Most companies won't change until they're pushed

I agreed with every article that said so. I nodded along in every conversation about it. I could have told you exactly why it mattered.

I did nothing about it until my role was eliminated and the decision was made for me.

Nothing was wrong with the idea. There just wasn't anything forcing it.

This week I watched an interview in which Sir Martin Sorrell describes most of corporate life behaving exactly the same way. He built WPP, one of the world's largest advertising groups, and now runs S4 Capital, so he has watched a lot of large organisations decide whether to change.

His answer is blunt. They mostly don't. Not until something pushes them.

Let's dive in.

Sorrell's read is that serious AI adoption is concentrated in industries facing a threat to their survival.

Carmakers watching Chinese manufacturers sell electric cars at prices they can't match. Traditional banks watching challenger banks take their customers. Consumer goods companies squeezed on price from every side.

Those are the sectors where AI is being used to redesign how the business runs. Everywhere else, in his words, it's "tests, audits, experiments, pilots".

His principle: organisations only change when an external force pushes them. And the resistance isn't technical. Changing the tools is easy. Changing the people, and the way the work is organised around them, is where the pain is.

The data points the same way: Deloitte surveyed 3,235 senior leaders across 24 countries for its latest State of AI in the Enterprise report.

When those same organisations adjusted their people strategy for AI, the top response was educating the workforce, at 53%. Only 30% were combining or re-imagining how the organisation itself is structured.

And bear in mind who Deloitte asked. Its sample is organisations it describes as on the leading edge of AI adoption. The rest of the market is further back.

So most of corporate life is sitting in a waiting room. Training programmes. Pilots. A steering group that meets monthly.

Waiting for a reason.

If you're a Director in one of those organisations, this reads as good news.

Nothing has been redesigned yet. The headcount plan looks like last year's. The org chart has the same boxes in it. Your company isn't facing a cheap competitor from the other side of the world, so the pressure Sorrell describes feels like somebody else's issue.

I'd be careful with that reading, for 3 reasons.

The first is that pilots aren't idle. A pilot is where an organisation finds out which workflows can run with fewer hands and fewer layers of sign-off. The education programme is teaching your team to do more without routing it through you. None of that changes anything today. All of it is sitting in a drawer, tested and ready, until the day it’s ready for roll-out.

The second is that the push doesn't arrive on your timetable. It arrives as a competitor's price list changes. A bad quarter. A new CEO who wasn't there when the current structure was built and doesn't feel any loyalty to it. You won't get a warning that it's coming. You'll get a meeting once it has.

The third is what happens when it does arrive. A company that has been piloting for 2 years doesn't start from scratch. It moves quickly, because the thinking is already done, and it moves structurally, because Sorrell is right that the real change is in how people are organised.

Deloitte says the same thing in plainer language: organisational structures are beginning to flatten as AI absorbs routine execution tasks.

Flattening means fewer layers. The senior layer has more people invested in the old shape than any other, and it costs more to keep.

Seniority doesn't move you down that list. It moves you up it.

Think about your boiler.

Most people know roughly how old theirs is. Past a certain age you start getting hints. A new noise. The pressure dropping now and then. An engineer at the annual service who says, carefully, "I'd start thinking about it."

Very few people replace a working boiler.

You replace it the week it dies. Usually in January. Usually with whichever engineer can come on Thursday, at whatever the price is that week, with whatever model they have available.

The replacement was always coming. You knew that. What waiting cost you was the choice of terms. The timing, the price, the options, all decided by the day it broke rather than by you.

Your company runs on the same logic as your boiler. So, almost certainly, does your career. Mine did.

Most senior professionals will build a second option when they're forced to. And a second option built at that stage comes on the terms available then. Whatever's available.

So the challenge is to find your forcing event before it finds you. This week:

1) Name the push for your sector: Sorrell's examples are a cheaper competitor, a challenger that doesn't carry your costs, or a squeeze on price. Which one is most likely to arrive in your industry? Has it started?

2) Interprete your own pilots: List the AI pilots and training programmes running in or near your function. For each one, write down which of your tasks it would make unnecessary if it worked. Be specific. That list is the draft of your next restructure.

3) Decide one thing you'd want in place before the push: Only one. A conversation with someone outside the organisation who values what you're good at. A clear sentence about what you'd do next. A number for how long you could live without your salary. Then book the time to do it this month, while you still control the narrative.

This is the work Zelova is built for. The guide looks at your actual role and your actual sector, helps you see what's likely to push and when you'd feel it, and turns that into a plan with more than one outcome in it. Built while you're employed, so you get to choose the terms.

It's a career strategy service, still being built. If any of this feels close to home, the waitlist is open at zelova.ai.

Is your organisation changing because it wants to, or waiting until it has to? And if it's waiting, what do you think will finally push it?

Reply and tell me. I'd like to hear your version.

David