The Hidden Cost of Frictionless Change: Why Real Transformation Requires Human Discomfort

We live in an age where nearly every aspect of work is being optimized, streamlined, and automated. Platforms promise “seamless” transitions. AI tools analyze resistance, personalize messaging, and orchestrate change in record time. At first glance, it feels like a breakthrough: finally, a way to bypass the friction that has long slowed down transformation efforts.

But there’s a deeper question worth asking, one that executives and change leaders too often overlook:

If we remove all the friction from change… do we also remove the opportunity for growth?

It’s a provocative thought, especially in an era where change has become a permanent condition. But it’s one we must explore if we want to lead effectively in a digitally accelerated world.

The Myth of Resistance

It’s a popular refrain in boardrooms: “People resist change.” But that’s not entirely accurate. People don’t resist change; they resist uncertainty, loss of control, and the feeling of being left out of decisions that affect their day-to-day lives.

The issue isn’t the change itself; it’s how change is handled.

Consider this: if people truly hated change, we wouldn’t seek out new experiences, try different foods, or switch jobs in pursuit of something better. Imagine eating the same meal three times a day, every day, for a week. Most people wouldn’t just accept a change; they’d demand it.

People want variety with agency, novelty that doesn’t threaten their sense of control. In organizational settings, resistance often shows up not as rebellion, but as silence, disengagement, or workaround behaviors. These are signals, not signs of defiance, but of people feeling unheard, uncertain, and sidelined.

A McKinsey & Company study found that employees who feel included in change efforts are 4.2 times more likely to report successful outcomes than those who don’t.¹ That stat alone should reframe how we approach resistance, not as a barrier to manage, but as feedback to interpret.

If leaders focused less on controlling resistance and more on creating spaces for dialogue, participation, and small acts of ownership, they'd unlock far more commitment than any change management plan ever could.

At AI Advisory Group, we’ve worked across industries, from energy to professional services to tech, helping companies navigate complex transformations. What we’ve consistently seen is this:

• People don’t push back when they’re included.
• They push back when change is forced.

This is a critical distinction. When leaders focus solely on managing change, controlling the rollout, enforcing compliance, and measuring milestones, they miss the deeper dynamics at play. True transformation isn’t a rollout. It’s a shift in belief, behavior, and identity. And that requires emotional commitment, not just procedural alignment.

Change as a Human Experience

There’s a difference between managing change and navigating it. Management implies predictability and control. Navigation, on the other hand, acknowledges uncertainty. It requires responsiveness, emotional intelligence, and situational awareness, traits often missing in conventional change models.

In behavioral science, we know that the brain craves certainty and autonomy. When either is threatened, people resist, not out of stubbornness, but as a natural protective response. This is why even the most sophisticated change platforms fail when they ignore those experiencing the change.

Executives who understand this shift their focus. They stop asking, “How can we control this?” and ask, “How do we create the conditions where people can own this?”

The Role of Discomfort in Growth

Here’s the paradox: while companies try to remove obstacles for the sake of efficiency, those very obstacles are often what drive meaningful growth.

Discomfort is not dysfunction. It’s a signal. The discomfort teams feel during change, when handled with care and structure, is what builds capacity, resilience, and innovation. The friction we often try to eliminate is the very thing that helps us evolve.

In our client work, we’ve found that transformations that appear to “go too smoothly” often signal something deeper: a lack of engagement, misalignment, or unaddressed organizational tension. On the surface, things look efficient. But under the hood, it’s patchwork, band-aid fixes dressed up as transformation.

Yes, the rollout is on time. The dashboards are updated. The process is technically followed. But what’s missing is belief. There’s initial compliance, but no lasting commitment. Employees may nod in meetings, but they’re building shadow systems in the background. Adoption plateaus. Momentum stalls. Trust erodes.

Why?

Because there was no struggle. No dialogue. No sense of personal or team ownership in the change. People weren’t invited to wrestle with new ideas or challenge assumptions. As a result, the change lacked emotional investment, and emotionally uninvested change never sticks.

This isn’t just anecdotal. According to Prosci’s Best Practices in Change Management report, only 34% of organizations meet their change objectives when employee engagement is low, compared to over 80% success rates when employees are highly engaged and prepared.²

That’s not a marginal difference. That’s the gap between performative rollout and transformational change.

Align People, Then Process, Then Technology

Most digital transformation strategies get the sequence wrong. They start with tools, then scramble to retrofit processes and people.

This is backwards.

Sustainable change follows a different order:

1. People First – Understand behavioral readiness, decision preferences, and internal narratives that shape how change will be received.
2. Process Second – Align workflows to support the human side of performance, not just system outputs.
3. Technology Last – Select tools that enable people and processes, not dictate them.

This order isn't just philosophy, it's protection. It safeguards your investments, prevents rework, and accelerates the ROI of transformation initiatives.

A Call to Mindful Leadership

Technology can help scale, automate, and predict. But it can’t replace trust. It can’t substitute for vision. And it certainly can’t create culture.

The most effective leaders understand this intuitively. They use technology as an amplifier, not a substitute, for human intelligence. They foster environments where discomfort is normalized, dialogue is encouraged, and people are equipped to navigate, not avoid, change.

If we want transformation to last, we must stop trying to eliminate friction and learn how to use it. Because when people feel psychologically safe to engage with a challenge, that’s when alignment happens. That’s when organizations move—not just forward, but together.

A Final Thought

In our pursuit of frictionless efficiency, we may be paving a smooth road to nowhere. The future doesn’t belong to those who avoid discomfort—it belongs to those who grow through it.

At AI Advisory Group, we help companies unlock this kind of growth by validating decisions, building human-centered strategies, and designing change that actually sticks.

Want to explore how your organization can turn friction into forward momentum? Let’s talk.

¹ McKinsey & Company. (2020). “The organization of the future: Enabled by technology, supported by people, and driven by performance.”

² Prosci (2021). Best Practices in Change Management – 11th Edition.