This article was originally published on LinkedIn. It has been reposted here with Penri's permission.

In the gleaming boardrooms of global enterprises, CEOs confidently announce their latest digital transformation initiatives to enthusiastic nods from their executive teams. Bold vision statements are crafted. Eye-watering technology budgets are approved. Optimistic sizzle videos are produced. Press releases trumpet the dawn of a new era.

And then, twelve months later, nothing has fundamentally changed except the balance of your technology vendor's bank account.

If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. According to McKinsey, 70% of digital transformations fail, with that figure rising to a staggering 84% for AI initiatives. The explanation typically offered is some combination of "technology challenges," "skill gaps," or that meaningless corporate catchall: "cultural resistance."

But after years of guiding organisations through these transformations at large holding groups and more recently at Arloesi, I've observed a more specific—and far more insidious—force undermining change: a multi-layered resistance network that masquerades as diligence, prudence, and quality control. Think of it as your organization's immune system identifying AI as a foreign body and mobilizing antibodies to quietly kill it while sending "We're making progress!" signals to the brain.

The Resistance Pyramid: It's Not Just Middle Management

While middle managers form the backbone of this resistance, they're merely the most visible layer of a more complex ecosystem of change prevention:

The Executive Enablers

At the top sit executives who publicly champion transformation while privately protecting the status quo. The CMO who spent 30 years mastering traditional marketing frameworks enthusiastically talks about AI-driven personalization in board meetings—then ensures 80% of the budget still flows to familiar channels and partners.

These leaders don't actively sabotage change; they simply fail to create consequences for those who do. They approve transformation initiatives with one hand while signing off on contradictory KPIs with the other. Their resistance is passive but powerful: "We're committed to transformation, but we can't risk disrupting our Q3 results."

The Middle Management Blockers

The middle layer—directors, senior managers, and team leaders—forms the most active resistance. These are the people whose identities, status, and livelihoods are most directly threatened by transformation.

Consider Karen, the agency's production director who built a twenty-year career on global production knowledge, airline status, and relationships with directors in every major market. The AI that can generate storyboards, pre-visualise shots, and eliminate the need for multiple on-location shoots doesn't just threaten her job—it invalidates her entire professional identity. It transforms her LinkedIn profile from "Global Production Expert" to "Girl Who Used to Fly Business Class to Supervise Shoots That Computers Now Do Better."

Or take Mike, the brand manager whose value has always been measured by headcount and agency relationships. When AI tools enable his team to produce ten times the output with half the people and fewer agency partners, what happens to his status, influence, and compensation? Suddenly Mike's empire of 30 direct reports and 5 agency relationships becomes a highly efficient team of 10 working with automation tools, and his budget shrinks accordingly. Is he going to enthusiastically embrace that future? Or quietly ensure it never arrives?

The Specialist Underminers

At the base are the specialists and individual contributors whose narrowly-defined expertise is threatened by AI. The master retoucher who spent decades perfecting their craft. The copywriter who prides themselves on finding just the right turn of phrase. The media planner who "just knows" which placements will work.

These specialists undermine new tools by highlighting edge cases where AI "just doesn't get it right." They create a narrative of technology's limitations that percolates upward, giving managers the ammunition to resist broader implementation.

In agencies, this often manifests as the "craft" argument—the notion that human creativity is somehow mystically superior to algorithmic outputs. In brands, it appears as concerns about "brand DNA" and "emotional resonance" that supposedly can't be quantified or automated.

The Passive-Aggressive Resistance Playbook: A Bingo Card of Bureaucratic Brilliance

What makes this resistance so effective is its plausible deniability. Unlike open revolt (career suicide in most organisations), resistance operates through subtle tactics that masquerade as diligence, caution, or process adherence. If you've sat through a transformation meeting lately, you might recognize some of these classics:

1. The Death of a Thousand Requirements

How it sounds: "Before we implement this, we need to ensure it integrates with seventeen legacy systems, complies with policies written in 2007, and addresses every edge case our team has encountered since 1998."

What's really happening: Transforming exciting innovation into a bureaucratic nightmare, ensuring that by the time all requirements are met (if ever), the technology is obsolete and enthusiasm has evaporated faster than budget in Q4.

