AI Driven PM: S2E8 - Resistance, Revenge, Resentment

 

Stop Counting. Start Leading.

Let me tell you something I learned that changed the way I lead.

Around 2012, I got serious about personal development. I joined the John Maxwell team. I had phenomenal coaches and mentors around me. And one teaching from Paul Martinelli hit me in a way I wasn't expecting.

He was talking about relationships. And he said:

"The danger in relationships is counting."

Once you start counting—that's the third time they've done that, that's the fourth time that's happened—you've started keeping score.

And once you're keeping score, three things happen. He called them the Three R's.

Resistance. You start pulling back. Cutting the person off a little. Creating distance.

Revenge. You start doing the same thing back to them. They're going to do that to me, I'll do it to them.

Resentment. And this is the dangerous one. This is emotional withdrawal. Leadership doesn't care. Nobody's paying attention. I'm done.

Once resentment sets in, that relationship is over.

Here's what hit me: I'm data-driven. I count everything. And when I traced the roots of some of my most difficult client relationships, I could see exactly when I had started counting their failures instead of solving their problems.

I was tracking the wrong metrics. And it cost me relationships.

But that's not why I'm telling you this story.

I'm telling you this because those same Three R's? They're happening on your change initiative right now.

Your Tool Isn't Failing. Your Change Management Is.

Three months after rollout, 60% of people are still using spreadsheets.

Teams are calling the new PM tool "Rick's surveillance tool."

Two departments are openly hostile. Leadership announced the rollout and then disappeared. Training was a 90-minute session with no follow-up.

Sound familiar?

Here's the sequence:

• Resistance: Passive non-compliance. "I'll just keep using spreadsheets until this blows over. Every few years they try something new. I'll wait them out."
• Revenge: Active demonstration that it doesn't work. "You want me to use this? Fine. I'll use it. And I'll make sure everyone knows how painful it is."
• Resentment: Emotional withdrawal. "Leadership doesn't actually care. Nobody reads these reports anyway. I stopped doing it six weeks ago and nobody noticed."

And here's the painful truth that Claude told me in our live demo and I couldn't have said it better:

"This is not a training problem or a tool problem. It is a trust problem with a workflow mismatch layered on top."

You didn't fail at selecting technology.

You failed at managing the human side of change.

People Don't Resist Change. They Resist Being Changed.

This is where DISC blew my mind.

I mentioned DISC in Episode 7. But here's the stat that changed the way I think about every rollout I've ever managed:

69% of the population is High S.

High S personalities love routine. They thrive on predictability. They come in, everything is in its place, and they do their best work.

They will change. But they don't like being changed.

And most organizations manage change initiatives like High D personalities designed them—fast, decisive, bullet point, done.

You announce it. You train them. You expect adoption.

And then you wonder why 60% of people are still using the old system three months later.

Here's the other piece nobody says out loud: People won't change unless they hurt enough that they have to, or care enough that they want to.

That's it. Those are the only two change levers.

Most change initiatives activate neither.

Why Change Initiatives Really Fail

It's almost never about the tool.

Here's what I've seen in 150+ implementations:

We focus on the WHAT. We ignore the WHO.

New tool. New process. New org structure. We spend 90% of our time configuring, integrating, testing, and training on the what—and about 10% on the people who have to actually change their behavior.

And then when adoption fails, we schedule more training.

More training on a tool people don't trust won't fix a trust problem.

What actually triggers the Three R's:

• Change is done to people, not with them
• No clarity on why the change matters
• No voice or input in how the change happens
• Broken trust from past change initiatives that went nowhere
• Leaders who disappear after the kickoff

And I want to call out one thing that kills me in every large-scale implementation I've ever seen:

They cut training. They cut change management. They cut project management.

The ERP costs 2 million. The configuration runs over. And when they need to find money, they cut the things that ensure the whole thing actually works.

"We have people internally who can handle that."

No. You don't. Not because your people aren't capable—but because change management is a discipline, not a checkbox. And it requires time, intentionality, and someone who isn't also trying to do their day job.

AI Change Management Is Different

Here's what makes the current AI rollout wave particularly dangerous:

AI change is personal in a way that a new PM tool isn't.

When you roll out monday.com, people are annoyed. When you roll out AI tools, people are scared.

