What Is Your Organization Defending That It Needs to Let Go Of?
Organizational survival adoption: more for show than strategic intent
On the surface, every organization is “doing AI” right now. Licenses have been bought. Projects are underway. Investment is squarely focused on AI. But when you look a little closer…the picture looks very different.
One Truth
According to Writer’s 2026 AI Adoption survey, 75% of executives admit their company’s AI strategy is “more for show” than real strategic intent.
In my previous post, I wrote about how AI is threatening our professional identities. If AI can do my job, what does it mean for the career I’ve built? This is leading to survival adoption, where individuals adopt AI just enough to be seen as using it but not in meaningful ways to uplift organizational productivity.
Survival adoption isn’t just an individual response. It is also an organizational response. And that’s why the 75% stat from Writer’s research is so meaningful.
This suggests that AI Adoption isn’t just a people problem. It’s a people and organizational problem.
One Insight
Researchers have found that organizational friction, such as rigid structures, misaligned incentives, and entrenched power structures, actively works to limit AI Adoption.
This survival adoption response isn’t a new problem. And it isn’t specific to AI. Forty years ago, researchers gave it a name: organizational inertia.
Organizational Inertia: An organization’s inherent tendency to maintain its current structures, processes, routines, and strategies, even when facing external pressures to change.
To understand why this happens, we need to understand how the concept of an organization was born. Organizations emerged in the Factory Age, a time when organizational success required stable and predictable conditions. The goal in the Factory Age was to consistently produce as many goods as possible at pace. Organizations were designed to maintain stability. This means that inherently organizations reject anything that threatens stability. And what threatens stability? Innovation. Change. New technologies.
I have now been studying organizations for over 12 years, and one of my findings is that even modern organizations, at their core, still operate as if they were still in the Factory Age. And when the Factory Age Legacy of an organization combines with the identity threat that individuals are facing, it creates the perfect conditions for survival adoption to thrive. What results is that investments get made, transformations get launched, but change never gets delivered.
Insight into Action
To Unstuckify AI Adoption at the organizational level, we need to understand that our organizations were never designed for the pace of change we are experiencing in the Digital Age and will continue to experience, at a much faster pace in the Age of AI.
Then, we need to take a really hard look at the current state and ask:
What are we defending that we need to let go?
Unstuckifying requires a hard look on two levels
As individuals, we need to ask: Who do we need to become in the Age of AI?
As organizations, we need to ask: What are we defending that we need to let go?
This work needs to happen at both levels so that the organization’s strategic intent aligns with the individual identity and behavior change.
Get Unstuckifyed
AI is going to transform life as we know it. Our identities, our organizations, our communities will be different in the Age of AI. Our brains see this level of change as a threat. Our organizations were designed to resist this level of change. But this level of transformation is possible. We have done it before. Remember life before the internet? Remember life before the smartphone? Notice how these innovations now exist seamlessly in our lives. The difference is that AI is moving at a much faster pace, and the change is on a larger scale.
Till Next Time
To thrive in the Age of AI, our identity and behavior will need to change. And that change starts with conversations because who we are and what we do are shaped by the narratives we articulate both internally to ourselves and externally with others.
So, the place to get started with is leading conversations about who we need to become and what we need to let go of.
Thanks for getting Unstuckifyed with me.
Dr Dani