Technological progress has fooled us into forgetting what social progress feels like.
It makes some sense, after all we live in technological times. We marvel, and cower, at what technology can increasingly do. Ideas gush. Small advances accumulate. Breakthroughs cascade. Scale accelerates. Society only then reckons with the aftermath.
That is how technological progress happens. But it is not how social change works. Social progress and organizational progress are not primarily a problem of invention. They are problems of confrontation, coordination, and power.
They get hard early because they touch human realities that technology can often postpone: status, identity, belonging, livelihoods, control. That is why the first feeling of real change is rarely “momentum.” It is friction. And friction does not mean you’re failing. It often means you’ve finally hit something that matters.
Then, a second distortion follows. If you think progress is inevitable, you start to treat resistance as irrational. You start to believe the only task is “adoption.” Adoption is a comforting story because it lets leaders imagine the work is finished once people say yes.
In real organizations, the hard part often starts after the yes. Systems don’t just adopt. They adapt. And often badly. They graft new language onto old incentives. A “customer-first” shift becomes an excuse to jam more work into the system. A transformation becomes another reporting layer. A new operating model becomes another power dynamic. AI becomes a faster way to do the same low-value work. That is maladaptation: how organizations make change look like progress while preserving what they actually value.
Tech progress makes maladaptation easy to miss because it teaches a clean plot: build, ship, adopt, scale. Human progress has a different plot: name what’s true, pay a price, endure backlash, build a coalition, make a tradeoff real, enforce it, watch the system try to wriggle out, correct, repeat.
That is why change makers, like you, burn out. They are trained to expect inevitability and get friction instead. They are trained to expect adoption and get maladaptation instead. They are trained to believe that once the idea is seen, the rest is execution. In complex organizations, seeing is the beginning, not the end.
If you’re trying to lead real change, the most important question is not “How do we drive adoption?” It is “How will this system try to stay itself?” Where will it perform agreement while preserving the old rules? Where will it translate the change into something harmless? What will it protect, and who will it protect?
Progress is not when people nod. Progress is when a new truth can be said in the room that matters, and the room changes what it rewards. Progress is when a real tradeoff becomes enforceable. Progress is when the system loses a little freedom to pretend.
If the work feels harder than it “should,” it might be because you’re finally doing the kind of progress that doesn’t arrive on its own.
So here’s one practical move this week: stop asking, “How do we get people to adopt this?” Start asking, “How will this place misread it, reshape it, and domesticate it?” Accept that up front. Then work to overcome it.