They're wondering: Is this the beginning of my replacement? Are they tracking my productivity to justify headcount reduction? Am I being automated out of relevance?

I've answered some version of "Will AI replace project managers?" dozens of times. The answer is the same every time: AI won't replace project managers, but you will be replaced by a project manager who knows how to leverage AI.

But when you're rolling out AI to a team that doesn't believe that? When leadership is absent, training was insufficient, and people don't see "what's in it for me"?

The Three R's hit faster and harder than with any previous technology adoption.

If you're not actively managing the people side of your AI rollout, you're watching the clock count down to resentment.

The Clarity Tool Lesson

Let me tell you one more story.

I used to do a lot of project rescue work. Organizations would call me when their implementation had gone wrong and they needed someone to come in and fix it.

For years, I supported CA Clarity—one of the most powerful PPM tools on the market. You could automate almost any process imaginable. Incredibly configurable.

But I'd walk into these organizations and feel the resentment the moment I walked in the door.

The tool hadn't been deployed well. The adoption had failed. People hated it. And the damage was done.

We could rebuild it. We could redesign it. We could deploy it properly this time, do real training, proper change management.

But the resentment gap was nearly impossible to overcome.

People had already decided. The tool was garbage. Leadership couldn't be trusted. Nothing would change.

So I had to transition my business from rescue work to implementation work.

Because trying to recover from resentment? That's a nearly impossible project.

This is why I say: Catch resistance early. Address it at resistance. Don't let it become revenge. And don't let revenge become resentment.

The Three Prompts That Help You Diagnose and Act

I ran three prompts live today using a scenario most of us recognize: A PM tool rollout three months in, with 60% still using spreadsheets and two departments calling it "Rick's surveillance tool."

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Prompt 1: Change Readiness and Engagement Diagnostic (Your Non-Negotiable)

What it does: Assesses where your team sits on the change readiness spectrum, identifies what stage of the Three R's you're in, surfaces root causes, and gives you a 30-day action plan to shift sentiment and build ownership.

What the AI told me:

ChatGPT's change readiness diagnosis:

• Most of the organization: between understanding and acceptance (they know the tool exists but don't believe in its value)
• Hostile departments: at awareness only (they know it exists and actively reject it)

Three R's signals:

• Resistance: Monday.com is being used as a reporting layer, not a system of work. Spreadsheets still run the actual business.
• Resentment: Calling it "Rick's surveillance tool" signals distrust of leadership intent. They believe this serves leadership control, not team productivity.
• Revenge: Double work creates visible friction. Teams signal frustration through inefficiency without open confrontation.

Claude's action plan:

Move 1: Co-creation with resistant departments.

"Do not push more training or communications into hostile departments. Go in and listen first. Facilitate working sessions where they redesign their monday.com boards to match how they actually work. Give them ownership of the configuration.

This is the only credible counter to the surveillance narrative. When they build it, it stops being yours."

That last sentence is everything.

Move 2: Activate the 40%.

"Identify two or three visible, respected people per department who are already using it effectively. Make them peer coaches—not ambassadors. Peer-to-peer adoption is faster and more credible than top-down instruction. Document one concrete time-saver or meeting eliminated per team as a proof point."

And the metric I loved most from Claude:

Number of times leadership references monday.com data in informal settings.

Because if leadership doesn't use it publicly, nobody believes it matters. That's not a usage metric. That's a trust metric.

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Prompt 2: Resistance Root Cause Analyzer

The behaviors I gave it:

• People say yes in meetings, then don't change behavior
• Slack is full of "this tool is stupid" comments
• One manager told their team: "Just keep using the spreadsheet. This will blow over."
• Multiple IT tickets requesting to be removed from the system
• Poor training participation (multitasking, minimal questions)
• One senior engineer said publicly: "This is just another fad. Remember when we tried [previous tool]?"

What the AI diagnosed:

Type of resistance:

• Passive: Yes in meetings, no behavior change
• Active: Slack complaints and vocal opposition
• Avoidance: Low training engagement
• Sabotage: The manager telling their team to keep using spreadsheets

Underlying fears:

• Fear of demonstrated incompetence (low training engagement = they don't want to look like they can't figure it out)
• Fear that this change signals something about their future (Big Brother tracking)
• Fear of workload increase without compensation ("You're increasing what I have to do without increasing what you pay me")

Unmet needs:

• Need for input and co-authorship
• Need for competence and psychological safety
• Need for a manager who's actually aligned

The senior engineer's comment is the most important signal of all. When someone says, "Remember when we tried [previous tool]?"—they're not complaining about this tool. They're telling you: "I've been through this before. Nothing changed. Why would this be different?"

