The Kübler-Ross model works for grief. It also works for your rollout.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Most people know the Kübler-Ross model from grief, five stages someone moves through after a major loss. Fewer people realize it maps almost perfectly onto how teams respond to a big change at work, including the kind of rollout you're probably running right now.

That's not a coincidence. A significant change at work is a loss, of the old process, the old way of being competent, sometimes the old sense of job security. People grieve it, even when the change is a good one.

Denial

"This probably won't actually happen" or "this doesn't really apply to my team." Denial shows up as quiet non-participation. People aren't fighting the change, they're just not engaging with it, because some part of them is betting it'll blow over.

The instinct here is to push harder with information. More emails, more detail, more proof it's real. That rarely works, because denial isn't a knowledge gap. Repetition and patience move it faster than volume does.

Anger

Once it's clear the change is real, denial often turns into anger. This is where you hear "nobody asked us" or "this is going to make everything worse." It can feel personal, and it's tempting to treat it as a discipline problem.

It isn't. Anger is usually a sign that people feel like something is being done to them instead of with them. The people who get loudest here are often the ones who care the most about doing their job well. Worth remembering before writing them off.

Bargaining

"Can we just keep the old system for this one part?" or "what if we only use the new process for new projects?" Bargaining is an attempt to control the shape of a loss instead of just enduring it.

Some bargaining is worth accommodating. A reasonable exception can build trust. But bargaining without limits turns into a change that never actually lands, so this is the stage where a clear, calmly held line matters most.

Depression

Not clinical depression, but a real dip. Motivation drops. People feel behind, unsure, sometimes a little embarrassed that something new is harder than the thing they used to be good at. This stage often gets misread as failure, either the rollout's or the person's.

It's neither. It's the normal cost of getting worse at something before you get better at it. Naming that out loud, this part is supposed to feel hard, does more than any pep talk.

Acceptance

Eventually, most people arrive here. Not necessarily loving the change, but working with it instead of around it. The mistake is assuming this is where the rollout ends. Acceptance is often quiet, and quiet gets mistaken for finished. It's really just the point where reinforcement starts to matter more than persuasion.

The bottom line

Not everyone moves through these stages in order, and not everyone moves through them at the same speed. Some people skip straight to acceptance. Some get stuck in anger for months. But if you're running a rollout and wondering why the resistance doesn't seem rational, it's worth checking which stage you're actually looking at. The tactics that work for anger don't work for denial, and the tactics that work for bargaining will backfire in depression.

Grief has a shape. So does change. Once you can see the shape, the resistance stops looking like a problem with your rollout and starts looking like exactly what it is. People, doing what people do when something they relied on goes away.

Happy Learning,

KP