what is wrong with it.

(16:10):
 What is wrong with it is that when the Palace of Westminster burned down in 1834, it was redesigned by somebody called Augustus Pugin who was a rather zealous Catholic convert. And for Augustus Pugin, the character X was the sign of the devil. So no clock anywhere in the Palace of Westminster has... And they are all Roman numeral clocks, none of them have an X. So if you may have seen Big Ben over the years, if you look at nine, 10, 11, and 12, you will see that there is no X, but a funny little F symbol. So I have all my life have been looking at Big Ben thinking I have been seeing it and I have not been seeing it. And we all make shortcuts because we are basically hardwired to be running around the forest hunter gathering and we are dealing with 35,000 messages or whatever it is every single day, getting faster and faster and faster, and we have to make shortcuts.

(17:12):
 And those shortcuts create our bias, our prejudice.

Doug Downs (17:16):
David, thank you so much. It was wonderful spending time with you today.

Lord David Evans of Watford (17:19):
Great pleasure.

Farzana Baduel (17:20):
Thank you for your insight. Here are the top three things we got today from Lord David Evans. Number one, lead with listening. People usually do not change because of more facts. They usually change when they feel heard and respected. Number two, fear shapes reception. When people feel unsafe, they filter everything through their insecurity before they can hear the message. And finally, number three, relevance beats judgement. The way in is not calling people wrong, but understanding what is driving them and speaking to that.

Doug Downs (18:05):
Just because the episode has ended does not mean the conversation has to. If you would like to send a message to our guest, Lord David Evans, we have got his contact information in the show notes. Stories and Strategies is a co production of Curzon Public Relations and Stories and Strategies Podcasts. If you like this episode, it would be great if you could leave us a rating, possibly a review. Thank you to producers, David Olajide and Emily Page. And lastly, do us a favour, forward this episode to one friend. Thanks for listening.