Exercise · AI and Automation Adoption: Leading Your Team Through Change
A Conversation with Someone Who Resists
Practice a five-step conversation with an employee who is resisting the adoption of AI.
Time45 minutes
ParticipantsGroups of three
MaterialsSituations on cards (6 pairs), observer checklists
From the trainingAI and Automation Adoption: Leading Your Team Through Change
Why this exercise
A conversation with someone who resists is neither persuasion nor a lecture. Five steps: listen, acknowledge the feeling, give the facts without promises you cannot keep, involve, and agree on a small first step with a deadline. An experienced skeptic often turns out to be the best tester of a new tool.
How to run it
- Show the five steps: listen → acknowledge ("I understand why this worries you") → facts: what is known, what is not known, what changes and what does not → involve ("Where could the assistant help you, and where not?") → a first step with a deadline.
- Groups of three: manager, employee, observer. The manager and the employee receive different halves of the same situation and do not show them to each other.
- A round: 2 minutes of preparation, 7 minutes of conversation, 6 minutes of feedback — from the manager, the employee and the observer using the checklist.
- Three rounds of 15 minutes, changing roles and taking a new situation.
- General debrief — 5 minutes.
Debrief questions
- Which step was hardest? Usually it is acknowledging the feeling and not arguing.
- What helped the "employee" move?
- How did you answer the question about redundancies?
Tips for the facilitator
- The goal of the conversation is not agreement but a first step. Sometimes a good outcome is "let's come back to this on Friday, once I know the answer".
- If the manager promises something they cannot deliver ("nobody will be let go"), the observer stops them and asks: "Is that within your power?" The facts step is replayed.
- Write down good phrases from the managers word for word — especially answers to "Will we be made redundant?" — and read out 2–3 at the end.
More
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