Brand-specific version: "We need this AI to understand all our brand guidelines, including the unwritten ones that only our creative director intuitively knows."

Agency-specific version: "This tool needs to integrate with our proprietary process that justifies our margins."

2. The Committee Shield

How it sounds: "We should form a cross-functional committee to evaluate this initiative."

What's really happening: Creating a black hole where good ideas go to die. Committees dilute accountability, slow decision-making to glacial speeds, and provide perfect cover for those quietly undermining progress. They create an illusion of action while ensuring nothing actually happens, like a corporate version of a hamster wheel.

Classic Committee Meeting Dialogue:

"Okay team, we're here to discuss AI implementation. Who wants to start?"

"I think we should establish a subcommittee to define our AI governance framework first."

"Great idea. We'll need representation from legal, compliance, IT, and each business unit."

"And we should create evaluation criteria before proceeding."

"Perfect. Let's schedule a follow-up in six weeks when everyone's calendars align."

[AI Implementation: Delayed by 6 months without anyone explicitly opposing it]

3. The Pilot Purgatory

How it sounds: "Let's run a small pilot first to validate the approach. We need to be methodical."

What's really happening: Creating an infinite loop of testing. The pilot never ends because the success criteria keep shifting like goalposts on wheels. Each test reveals "concerns" requiring further investigation, creating a perpetual cycle of evaluation without implementation. It's the corporate equivalent of "We'll get to it next year" for five years straight.

Brand-specific twist: "We ran a pilot in Montenegro, but that market is too small to be conclusive. Let's try Luxembourg next."

Agency-specific twist: "The pilot worked for this client, but our other clients are different. We need to test with each one individually."

4. The Budget Squeeze

How it sounds: "We fully support this initiative but need to ensure ROI before additional investment."

What's really happening: Starving transformative projects of adequate resources, guaranteeing they'll underperform. It's like telling someone to build a skyscraper but only giving them enough materials for a garden shed, then declaring construction doesn't work when the shed isn't 50 stories tall. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy they can point to later: "See? We tried AI and it didn't work for us."

5. The Silent Skill Embargo

How it sounds: "We'll need specialized training before we can use these new tools effectively."

What's really happening: Indefinitely delaying adoption while appearing supportive. The training is always somehow inadequate, the specialists too few, the learning curve mysteriously too steep. Meanwhile, that same manager who claims AI tools are "too complex" for their team somehow manages to master fantasy football algorithms or TikTok's ever-changing features over a weekend.

6. The Compliance Concern

How it sounds: "I'm not convinced this meets our regulatory/security/privacy requirements."

What's really happening: Weaponizing legitimate concerns, elevating manageable issues into insurmountable obstacles without explicitly opposing the initiative. GDPR and data privacy suddenly become fascinating topics to people who previously couldn't spell GDPR if you spotted them the G, D, P, and R.

Agency-specific version: "Our clients have strict data policies that might not allow this."

Brand-specific version: "Legal needs to review this, and they're currently backed up through next fiscal year."

7. The Alternative Distraction

How it sounds: "Instead of this approach, we should consider this other solution that my brother-in-law mentioned at dinner last week..."

What's really happening: Continuously redirecting attention to other technologies, methodologies, or vendors, ensuring nothing gains enough traction to threaten the status quo. It's organizational ADD, deliberately induced to prevent change from taking root.

The Commercial Model Resistance

Beyond individual tactics lies an even more fundamental barrier: the commercial models that structurally resist transformation.

Agency Billing Structures: When your entire revenue model is based on human hours, tools that reduce those hours are existentially threatening. For agencies billing on FTE models or hourly rates, efficiency is the enemy of income. This creates a bizarre reality where agencies publicly promote efficiency while their financial structures incentivise inefficiency at every level.

Brand Procurement Models: Similarly, brand procurement teams evaluate agency performance on input metrics (hours, resources, deliverables) rather than outcomes. They negotiate for more human hours at lower rates rather than better results with fewer hours, inadvertently reinforcing outdated production models.

This creates a perverse ecosystem where:

• Agencies can't afford to implement technologies that would make them more efficient

• Brands won't pay for outcomes that would cost less but deliver more

• Everyone talks about transformation while their commercial agreements make it impossible

Agency-Client Dialogue That Kills Innovation:

Agency: "We've developed an AI tool that could reduce production costs by 70% while increasing personalization."

