VPs of Talent, Directors of Learning & Development, and Regional Sales Directors
Our financial services team went back to the old process. What do we do now?
Do not relaunch. A second launch of the same system reads as noise and spends credibility you will need. Find out whether the old path is still open, whether the new way is genuinely slower for the individual, and whether anyone noticed when people stopped. Fix whichever is true, then reintroduce quietly to one financial services team rather than the whole region.
What this looks like in financial services
Advisors are handed an AI-assisted planning tool that drafts client scenarios in minutes. Compliance signs off. Adoption sits at 30% because the advisors who have carried books for fifteen years will not put a client conversation through something they cannot fully explain to that client.
This is not stubbornness and treating it as stubbornness makes it permanent. In a business where an advisor's credibility is the product, any tool that introduces explanation risk gets quietly avoided, and the firm books the cost of the licence while capturing none of the productivity.
How you know it is happening
The system is technically live and functionally abandoned.
Nobody was ever asked why they stopped, so the reason is still unknown.
Leadership is discussing a relaunch with a bigger announcement than the first one.
Why the obvious fixes do not hold
Relaunching. It tells everyone the first announcement did not mean anything, which is exactly the belief you need to reverse.
Escalating enforcement. Enforcement without closing the old path produces resentment and workarounds rather than adoption.
Blaming the vendor. Sometimes fair, almost never useful, and it guarantees the same outcome with the next vendor.
What actually works
Diagnose first: is the old path open, is the new way slower per person, did anyone notice when people stopped.
Reintroduce to one team, closing the old path for them specifically, with a week-three check.
Let that team's numbers do the arguing. One visible success persuades better than any mandate.
What to measure
Before reintroducing, time both paths honestly with a real user rather than a champion. If the new way is slower per person, nothing else you do will matter.
In financial services organizations the systems this usually touches are planning and proposal software, CRM workflows, AI meeting summarization, compliance automation.
The part nobody names
The mechanism underneath all of this has a name. Dr. Noah St. John calls it taming the caveman in your brain, and it is not a metaphor for laziness. A 200,000-year-old survival instinct is making decisions about 2026 software. It treats an unfamiliar system as a threat, it prefers the known path, and it fires before anyone consciously chooses anything.
That is why the fix is behavioral rather than technical, and why it holds once installed. It is also why financial services organizations keep buying capability and capturing none of it: the instinct that decides adoption was never addressed by the rollout plan.
Dr. Noah has spent 29 years on this specific gap, with $3 billion in documented client results across 150+ countries and 27 books in print.
Common questions
Should we relaunch a failed rollout?
Not in the same form. Diagnose why it reverted, fix that specific cause, then reintroduce quietly to one team.
How do you get a team to stop using the old spreadsheet?
Close it. If the legacy path still works it will keep winning, because it is faster for the individual even when it costs the organization more.
Want your team’s number instead of a general answer?
Twelve questions, about three minutes. It scores your team on the four places execution actually leaks and gives you a dollar figure for what the friction costs you a year.