That's broken trust from past failures. And no amount of training fixes that.

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Prompt 3: Co-Creation and Ownership Strategy

Here's the key reframe Claude gave me before building the strategy:

"The worst version of participatory change is pretending people have input they do not have. Name the constraint honestly before you invite collaboration."

What I could actually open up for input (even though the tool decision was final):

• How boards are configured
• What the required fields look like
• Automation rules and permission structure
• Update frequency and check-in norms
• Who owns each board

That's not a small thing. When people design how their system works, it becomes their system. Not the tool leadership forced on them.

The pilot experiment approach: Run a 30-day experiment with one willing team, not to prove the tool works—to learn what actually makes it work for them. Then share those wins peer to peer.

The communication principle: Don't claim you're listening if you're not prepared to act on what you hear. Performative co-creation is worse than no co-creation. It validates the cynicism.

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Your Non-Negotiable Experiment This Week

Run the Change Readiness and Engagement Diagnostic (Prompt 1) on a current or recent change initiative.

Then take one action: either invite co-creation or directly address a root cause of resistance.

Here's what I want you to notice:

1. Does giving people a voice shift sentiment—even when the change itself is non-negotiable?
2. Do you discover root causes you hadn't seen before?
3. Where on the Three R's spectrum is your team, really?

Because here's the truth:

You can have the best tool in the world. If you skip the people side, it will fail.

And once resentment sets in, you're not doing a rescue. You're doing a replacement.

Catch it at resistance. That's where change is recoverable.

Stop counting their failures. Start co-creating their success.

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Next time: Coaching First, PM Second—why facilitation is one of your most valuable skills in the AI era, and how to lead without being the one with all the answers.

Check out the live episode on YouTube: 

Now go find out where your change initiative really is.

— Rick A. Morris

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The Prompts (Copy/Paste Ready)

Prompt 1 - Change Readiness and Engagement Diagnostic

You are an organizational change management consultant.

First, ask me 5–7 questions about the change initiative, the people affected, their current behavior and sentiment, past change history, and leadership engagement.

Then provide a diagnostic and strategy that answers:

1. Where is the team on the change readiness spectrum? (awareness, understanding, acceptance, adoption, or advocacy)
2. What signs of resistance, revenge, or resentment am I seeing?
3. What are the root causes of resistance? (lack of clarity, fear, broken trust, no input, poor execution)
4. What change management strategy should I use? (communication, co-creation, small wins, leadership modeling)
5. What specific actions should I take in the next 30 days to shift sentiment and build ownership?
6. How do I measure progress in change adoption beyond the number of people trained?

Change initiative context: [Enter Context]

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Prompt 2 - Resistance Root Cause Analyzer

You are a behavioral psychologist specializing in organizational change.

Ask me 3–5 questions about specific resistance behaviors, what people are saying or not saying, and what happened leading up to the resistance.

Then analyze the root causes by answering:

1. What type of resistance am I seeing? (passive, active, avoidance, or sabotage)
2. What are the underlying fears or concerns driving the resistance? (fear of job loss, loss of control, incompetence, increased workload)
3. What unmet needs are people expressing through resistance? (clarity, input, support, or trust)
4. What past experiences are influencing current resistance? (previous failed changes, broken promises)
5. How do I address root causes rather than just symptoms?

Resistance behaviors observed: [Enter Context]

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Prompt 3 - Co-Creation and Ownership Strategy

You are a change management facilitator specializing in participatory change.

Ask me 3–4 questions about the change initiative, who's affected, and where I could invite input or co-creation.

Then design a co-creation strategy answering:

1. Where in the change process can I invite people to shape HOW—not just accept WHAT?
2. What decisions can I delegate or open up for input?
3. How do I identify and empower change champions within resistant groups?
4. What pilot or experiment can I run WITH the team (not TO the team) to build ownership?
5. How do I communicate that input is genuinely valued and not just performative listening?

Change initiative and constraints: [Enter Context]