By: Natalie Johnson
A company has invested $10 million in artificial intelligence. The systems have been selected, the capital committed, and reversing course is no longer a realistic option. Elsewhere, a healthcare organization is implementing a change where poor execution can affect patient outcomes and, in the most serious circumstances, mortality.
The situations are different, but Tony Chatman sees the same underlying leadership challenge in both.
“From a corporate standpoint, it’s a focus on when change cannot afford to fail,” Chatman says. “That’s how we define high stakes.”
Chatman, a keynote speaker, organizational consultant, and leadership advisor, has built much of his recent work around understanding individual and organizational resistance. In ordinary change, resistance may slow progress. In ordinary change, resistance may threaten a project or implementation; in high-stakes change, it can become something more consequential: a threat to the very existence of the organization.
Organizations are often better at evaluating whether a strategy is sound than determining whether the people responsible for carrying it out are actually prepared to execute it.
When the Cost of Getting Stuck Changes
Most organizations experience friction during change. Employees need time to adjust, leaders disagree about priorities, and implementation rarely unfolds as cleanly as it appeared in a planning document.
In many cases, there is room for correction. A pilot program underperforms and gets adjusted. Adoption takes longer than expected. Leadership improves communication, changes the timeline, or adds training.
High-stakes change is different because the cost of those corrections rises as the organization moves forward.
“You’ve invested $10 million in AI. You can’t backtrack,” Chatman says.
Once significant capital has been committed, teams reorganized, promises made, or future strategy built around a transformation, changing direction becomes far more difficult.
The strategy may still be correct, and the technology may still be appropriate. The business case may still be strong. Yet the organization can remain unable to execute effectively if the people responsible for the transformation are stuck.
Chatman believes this is where executives need to broaden the way they think about risk. Companies routinely evaluate financial exposure, regulatory concerns, competitive threats, and technical feasibility before making major decisions. The human ability to carry those decisions forward is often treated as a secondary concern.
In high-stakes environments, that separation can become costly.
The Hidden Cost Is Often Misdiagnosis
When a transformation begins to stall, leaders rarely do nothing. The more common problem is that they respond aggressively to the wrong diagnosis. A rollout is behind schedule, so leadership increases accountability. Adoption is inconsistent, so the company invests in additional training. Employees appear uncertain, so executives communicate the strategy again.
Any of those responses may be appropriate.
But none answers the most important question: why is the organization actually stuck?
That is where Chatman believes resistance becomes particularly important. The visible symptom and the underlying problem are not always the same.
A team that appears to have a communication problem may understand the strategy but lack commitment to it. Employees sent back through training may already possess the necessary skills but distrust the people directing the change. Leadership may interpret hesitation as an employee issue while overlooking executive behavior that sends contradictory signals.
The danger is not simply that resistance exists. It is that an organization can spend significant time, money, and political capital trying to solve the wrong version of the problem.
In a relatively small initiative, that mistake may create a delay. In a transformation involving millions of dollars, competitive pressure, or human consequences, the margin for repeated misdiagnosis becomes much smaller.
Chatman’s work examines seven Resistance Points across an organization, giving leaders a way to consider where progress is breaking down before prescribing another solution.
The value in a high-stakes environment is not simply having another model. It is asking a more disciplined question before committing more resources:
What, exactly, are we trying to fix?
Why Pressure Does Not Automatically Produce Readiness
One assumption surrounding major transformation is that higher stakes will make people more willing to change. Sometimes they do. A clear threat can sharpen priorities and eliminate debates that might otherwise continue indefinitely.
But high stakes can also intensify the behaviors leaders are trying to overcome.
People may become more protective of familiar processes when mistakes feel more consequential. Managers may be less willing to admit uncertainty when leadership has attached significant visibility to an initiative. Executives may become more committed to defending an original decision after considerable resources have already been invested.
That is why Chatman does not believe leaders can simply communicate the seriousness of the situation and assume everyone will move in the same direction.
Healthcare illustrates the point clearly. Professionals who have developed routines around protecting patient safety may be cautious about changing them because they understand the consequences of getting something wrong. If leaders fail to recognize that distinction, legitimate concern can be misread as simple unwillingness.
The same principle applies elsewhere. A transformation can make strategic sense from the executive suite while creating questions about competence, security, workload, or accountability throughout the organization.
Those concerns do not automatically invalidate the strategy. But they do contain information leaders need if they expect the strategy to be executed well.
When Diagnosis Becomes Part of Strategy
Chatman’s argument is not that human considerations should replace strategy. It is that organizations facing consequential change can no longer afford to separate the two.
A company can choose the right technology and still implement it poorly. It can build an intelligent transformation plan and still fail to generate the commitment required to carry it out. It can communicate constantly and still miss the reason people are not moving.
The more difficult a decision becomes to reverse, the more expensive those gaps can become.
For executives responsible for major transformations, that creates a different set of questions:
- Where is the organization beginning to stall?
- Is the visible problem actually the root problem?
- Are leaders applying more pressure to an issue that first requires diagnosis?
- And how much room remains to correct course before the consequences become harder to absorb?
Those questions move resistance out of the category of a soft organizational concern and into the realm of execution.
When change cannot afford to fail, understanding why people are not moving is no longer separate from the strategy.
It becomes part of managing whether the strategy succeeds at all.
For leaders navigating transformations where the margin for error is narrowing, more information about Chatman’s work on organizational resistance and high-stakes change is available at tonychatman.com.