Brand: "Sounds great! So our retainer should go down by 70%, right?"

Agency: "Well, no... we've invested heavily in this technology to improve outcomes..."

Brand: "But you're doing less work, so we should pay less."

Agency: [Quietly shelves the innovation and goes back to staffing projects with junior employees]

The Middle Management Resistance Persona Gallery

If you're implementing transformation, you've likely encountered these characters:

The Process Enforcer: Worships at the altar of "how we've always done it." Can recite company policies from memory but somehow can't remember to unmute on Zoom calls. Primary weapon: "That's not how our process works."

The Eternal Skeptic: Has seen initiatives come and go and believes cynicism equals intelligence. Begins 90% of sentences with "The challenge with that is..." Never offers solutions, only "pragmatic concerns." Would question the ROI of oxygen if breathing became a strategic initiative.

The Timeline Stretcher: A master of the impossible calendar. Can make scheduling a single meeting take longer than building the actual technology. "I'm booked solid until March" is their battle cry, even in April.

The Resource Hoarder: Treats budget and headcount like Gollum treated the ring. "We just don't have the resources" is their mantra, while simultaneously finding budget for office renovations and team-building retreats at vineyard resorts.

The Creative Purist: Unique to agencies, this persona invokes "the sanctity of creativity" to resist anything that systematises or scales creative work. Uses phrases like "the human touch" and "the magic of creativity" while conveniently ignoring the fact that 90% of their team's output is variations on existing templates.

The Brand Guardian: The brand-side counterpart to the Creative Purist, this character treats brand guidelines like religious texts, using "brand consistency" as a shield against automation. Conveniently forgets that their brand imagery is already produced by outsourced farms of designers following rigid rules that could easily be automated.

The Wrong People Making the Right Decisions

A critical factor in failed transformations is placing the wrong people in charge of the very changes that threaten their status.

Consider the typical scenario: Who gets put in charge of implementing AI content production tools? Usually the head of content production—the very person whose empire, expertise, and identity are most threatened by the new technology. It's like asking travel agents to create Airbnb.

This is the innovator's dilemma at a personal level: Those who succeeded in the old system are the least motivated to dismantle it, no matter how necessary that dismantling might be for the organisation's future.

The right-casting challenge becomes evident:

• The production director who manages 100 artists isn't the right person to lead a transition to AI-generated imagery

• The CMO who built their career on TV campaigns isn't the right person to lead a shift to algorithmic marketing

• The agency exec whose bonus depends on staff utilization isn't the right person to champion automation

Yet these are precisely the people typically charged with transformation, creating a fundamental misalignment between personal and organizational interests. The solution isn't vilifying these leaders—it's recognizing the inherent conflict and adjusting governance accordingly.

The Real-World Impact

Last year, we worked with a global CPG brand implementing an AI-powered content automation system. The technology worked flawlessly in tests, producing content variations in seconds that previously took days. Executive sponsors were thrilled. The pilot team was energized.

But six months later, adoption remained below 15%.

When we investigated, we discovered multiple middle managers had effectively created parallel workflows—allowing the official AI project to proceed while ensuring their teams still produced content "the traditional way" as a "backup." They cited vague "quality concerns" despite metrics showing the AI-generated content performed better in market tests.

The result? Duplicated effort, wasted resources, and a transformation that existed on paper but not in practice—like a corporate version of "The Emperor's New Clothes" where everyone pretends to see the magnificent new process while secretly clinging to the old one.

In another case, a media agency's leadership committed to an AI-driven media optimization platform. Three directors who had built their reputations on manual optimization expertise didn't openly oppose the initiative—they simply ensured their teams stayed "too busy" with existing work to fully engage with the new system, created impossibly high expectations for the AI's performance, and maintained manual processes as "verification" of the AI's outputs.

The platform was eventually abandoned as "not ready for our specific needs"—a narrative crafted not by those who built the technology but by those who felt threatened by it. Mission accomplished: careers protected, transformation buried, and nobody could be directly blamed for the failure.

