If you went to Loftus Road any time between the 1950s and the 1990s, you knew Daphne Biggs. She was secretary of the Supporters’ Club, she helped out as a commercial assistant, and if something needed doing at QPR, Daphne did it. Nobody appointed her a legend. She just became one, the way people do when they turn up for decades and quietly hold things together.

Her favourite song was Jeff Beck’s Hi Ho Silver Lining, and the club started playing it after every home win to recognise her contribution to the club. Daphne died in 2002, and it still gets played now, more than twenty years later, for a woman most of the crowd never met.

QPR are trying to change, and fair enough. They want the TikTok generation, the fans who discover a club through a two-minute clip rather than a Saturday afternoon on the terrace. So the kit launch became a hide-and-seek video with YouTube influencers running around the ground in the new shirts. A group of fans wrote a new matchday anthem. It was played once, booed off and quietly retired. And last weekend, someone decided Hi Ho Silver Lining should play before kick-off instead of after a win.

QPR lost.

I don’t think the song caused the result, obviously. But the decision to move it says something worth looking at, because “respect the old stuff” isn’t quite the lesson here.

Daphne’s song was never really about information. It didn’t tell you why the club does anything, the way “we sign contracts off twice because of what happened in 2009” tells you why a process exists. It’s identity, not procedure. It says, ‘This is who we are, this is who built the place, and this is who’s owed something.’

Its power also came from being rare and conditional. It only played after a win. That condition was the point. It’s what made hearing it mean something. Play it before kick-off as generic pre-match noise and you haven’t particularly offended anyone. You’ve just emptied it. The mistake wasn’t disrespect. It was treating a symbol like content.

The anthem tells a different story, and it’s worth not flattening the two together. It wasn’t imposed by suits who didn’t understand the fans. Fans wrote it themselves. But the club’s Supporters’ Advisory Board wasn’t informed, despite existing precisely to provide a route for supporter input.

There was some informal testing, but only on the day it was due to be played. The matchday DJ – an independent from the club – shared it for people to hear and was castigated. A separate supporters’ group heard it and advised against playing it. When the fans behind it put it on Twitter that day, the response was overwhelmingly critical.

It was played anyway. It was booed and will probably never be played again.

So the problem wasn’t outsiders versus insiders, whatever the temptation to read it that way. Nor was it simply a failure to test. The club had an advisory structure it didn’t use, received several warning signals through other routes and went ahead regardless. Good intentions and a fan-led origin were treated as sufficient legitimacy. They weren’t.

I see both versions of this regularly in organisations. Someone joins, sees how things are done, wants to change them and runs straight into resistance dressed up as “we’ve always done it this way”.

The mistake many change agents make is treating all of that resistance as the same thing. Some of it is protecting real knowledge, the reason a process exists even though nobody has written it down, and you cut it at your peril. Some of it is protecting identity and standing, the rituals and stories that make people feel they belong to something, and changing those needs an actual negotiation, not an announcement.

Confuse the two, and you’ll either preserve nonsense because it feels sacred or bulldoze something functional because it looks like tradition.

And don’t assume the source of a change tells you whether it will land. The anthem came from the fans, not management, and it still got booed off in a single evening. Legitimacy doesn’t come solely from where an idea started. It also depends on whether people were brought along, whether the routes created to involve them were actually used, and whether contrary evidence was taken seriously. A good idea introduced badly can fail as decisively as a bad one.

So if you’re the person walking into an organisation wanting to shift things, work out first which bits of resistance are protecting knowledge you don’t understand yet and which are protecting a sense of belonging you haven’t yet taken the time to understand.