Breaking Plates

Embracing the new requires a willingness to throw out the old.

There is a telling moment in almost every AI engagement I take on. The executive team has signed off on the initiative, the tools have been licensed, the kickoff presentation is done, and everyone is nodding. Then someone asks the question that reveals everything: “So how do we implement this without upsetting people or disrupting what’s already working?”

That is the moment I know how hard the next several months will be. The culture and, specifically, the stakeholders’ politics will force, at best, a tedious evolution, at worst, a failed project.

Of course, change requires working with and acknowledging objections. At the same time, completely caving to those same voices of dissent is usually the fastest way to tank a new AI project. Project champions and owners need to be honest with themselves before the initiative launches: There will be headwinds. Old methods will break, and some team members will be vociferous in their dissatisfaction.

The Comfortable Lie

Organizations are remarkably good at telling themselves they want to change. They fund the initiative, they attend the workshops, they post the all-hands recording to the intranet. They use words like transformation, disruption, and innovation.

In the same breath, they use these words to explain why the existing approval process cannot be altered, why the legacy platform must stay, and why the team that has always owned that function must still own it. This is not cynicism. It is a pattern so consistent across industries and organization sizes that at some point you have to call it what it is: A collective agreement to pursue the appearance of transformation without accepting its actual cost.

The tools get licensed. The workflows stay intact. The culture absorbs the initiative and continues as before, slightly more expensive and slightly more exhausted.

In Now Is Gone, I argue that failures and pain create the conditions for genuine willingness. Regardless of the catalyst that spurs genuine willingness to forge a new path, a surrender must occur. Only then are stakeholders willing to look at completely new methods. Brené Brown addresses this directly in Strong Ground, arguing that genuine transformation requires destabilization before it can produce anything solid.

You cannot build a stable foundation on top of a process, structure, or business strategy that needs to come down.

The discomfort of the surrender is not a signal that something has gone wrong. It is the signal that something real is finally happening. Most organizations experience discomfort and interpret it as a warning, pull back, and recommit to the old approach with some new vocabulary layered on top. Or worse, they force the old process onto the new technology solution. Is it any wonder why the outcomes do not change?

We Have Seen This Before

This is not an AI problem. It is a technology adoption problem that has recurred with every significant platform shift over the past three decades. The pattern looks like this:

• The internet arrived, and companies built websites while their sales organizations kept doing exactly what they had always done, because the website was additive and changing how you sell required examining how you sell.

• Social media arrived, and brands hired community managers and gave them neither the authority nor the budget to do anything that might actually matter, because the real decisions were still being made by people who did not understand or trust the new environment.

• Mobile arrived, and enterprises treated it as a miniaturized version of the desktop experience rather than a fundamentally different relationship between a brand and a customer.

• AI has arrived, and organizations are licensing tools their employees are quietly afraid of, for workflows their managers have no intention of redesigning, and measuring against goals designed for a different way of working entirely, if they measure at all.

The tool adoption statistics look impressive in every cycle. The transformation outcomes never match them, because tool adoption and transformation are not the same thing, and the difference is exactly what nobody wants to talk about in the kickoff meeting.

What Actually Has to Change

The fixed idea is almost never about the tool. It is about identity. The organization that built its competitive advantage on a particular skill, a particular relationship model, a particular way of making decisions, has an enormous amount invested in the continued validity of that approach. This is unfortunate because it is a failure to understand that their value is in producing a business outcome, not any specific method.

The people who gained prominence through that model have the most to lose from its obsolescence, and they are often the ones with the most power over whether change actually happens. And they have the most to gain by evolving, or even better, transforming that model to produce an even better result. They have the magic in the bottle.

Ironically, asking them to break the old model is asking them to dismantle the evidence that they were right. Because they have so much of their persona and perceived value vested in that method, changing it is a different and harder ask than installing new software. But over the long haul, that vested persona is an anchor holding them back from navigating what comes next.

I remember one project where we needed to move applications to a new login method for security purposes. Several app owners objected, preferring older password-based authentication methods. Unfortunately, the project champion did not have authority over them, and the next-level executive did not want to incur negative feedback despite the resulting costs and risks. The resulting political pushback delayed adoption by two years.

The pivot moment in any genuine transformation is not when the tools get deployed. It is when someone in a position of authority says, out loud, that the old way is no longer working, and means it, and is willing to accept the consequences of that admission. Until that moment, everything else is performance. The initiative will run. The dashboard will get built. The results will be explained away. And in eighteen months, there will be a new initiative.

Think Liquid, Not Rigid

Think liquid, the core concept of change in Now Is Gone, means following the path toward your actual goal, not defending the route you originally mapped. You cannot think in liquid terms if you are still pretending the original route is working, or if the people with authority over the decision have too much of their identity invested in its continued validity.

The organizations I have seen actually transform in this era share a quality that has nothing to do with the sophistication of their technology stack. They were willing to look directly at what was not working and name it, to take an honest inventory of their actual situation rather than the situation they wished they were in, and accept that moving forward required giving something up.

Some processes that felt permanent had to end. Some people who defined themselves by the old approach had to find a different definition, or leave, or both.

Brown’s framing is useful here precisely because she refuses to make transformation sound inspiring. It is sometimes that, but it is also genuinely destabilizing, and that destabilization is not a side effect that can be managed away with good change management communications.

Some plates are going to break. The question is whether you break them deliberately, with a clear understanding of why the old structure has to go, or whether you wait until they fall off the shelf on their own.

The pain of breaking the old model deliberately is real, and it is finite. The pain of refusing to examine it compounds quietly until it isn’t quiet anymore. The path forward opens when you stop waiting for it to hurt less.