The Ecosystem Effect: How Resistance Cascades

Perhaps most insidiously, resistance cascades throughout the marketing ecosystem, creating interconnected barriers:

• When brands resist transformation, their agencies can't evolve (because client demands dictate agency capabilities)

• When agencies resist transformation, their production partners can't advance (because agency briefs dictate production methods)

• When production partners resist transformation, technology providers can't gain traction (because adoption requires production buy-in)

This creates a gridlock where everyone waits for someone else to change first, resulting in an ecosystem frozen in time while technology races forward. Each player points to another as the source of inertia, creating a perfect circular firing squad of blame that preserves the status quo.

Why Traditional Change Management Fails (Or: Why Your "Digital Transformation Roadshow" with Free Donuts Isn't Cutting It)

Traditional change management approaches often miss these dynamics entirely. They focus on executive sponsorship, communication plans, and training programs—all necessary but insufficient. It's like bringing a marketing brochure to a knife fight.

They fail to address the fundamental realities:

• For many middle managers, successful transformation means personal obsolescence

• For agencies, true efficiency requires cannibalization of current revenue streams

• For brands, maximizing value means restructuring decades-old vendor relationships

• For the entire ecosystem, transformation requires dismantling familiar power structures

No amount of inspiring town halls, digital upskilling workshops, or transformation coffee mugs will convince someone to enthusiastically participate in rendering their expertise irrelevant or their business model obsolete.

The rational response, particularly for those with mortgages, college tuitions, and two decades invested in current ways of working, is resistance.

And since open opposition would be career suicide, that resistance goes underground—manifesting as procedural delays, endless requests for verification, and compliance concerns rather than outright refusal. It's not sabotage; it's just being "thorough" and "diligent."

The Unofficial Guide to Killing Transformation (If You're Reading This to Take Notes, We See You)

For educational purposes only, here's how veteran resistors quietly ensure technology initiatives fail while maintaining plausible deniability:

1. Never say no

   – Instead, say "yes, but..." followed by seventeen contingencies that would require the alignment of all planets in the solar system.

2. Create parallel systems

   – Maintain old processes alongside new ones "just until we're confident," ensuring the old never dies.

3. Redefine success

   – When the initiative achieves its original goals, explain that "we've evolved our thinking" about what success looks like.

4. Weaponize complexity

   – Make implementation seem so technically intricate that only your team could possibly understand it, then claim your team lacks bandwidth.

5. Invoke the spectre of past failures

   – "Remember Project Phoenix in 2018?" becomes a powerful incantation to raise doubts about any new initiative.

6. Use selective data

   – Cherry-pick metrics that support your narrative while ignoring the dashboard of successes.

7. Master the art of enthusiastic inaction

   – Be the loudest supporter in meetings while doing absolutely nothing afterwards.

8. Agency-specific tactic: Invoke the client shield

   – "Our clients would never accept this approach" becomes an unanswerable objection since clients aren't in the room.

9. Brand-specific tactic: Demand perfect certainty

   – Require proofs of success that no innovation could possibly provide in advance.

If you found yourself nodding along while reading this list...congratulations, you're part of the problem! (But don't worry, your secret is safe with me and the other few thousand people reading this article).

Breaking Through the Blockade

So how do forward-thinking organizations overcome this multi-layered resistance? Based on our work with clients who've successfully navigated these challenges, several approaches stand out:

1. Acknowledge the Threats and Conflicts

Stop pretending transformation is painless or that asking people to dismantle their own power bases is reasonable. Explicitly recognize that AI and automation will eliminate certain roles, change others, and require new commercial models. This honesty creates space for authentic conversations rather than fostering an environment of thinly-veiled pretense where everyone knows what's really happening but nobody says it out loud.

2. Right-Cast Your Transformation Leaders

Put people in charge whose future success depends on transformation succeeding, not those whose status comes from the system being replaced. This might mean looking outside traditional hierarchies to find leaders without legacy investments in the status quo. The head of innovation might be a better transformation leader than the head of the department being transformed.

3. Create Transformation Incentives

Directly tie compensation and advancement to successful transformation. When a middle manager's bonus depends more on AI adoption metrics than headcount, priorities shift dramatically. Self-interest is a powerful motivator when properly aligned. Nothing clarifies thinking like having your mortgage payment tied to embracing the future rather than preserving the past.

