Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

“People don’t resist the plan.They resist paying a cost nobody named.”

Michel Paquin

A small moment that says a lot

I was helping a friend pack up her mother’s house last month. Most boxes went fast. Books, dishes, old furniture — labeled and taped in minutes.

Then we got to a small box of kitchen utensils. Nothing valuable. A few wooden spoons, a chipped ladle, a mismatched set of measuring cups.

Her mother picked up one spoon, turned it over, and didn’t put it in the box.

“This isn’t about the spoon,” she finally said.

It wasn’t. It was thirty years of dinners, of a kitchen that worked a certain way, of being the person who knew where everything went without looking.

Every time I sit in a transformation kickoff, I think about that spoon.

The plan is rarely the problem.

It’s the spoon nobody accounted for.

What people are really giving up

When a business case gets approved, everyone talks about what the organization gains. Efficiency. Margin. Speed to market.

Almost nobody puts a number on what specific people give up to get there.

Things like:

• Being the one who knows how things really work
• Having a seat at a table that’s about to shrink
• A way of operating built over years, that suddenly counts for less

None of that shows up in the ROI model. All of it shows up in how slowly the plan actually moves.

Why this shows up in stalled decisions

A transformation can be fully approved and still crawl.

Not because people don’t understand it. Because understanding the plan and paying its price are two different things.

So people ask for one more workshop. One more round of alignment. One more pilot before the real rollout.

Not because they need more information.

Because nobody has said, plainly, what this costs them — and until someone does, agreeing to the plan doesn’t feel safe.

The hidden mechanism: unnamed cost

This isn’t stubbornness. It’s arithmetic.

People will absorb a real loss if it’s named and acknowledged. What they won’t do easily is absorb a loss that leadership hasn’t admitted exists.

An unnamed cost doesn’t disappear. It just moves.

It shows up as:

• Slower adoption than the plan assumed
• Quiet workarounds nobody escalates
• A team that nods in the meeting and stalls afterward

From the outside, it looks like inertia. From the inside, it’s self-protection against a bill nobody agreed to.

Name the concept

Call it the unspoken tax.

Every transformation charges one. It’s paid in status, authority, expertise, or belonging — and it’s almost never on the slide.

The plan doesn’t stall because the tax exists. It stalls because nobody named who’s paying it.

How to work with it

You can’t discount your way out of an unnamed cost. More data doesn’t touch it, because it was never a data problem.

A simple test:

• What is this plan actually asking someone to give up?
• Who, specifically, is paying that price?
• Has anyone said so to them directly?
• What would make that price feel worth paying?

Once the tax is named, people can decide whether to pay it. That decision moves fast. What never moves fast is a cost everyone can feel but nobody will say out loud.

When this doesn’t apply

Sometimes a stalled rollout really is a capability problem, a sequencing problem, or a genuine resourcing gap. That’s real, and naming a cost won’t fix a plan that’s technically broken.

But if the plan is sound and adoption still crawls, stop looking at the plan. Look for the spoon.

What to do this week

Pick one initiative that’s moving slower than it should.

Ask one question: what is this actually costing the people closest to it, and has anyone told them we see it?

Don’t fix it yet. Just name it, out loud, to the person paying it.

That’s usually where the plan starts moving again.