Corporate transformations rarely fail because executives are unable to describe the destination. The strategic case may be persuasive, the programme may have formal sponsorship and the necessary investment may have been approved. Yet implementation often proceeds more slowly than expected. Decisions remain open, resources are not released on time and operating units continue to follow established routines while formally supporting the new direction.
These difficulties are usually described as resistance to change. The expression is convenient, but it can obscure more than it explains. It places the problem within the attitudes of employees and encourages leaders to respond with more communication, training or visible sponsorship. Those measures may be necessary, but they are unlikely to resolve a conflict concerning authority, professional status, access to information or control over resources.
Transformation changes more than structures and processes. It also changes the position of people within the organisation. Some gain access, visibility or decision-making authority, while others lose autonomy, influence or the scarcity value of their expertise.
The relevant question for a chief executive is therefore not only whether employees understand the transformation. It is also whether the leadership understands how the transformation will alter the organisation's existing distribution of power.
The gap between strategic ambition and organisational experience
Recent studies describe a widening gap between the ambition to transform and the organisation's capacity to absorb change. PwC's 2026 workforce analysis reports that employees are experiencing continuing uncertainty, fatigue and uneven confidence in their skills, while companies are increasing the pace of reinvention. The report argues that performance depends on aligning strategy, skills and trust rather than treating workforce adaptation as a consequence that can be managed after the principal decisions have been made.
This gap is particularly visible in technology programmes. Companies frequently make substantial investments before redesigning the work, responsibilities and career paths affected by the technology. BCG estimates that only about 5 per cent of organisations in its global AI maturity study have obtained substantial financial gains from artificial intelligence. Its interpretation is not that the technology is ineffective, but that value depends mainly on changes to people, skills, workflows and the operating model.
The same problem exists in transformations that have little to do with artificial intelligence. A centralisation programme may be technically well designed but still fail to account for the local relationships that allow work to proceed. A new performance system may introduce greater transparency while removing the discretion that managers previously used to solve customer problems. A reorganisation may clarify reporting lines without resolving the cross-functional dependencies on which execution depends.
In each case, the formal transformation is only part of the change. The other part concerns the organisation's practical arrangements: who can decide, who must be consulted, who controls essential information and whose cooperation is required when formal procedures are insufficient.
Transformation changes the distribution of power
Power in organisations is often associated with hierarchy, budgets and formal decision rights. These are important, but they do not provide a complete account of how influence operates. A senior executive may have the authority to approve a transformation without possessing all the relationships, knowledge and operational resources required to implement it.
Michel Crozier and Erhard Friedberg offered a useful way to understand this distinction. In their analysis, organisations are not governed solely by formal structures. They also operate through what they called a "concrete system of action": a set of practical relationships and negotiated arrangements through which people coordinate their work. Power develops around areas of uncertainty. An individual or group gains influence when others depend on its expertise, external relationships, access to information or ability to interpret organisational rules.
This helps explain why relatively junior employees can sometimes exercise considerable influence over a transformation. An experienced specialist may know how to manage exceptions that are absent from the official process. A commercial manager may control relationships with important customers. A technical team may be the only group able to assess the risks of a proposed migration. An assistant or project coordinator may occupy a central position in the informal flow of information. None of these actors necessarily has formal authority over the programme, but each may affect its speed and credibility.
John French and Bertram Raven's classification of social power adds another dimension. Their original framework distinguishes power derived from a legitimate position, the ability to reward, the ability to impose consequences, recognised expertise and identification with a respected person or group. The implication for transformation is straightforward: a chief executive may possess legitimate authority, while an expert possesses credibility and a respected manager commands the confidence of the workforce. Formal approval does not automatically replace these other sources of influence.
Anticipated losses shape organisational behaviour
Executives normally present transformation in terms of collective benefits. The organisation will become more efficient, more integrated, more responsive or better able to grow. These benefits may be genuine, but individuals also evaluate change from the perspective of their own responsibilities and professional future.
