Find No Sooner Part 4: Mapping Resistance After the Fact

🧊 This article is Part 4 of the series: Find No Sooner, Unfreeze Progress
Strategies for spotting resistance early and understanding what’s stalling your team.

• Part 1: Why No Hides
  The social, cultural, and structural reasons people hide their objections.

• Part 2: Inviting No Into the Conversation
  Asking questions that uncover objections.

• Part 3: Reading the ICE in Real Time
  Decode disagreement in the moment using the ICE model.

• Part 4: Mapping Resistance After the Fact ← you are here

Three months after the "successful" launch, the project stalls.
Meetings get rescheduled. Action items linger. The enthusiasm from that final planning session has evaporated, replaced by growing unease.

Before the launch, you asked for input.
You worked through disagreements. You got buy-in.
And now you’re watching progress freeze in place while everyone maintains the polite fiction that everything is fine.

Late resistance is harder to spot and even harder to talk about.
That’s where Resistance Mapping comes in: a way to make what’s freezing the work visible, so you can decide what to do next.

What Resistance Looks Like

Nancy described the worst kind of resistance:

Some decisions immediately fail the water cooler test.

But more often, you only notice resistance when your project begins to fail.

When I ask groups what resistance looks like on their teams, they all have answers.

• Most commonly: no replies and rescheduled meetings,

• "A barrage of questions and philosophizing and justifying and this whole dance. It's like a wrestling match. Exhausting."

• "They give up easily. They don't sit and struggle with it. It's so easy to go do something else instead. Email, go talk to your friend, that other project..."

• "Or like a person who just can't say no, so takes things on. I can see that from the outside that it's too much, but okay! They said yes, so I hope they follow through..."

The easiest way to say no is to say nothing at all and hope the question goes away. When objections are never voiced, or when they're dismissed, quiet resistance becomes a way to reclaim power.

Finding the Freeze

We uncover resistance using classic discovery techniques.
Interviews, observations, data analysis, and surveys. Talking to people.

You'll bring the same spirit of curiosity and care that we recommended when we talked about questions to ask before making a decision. Only now, you're playing catch-up on a project going wrong.

Sample questions that reveal resistance

• What will you need to support this (project/initiative/change)?

• What, if anything, will make this challenging?

• What might cause this to fail?

• How confident are you in this deadline?

(Which questions do you find most useful? Let us know in the comments.)

As you learn more, you'll realize that not all resistance needs to be eliminated.
Some of it simply needs to be understood well enough to work with it, or to realize your plan needs rethinking.

As one workshop participant said:

True that! Most of the time, though, you'll need to take action.

Resistance Mapping:
When One Solution Won't Thaw the Freeze

Resistance to large initiatives rarely comes from just one source or stakeholder group.

Consider what happened when Duolingo announced their AI-first strategy in 2025.

The executive team was clearly excited about what they saw as a bold strategic move to position the company for the future. But when they announced their intent to be AI-first, different groups raised completely different concerns:

• Contractors worried about job security and timeline confusion

• Employees questioned whether this meant layoffs despite reassurances

• Customers raged about losing the human touch in language learning

• Analysts wanted clarity on revenue impact and market positioning

Each group's resistance stemmed from different barriers and would require different solutions. You can't address contractor concerns about the timeline with the same approach you'd use for angry customers threatening to delete the app.

Most leaders facing this kind of multi-stakeholder resistance default to one of two extremes: whack-a-mole problem solving (tackle issues as you spot them) or massive discovery projects involving extensive interviews, panels, and organizational network analysis.

Resistance mapping sits between and alongside these approaches. It's substantial enough to capture the complexity of multi-group resistance, but focused enough to guide decision-making without getting lost in analysis paralysis.

What Is a Resistance Map?

A Resistance Map visualizes the different barriers causing various stakeholder groups to resist your change or initiative. It's structured as a simple matrix: stakeholders across the top, common resistance barriers down the side.

As you discover resistance through interviews, surveys, or observation, you capture representative examples in the appropriate cells. Then you color-code based on urgency and threat level, highlighting which combinations of stakeholder and barrier type pose the biggest risk to your project's success.

The map's power lies in what it reveals: different stakeholder groups often need completely different solutions, and a single communication strategy—no matter how well-crafted—won't address everyone's concerns.

Example: Resistance to Duolingo's AI-First Strategy

How to Use A Resistance Map

The map highlights two critical insights for leaders:

Urgency and Resource Allocation: The color-coding shows you where to focus first. Darker colors indicate barriers that could kill your project if left unaddressed. Lighter or no color shows the ones you feel can be easily addressed or revisited later, after you’ve put out the fires.

Multi-Pronged Strategy Necessity: Looking at the Duolingo example, you can see that managers who need resources require a different solution than contractors who need clarity, which is different from the approach needed for customers who are fundamentally opposed to the direction.

Some resistance can be addressed with targeted communication—hold briefings for confused analysts, send detailed timelines to contractors. But other resistance, like an enraged customer base, signals the need for significant program changes: product modifications, pricing adjustments, or even finding new markets that aren't hostile to your approach.

The map prevents you from thinking a better memo will solve everything.

Final Tip: Blank Cells Help Leaders Focus

You can see that I left many cells blank in the table above.

For example, the top row for Information Gap only includes generalized comments from Contractors and Investors. This doesn't mean that everyone else felt the information was clear. Far from it. In fact, there were so many angry comments on these memos that we could easily fill out all of the cells in the map.

That would defeat the purpose.

The map's job is to highlight the types of resistance you've found, the strength of that resistance, and the areas that you believe leaders need to address most urgently. Adding only one or two representative examples of each barrier makes the map easier to read and a more useful decision aid.

That said, you may find it useful to supplement these qualitative examples with a count of the number of comments/observations expressing each concern.

In that case, our Duolingo example might look something like this (with totally made-up numbers):

Just be sure to keep your map to the simplest useful level of information needed to support a conversation about next steps, and have the full details ready to reference should questions arise.

In Conclusion:
I Hope You Learn to Love an Easy No

One theme has run through this whole series:
The longer you wait to surface a disagreement, the harder it becomes to resolve.

The simplest moves—inviting feedback early, asking clarifying questions—often prevent the need for the more complex moves we explored here.

But if resistance surfaces late, tools like the ICE Model and Resistance Mapping give you a way to work with what’s real, rather than getting stuck in wishful thinking.

Every clear “No” you hear early is a gift.
It gives you choices.
It earns trust.
And it can turn skeptics into allies by showing them that you care enough to ask.

So next time you see those little feet sticking out from under the blanket of “Yes,” don’t pretend you can’t see them.

Get curious. Ask questions. Welcome the No.

That’s what it takes to clear the ice so real progress can flow.

Thanks all!
I’m looking forward to your questions and suggestions for improvement!

Curious about how this connects to broader collaboration and decision practices?
Our work on designing collaborative ecosystems and 5D Thinking offers more ways to keep your team moving forward. Explore here.