A transformation team runs a closed exercise with insiders playing the defenders of the old system, then builds answers to their likely obstruction into the rollout plan before launch.
An example
Eight months before a regional hospital system planned to put one sepsis protocol in place across six formerly independent medical groups, the chief medical officer booked a conference room for a day and invited five people: two retired department chairs, a nurse manager who had lived through a failed standardization effort, the head of supply chain, and a physician who had argued against the merger. Their job was to play the chairs who would resist. By lunch they had produced eleven moves, from demanding a separate evidence review for each specialty to pointing out that the protocol's preferred antibiotic came from a single supplier. The chief medical officer had agreed in advance that every move would get either a fix or a named owner. The rollout was resequenced to start with the two groups whose chairs had asked for the protocol, and a second supplier was qualified before launch.
Why it works
Rehearsing the opposition makes the new path easier to carry out. The obstruction that would have surfaced mid-rollout, a budget ambush, a flood of edge cases, a customer escalation, a leak, has already been met in the plan. It also makes obstruction costlier for whoever tries it. When an anticipated move meets a calm, prepared answer, such as a written decision rationale or a supplier already qualified, the person making it looks predictable and pays for it in standing. It depends on role-players who understand the old system's grievances and on a window in which the plan can still change.
The thinking behind it
Thomas C. Schelling Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict (1960) argues that a threat works only if the other side believes it would be carried out. The resisters' threats, a budget ambush, a customer escalation, a single-supplier objection, carry weight because they could stall a rollout. A war game that builds the answer in advance, such as a second supplier already qualified, removes the cost behind the threat before it is made, so making it buys the resister little and marks them as predictable.
Irving L. Janis Janis's Victims of Groupthink (1972) argues that in cohesive groups the drive for agreement can override realistic appraisal, with symptoms such as self-censorship and an illusion of unanimity. He built the idea from case studies, and later work questions how far it generalizes. Its practical point still fits here: a planning team insulated from its opponents tends to underrate them, and casting insiders to argue the other side brings outside views in before the plan is fixed.
When it fits
Transformations that will take a known group's autonomy, budget, or way of working are the setting, where the resisters are identifiable and have real means to slow things down. You need authority over the plan and its sequencing, a few months before rollout commits, and insiders willing to argue the other side honestly. Consultants improvising villains will not do.
How to use it well
Commit first, in writing, that every obstruction move the exercise surfaces will be either fixed in the plan or accepted as a risk with a named owner. Without that commitment the session turns into a confidence exercise.
- Cast insiders who understand the grievances of the people losing something, and ask them to play to win.
- Work through concrete moves: budget objections, rule-bound compliance that stalls the work, escalations to customers, leaks, departures of people the old system depends on.
- For each move, build the answer into the plan: documentation, a second supplier, an alternate sign-off path, a changed sequence.
- Keep the session closed. Word that leadership is gaming against its own people reads as distrust and can provoke the very resistance being modeled.
What it costs and where it backfires
It takes a day or two of senior time and some trust from the role-players, who are being asked to think like opponents of a plan they may half share. The larger risk is a leak, which turns a planning exercise into evidence that leadership sees colleagues as enemies. The clean form prepares answers to obstruction. Once the exercise is used to target the people expected to resist, through their careers or their budgets, it has become a list of opponents to remove, and it will be read that way.
When it is used on you
If you defend the old way and find your moves already answered, a supplier qualified before you raised the issue and a sequence that starts where you have no allies, assume the plan was rehearsed. Rehearsed objections lose. What still changes a plan is a new, specific objection raised early, about a real gap the planners could not see from where they sit.