The losses they anticipate are not limited to employment or compensation. A manager may expect to lose discretion because decisions will be centralised or made through a common system. An expert may see specialist knowledge converted into a standard process and made available to a wider group. A corporate function may lose ownership of data that gave it a privileged role in important decisions. An operating unit may be required to abandon practices that supported its independence. Employees may also face a less visible loss if the transformation weakens the professional identity on which their confidence and status were built.
Research from MIT on early corporate experiments with generative AI provides a useful illustration. The researchers found that some applications created resistance when they intervened in tasks that employees valued and from which they derived professional meaning. Applications aimed at removing recognised bottlenecks were more likely to align the interests of the company and its employees. The study also cautions that reducing reliance on colleagues can weaken mentorship, collective learning and trust, even where an individual can perform a task more efficiently with technological assistance.
This does not mean that leaders should preserve every role, routine or source of influence. It means that resistance can be rational from the position of the person who expects to lose something important. Understanding that position allows the leadership to distinguish between concerns that require a design response, interests that require negotiation and attempts to preserve an arrangement that no longer serves the company.
How resistance affects execution
Direct opposition is only one form of resistance and is often the easiest to address. An explicit disagreement can be examined, tested against evidence and decided through the appropriate governance. More consequential resistance may remain within the accepted language and procedures of the organisation.
A business unit can support the programme while assigning its strongest people elsewhere. A function can request additional analysis before releasing information or approving a decision. Managers can emphasise exceptions until the general model appears unworkable. Teams can comply with the new process while maintaining the old one in parallel. Stakeholders may also wait for senior management's attention to move to another priority, particularly if previous transformation programmes have lost momentum in this way.
These behaviours should not automatically be interpreted as deliberate obstruction. They may reflect genuine operational risks, unclear priorities or insufficient capacity. Their cumulative effect, however, is to keep the previous system in place. The programme remains important in formal presentations while becoming secondary in the allocation of time, information and resources.
McKinsey's State of Organizations 2026 illustrates the scale of this problem. While 56 per cent of executives surveyed said they were clear about their organisations' most important priorities, the proportion fell to 44 per cent among senior managers and 27 per cent among middle managers. Only 30 per cent of organisations reported reallocating resources across the enterprise. Among the barriers to reallocation, 41 per cent of respondents cited resistance and managerial protectionism.
These findings suggest that execution problems cannot always be corrected through clearer corporate messages. People may understand the stated priorities while continuing to protect the resources, responsibilities and relationships for which they remain accountable. Jeffrey Pfeffer's work on organisational power is relevant here: a decision has little practical effect until leaders have assembled the political support and resources required to change behaviour.
Implementation is not separate from power; it is one of the ways in which power becomes visible.
Resistance can improve the transformation
Treating all resistance as a problem creates two risks. The first is that management may suppress information it needs. The second is that legitimate concerns become expressed indirectly because employees conclude that open disagreement is unsafe or ineffective.
Opposition can reveal an underestimated customer dependency, a regulatory constraint or a weakness in the proposed operating model. It may identify knowledge that will still be required after automation or centralisation. It can also show that incentives remain attached to the old model, leaving managers responsible for outcomes they can no longer control. In these situations, resistance performs a useful diagnostic function.
This does not make every objection equally valuable. Leaders need to distinguish among evidence that improves the design, professional concerns that require a transition plan, negotiations intended to protect a reasonable degree of autonomy and efforts to preserve private advantages at the expense of the enterprise. The distinction depends less on the tone of the objection than on the quality of the evidence, the interests involved and the consequences for the organisation as a whole.
The practical value of dissent also depends on the leadership's response. If critics are excluded too quickly, informal opposition may become stronger and less visible. If every objection produces a delay, the organisation teaches stakeholders that resistance is an effective way to avoid change. A credible transformation therefore requires both openness to challenge and a clear point at which evidence has been considered, a decision has been made and accountability begins.
The political diagnosis a chief executive needs
A conventional stakeholder analysis classifies people according to their interest in a programme and their formal influence over it. That is a useful starting point, but it is insufficient for a major transformation. The chief executive needs a more detailed view of how the organisation functions in practice.
The first element is a power map. For each important stakeholder, the leadership should assess formal authority, control over critical resources, specialist knowledge, network position and the willingness to use these sources of influence. Potential power and exercised power are not the same. A highly placed sponsor who rarely intervenes may matter less to implementation than a respected operational manager who shapes how several teams interpret the programme.
