Every change programme has its sceptics. You know the type. They've sat through three "transformations" already and watched each one quietly fizzle out. They don't buy the timeline. They don't buy the upside.
So they get labelled blockers, or something ruder, and the people running the rollout learn to work around them. Keeping them out of the steering group. Briefing them last.
That's a mistake. Not because sceptics are always right - they're not - but because they ask the questions you can't afford to ignore.
Are the savings real, or has the work just moved somewhere else? If the tool takes an hour off drafting a brief but adds an hour of checking, you haven't saved anything. You've just made the work harder to see.
What happens when the agent gives a confident wrong answer? (Not if. When.) Who spots it, and how far does it travel before they do?
Does the whole thing wobble the moment the one person who really understands it goes on holiday? Plenty of AI builds are one enthusiast and a pile of prompts nobody else has read.
These can sound like awkward, even obstinate questions. And sometimes they are. But they usually come from someone who knows how the work actually gets done, and what it'll take for this thing to survive contact with a normal Tuesday. That's a voice worth hearing, not sidelining.
The trick is to stop waiting for doubt to show up and to build it into the plan.
Gary Klein, in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article, called this "Performing a Project Premortem". Before a project starts, you get the team together and tell them it's failed. Then everyone writes down why.
Klein drew on a 1989 study by Deborah Mitchell, Jay Russo and Nancy Pennington, which found that imagining an event has already happened - what they called "prospective hindsight" - improves people's ability to identify the reasons behind an outcome by around 30%.
It also changes the social dynamic. In a normal kick-off, raising a worry makes you the awkward one. In a premortem, it's the job. Your sceptics go from being the problem to being the best people in the room.
So next time someone hangs back, or seems to be lobbing grenades at your change programme, resist the urge to route around them. Put the doubt in the diary instead.
If this sounds strikingly familiar, we can help. Our Waypoint is a free, confidential hour with a marketing leader, working out what's really slowing things down. Get in touch to book one.