Budget for the implementation dip (Sam Rees)
Sam Rees opens a recent essay by sketching the standard change business case: go-live on a set date, effort falling steadily afterwards, benefits flowing from the next quarter. Her point is that the lived version looks nothing like it. Effort climbs before it falls, because people have to learn new decision rights, handoffs and systems while still delivering the day job, often with fewer resources than before.
None of this is new. Michael Fullan called it the implementation dip decades ago, and Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock and Chad Syverson gave it an economic form in the productivity J-curve, where investment in new processes shows up as cost long before it shows up as output.
What is new is the setting. AI programmes redesign the work itself rather than merely accelerating it, so the transition reaches into judgement and decision rights, not just tooling. My expectation, and it is an expectation rather than a measurement, is that the learning hump will be bigger than in past software rollouts for exactly that reason.
Two consequences follow either way. If the peak of the curve is not funded, it gets paid for anyway, out of evenings, goodwill and attrition, none of which appear in the model. And leaders who read learning as resistance push harder at exactly the moment the organisation needs slack, converting a predictable dip into a genuine failure.
Rees's fix is practical rather than comforting: put the transition cost in the model, and decide in advance what stops while the change is underway. If nothing comes off the plate, your people are the contingency reserve.
The organisations that come out of this wave strongest will not be the ones that adopted fastest. They will be the ones that budgeted honestly for the six months after go-live.
What did your last AI business case assume about those six months?
#ChangeManagement #AI #Transformation
Sources:
- Sam Rees, The Adaptive Organisation, "The Change You Imagine ... And The One You Actually Live" (3 Nov 2026): https://lnkd.in/gvwrASGw