The second element is an analysis of anticipated gains and losses. This should examine changes in status, autonomy, resources, access, expertise and career prospects. The purpose is not to compensate every loss. It is to identify where the transformation creates a predictable incentive to delay, where a capability may be unintentionally destroyed and where an explicit negotiation is preferable to an unresolved conflict.
The third element is a coalition map. Formal sponsors should be distinguished from active allies, credible messengers, undecided stakeholders and actors capable of coordinating opposition. A transformation does not require unanimous enthusiasm, but it does require a coalition with enough authority, expertise and organisational trust to make the new model operational.
The fourth element is a map of informal networks. Leaders should know whom employees consult when official information is incomplete, who can secure an exception, who connects otherwise separate units and whose judgement is trusted during uncertainty. These relationships often explain why the same message produces different responses across the organisation.
Together, these four perspectives offer a more realistic assessment than a simple list of supporters and opponents. They show where the transformation depends on cooperation, where interests are misaligned and where the organisation's formal governance differs from its actual decision process.
Reducing resistance requires more than stronger communication
When implementation slows, management often increases the forces supporting change. It adds targets, reporting, executive messages and programme controls. Kurt Lewin's analysis of force fields suggests another possibility. Change can also be enabled by reducing the forces that hold the existing equilibrium in place.
In practice, this may require clarifying decision rights, changing incentives, protecting a critical field of expertise or creating a credible career path for people whose roles will be substantially altered. It may require opening access to information that was previously controlled by one function. In other cases, it may be necessary to remove an informal veto or to make explicit that continued delay will have consequences.
Readiness for change is therefore more demanding than general support for the strategic objective. Achilles Armenakis and his colleagues defined readiness through the beliefs, attitudes and intentions of organisational members. Their work, and its later development, identifies several questions that employees need to resolve: whether change is necessary, whether the proposed response is appropriate, whether the organisation can implement it, whether leaders will provide sustained support and what the change means personally for those affected.
Communication can contribute to each of these conditions, but it cannot create them on its own. Employees will judge leadership support through resource decisions and management behaviour. They will assess feasibility through the quality of implementation. They will infer personal consequences from changes to roles, incentives and career opportunities. Where these signals contradict the official message, the practical signals usually have greater influence.
Treating power as part of execution
Power and interests are not secondary complications that appear after a transformation has been designed. They are part of the system through which the transformation will be implemented.
Ignoring them does not make the programme less political; it simply leaves the political dimension unmanaged.
For the chief executive, the objective is not to eliminate disagreement or to satisfy every stakeholder. It is to understand the dependencies on which execution rests, preserve the capabilities the future organisation will need and make the necessary conflicts explicit. Some losses can be reduced, some should be negotiated and others are an unavoidable consequence of changing the company's direction.
The central leadership task is therefore to connect the formal design of the transformation with the organisation's actual distribution of authority, information, expertise and trust. A programme is more likely to progress when leaders understand not only where the company intends to go, but also how the proposed destination changes the position of those whose cooperation will determine whether it arrives.
Selected references
- Achilles A. Armenakis, Stanley G. Harris and Kevin W. Mossholder, "Creating Readiness for Organizational Change", Human Relations, 1993.
- Boston Consulting Group, AI Transformation Is a Workforce Transformation, 2026.
- Michel Crozier and Erhard Friedberg, L'acteur et le système, Éditions du Seuil, 1977.
- Deloitte, 2026 Global Human Capital Trends, 2026.
- John R. P. French Jr. and Bertram Raven, "The Bases of Social Power", 1959.
- Kurt Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science, 1951.
- McKinsey & Company, The State of Organizations 2026, 2026.
- MIT Working Group on Generative AI and the Work of the Future, Humans in the Loop: The Evolution of Work in Early Experiments with Generative AI, 2026.
- Jeffrey Pfeffer, Managing with Power: Politics and Influence in Organizations, Harvard Business School Press, 1992.
- PwC, Leading Through Uncertainty: AI's Impact on the Workforce, 2026.