For agencies, this means creating commercial models where efficiency benefits the agency, not just the client. For brands, it means procurement models that reward outcomes rather than inputs.

4. Implement Change-Specific Performance Metrics

Generic objectives like "support digital initiatives" are meaningless corporate Mad Libs. Specific metrics like "30% of content produced via AI system" or "50% reduction in manual approval steps" create clear accountability that's harder to evade. Vagueness is the enemy of transformation; precision is its ally.

5. Re-examine Your Commercial Models

For agencies, experiment with outcome-based pricing that decouples revenue from human hours. For brands, develop procurement approaches that reward efficiency rather than punish it by immediately reducing budgets. Create commercial models where technology adoption benefits both parties rather than just transferring value from one to another.

6. Establish Independent Transformation Teams

Create dedicated teams with the authority, resources, and mandate to drive change without requiring consensus from those most threatened by it. These teams should report directly to executive leadership, bypassing the middle management layer most likely to resist.

7. Embrace Radical Transparency

Make data on transformation progress visible to everyone. When all can see which teams are adopting new tools and which aren't, passive resistance becomes harder to maintain. Sunlight remains the best disinfectant, and dashboards are the sunlamps of the corporate world.

8. Create Clear Career Evolution Paths

Show how roles will evolve, not disappear. The TVC producer skilled in global production might become an AI-systems orchestrator, leveraging their domain knowledge in a higher-value role. The brand manager might shift from managing execution to overseeing strategy and insights. Create and communicate these pathways before resistance calcifies. Nobody willingly boards a plane without knowing the destination.

9. Bridge Generational Divides

Pair digitally-native employees with experienced managers in co-leadership models. This creates space for knowledge transfer while ensuring fresh perspectives influence decision-making. The wisdom of experience combined with the fearlessness of youth is a powerful combination.

10. Focus on Industry-Specific Success Stories

Document and share transformation wins that explicitly address the unique challenges of your industry, creating a counternarrative to the "it won't work here" resistance. When a direct competitor succeeds with AI transformation, the "uniqueness" argument loses potency.

The Leadership Imperative

Ultimately, overcoming this multi-layered resistance requires uncommon courage from senior leadership. It means acknowledging uncomfortable truths about organizational change, commercial models, and individual careers. It means making difficult personnel decisions when persuasion fails. It means sustaining transformation focus despite the gravitational pull of quarterly results.

For executives who've risen through the same system, this can be particularly challenging. The resistance strategies described here were likely part of their own professional toolkit in previous roles. Recognizing and countering these tactics means confronting shadows from their own management past.

But the stakes are too high for comfortable fictions.

Organisations that allow entrenched interests to quietly suffocate transformation will find themselves increasingly irrelevant in a world where AI capabilities are doubling every six months while their transformation initiatives advance at the pace of continental drift.

The choice isn't between harmony and conflict—it's between short-term comfort and long-term survival. Leaders who lack the courage to confront this resistance aren't preserving culture; they're signing their organization's eventual death warrant with a very nice pen.

Beyond Resistance: The Transformation Partnership

While this article has focused on resistance patterns, it's worth noting that effective leaders who embrace change can become transformation's most powerful allies. With their deep operational knowledge and organisational influence, they can translate executive vision into practical reality in ways no consultant or technologist ever could.

The goal isn't to villainise anyone but to recognise the very human dynamics at play when technology threatens established identities, business models, and livelihoods. By bringing these dynamics into the open and addressing them directly, organisations can unlock the true potential of both their people and their technology investments.

The digital transformation graveyard is full of brilliant technologies that failed not because of their capabilities but because of the human systems they threatened. Smart organizations recognize that the true transformation challenge isn't implementing new tools but reimagining the human systems around them.

As for the managers and leaders reading this who recognize their own resistance tactics—I don't blame you. Your concerns are valid. Your expertise remains valuable. But consider this: those who learn to orchestrate AI rather than compete with it will define the next generation of organizational leadership. The choice is yours: evolve into the augmented leaders of tomorrow or perfect the art of protecting yesterday until there's nothing left to protect.

Penri Jones is Founder & CEO at Arloesi, a pioneering content innovation partner empowering brands, agencies, and tech companies to reimagine their content strategies in the digital age.