This is not a failure of the change program. The strategy is sound, the timeline is reasonable, the leadership support is real. It is a failure of the last ten feet.

The last ten feet is the distance between a well-designed change initiative and the conversation a manager needs to have with a specific person on Tuesday morning. No playbook covers that distance. No methodology gets you there. The deck ends, the kickoff happens, the training is scheduled, and then there is a person at a desk who has gone quiet, and someone who has four minutes to decide what to say to them.

SteadMark was built for that ten feet. Everything below is how it got built, and why it is built the way it is.

The manager in the middle carries the weight that nobody planned for.

Start with the person in the scene above, because the whole company is about to lean on them and almost no part of the program was designed with them in mind. A middle manager in a transformation carries delivery accountability for a change they did not design, with a team they did not build consensus with, and a strategy they cannot override. They are the implementation layer. They are also the absorption layer.

When resistance surfaces, it surfaces on their team. When adoption stalls, the blame lands on their desk. When a senior leader asks what is happening on the ground, they are the one who has to answer, usually in a hallway, usually without warning.

They rarely have the time, the training, or a diagnostic to make sense of what they are seeing, and they are carrying a full workload while they try. The change is one more thing stacked on top of everything that was already there.

Resistance is not a character flaw. It is a rational response to a real threat, which means the manager's job is to find the threat and address it, rather than to push through the resistance as if it were the problem.

The change practitioners who validated this approach made me reckon with a precondition I wanted to be honest about. The daily read works where the relational and political groundwork already exists. Where a manager was heard and involved in how the change was designed, the read lands as support. Where that groundwork is missing, it reads as one more directive from above.

SteadMark does not replace good change design. It is the daily instrument that makes good change design hold up at the level where it actually gets tested.

There is a number you have seen at the front of every change deck. Seventy percent of change initiatives fail. I quoted it myself for a while. Then I went looking for where it came from, and that search is part of why this company exists.

Mark Hughes, a researcher at the University of Brighton, traced the 70% through five separate published sources and found no valid empirical evidence behind any of them. The figure is a narrative, not a measurement. What the more careful research does support is narrower and more useful. Change does not fail because people are broken. It fails when programs are built and delivered in ways that give the people living through them no role and no voice, and then read the resulting resistance as a personal failing.

The MIT finding from 2025 says the same thing in a new setting. Ninety-five percent of enterprise generative-AI pilots produce no measurable return, and the researchers were explicit that the cause is organizational rather than technical. The tool is capable. The adoption work is what breaks. Different decade, different technology, same lesson, and the intervention has been aimed at the wrong layer the whole time.

Every resistance pattern resolves to one of three human needs.

Self-Determination Theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester and built out across the decades since the 1980s, identifies three basic psychological needs that drive motivation: Competence, Autonomy, and Relatedness. When one of them is threatened, disengagement follows.

The theory was not written for organizational change. It was written for human behavior under challenge, transition, and constraint, which is a fair description of what a transformation does to the people inside it. That is why it maps so cleanly onto what practitioners actually see.

SteadMark classifies resistance patterns against these three needs, with a Kotter overlay for where the initiative sits in its arc. The recommendation it delivers speaks to the specific need under pressure for this person, in this change, on this morning.

The work happens at the pattern level rather than the person level. The product is built to read patterns in connected team communication and to keep internal classification detail below the change-function tier, so that what reaches a line manager is a name and a next move rather than the model output behind it. That is an architectural commitment, and it is the one the permission layer is being built to enforce.

Pattern recognition built from repetition.

Before SteadMark, there were many years reading rooms as a paramedic in Palm Springs and San Diego, working Coachella weekends. Jim Sullivan learned to walk into a room, assess it in seconds, and act on what he saw.

The skill is not intuition. It is pattern recognition built from repetition. You see the same presentation enough times that the read becomes automatic. You act before you can fully explain why. The frameworks behind the read he had studied earlier, in the lab.

Jim Sullivan

Founder, SteadMark · Former paramedic, Palm Springs and San Diego

Earlier in his career, as an undergraduate researcher at Northeastern University’s IASlab with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and at UCSD’s Dr. Winkielman Affect and Cognition Lab, Jim studied the behavioral science that became the foundation for this work. Emotion construction. Affect and cognition. The patterns had names. The reads had frameworks.

The question that stayed with him: what does a manager do with a team member in a resistance pattern when they have 90 seconds before the next standup? The paramedic answer is: you read the room, you name what you see, and you act on it before the situation escalates. SteadMark delivers that read, every morning, grounded in decades of behavioral science.

SteadMark names people. That is the design, not an oversight.

A recommendation that cannot be acted on is not a recommendation. SteadMark tells a manager who needs a conversation today, rather than that some people on the team may be experiencing change fatigue. The specificity is the value, and naming a person is a deliberate position rather than a thing that slipped through.

That position creates a real obligation, and we state it plainly to every customer, to every employee whose communication is read, and to ourselves. It rests on four mechanisms.

On the data side, SteadMark reads the team channels you connect. Channel ingestion is live, and the direct-message and private-channel pipelines are being removed before any customer deployment. The read is held as a behavioral pattern rather than a transcript.

We say all of this plainly because the honesty constraint in our values requires it. The product reads workplace communication. That is powerful and it is intrusive, and we would rather name that directly than soften it into something it is not.

If you are running a change program right now, we want to hear from you.

SteadMark is in design partner development. We are working with a small group of change practitioners and the managers they support to build the product that will hold up in production, in real organizations, against real Tuesday mornings.

If the 7:30 AM email at the top of this page would change how you start your week, that is the fifteen-minute conversation we want to have.