Inoculate Against the Inevitable

The most powerful thing you can say before a change initiative launches costs nothing and takes two minutes. Almost no one says it.

Keith Laplante

Thirty-five years leading inside organizations (TD Waterhouse, BMO, HomeEquity Bank) and advising alongside them (Accenture, ExperiencePoint, The Refinery Leadership Partners). Facilitated leadership programs at Harvard, Duke, and Stanford. Read more about Keith

"What creates disengagement isn't difficulty. It's unexpected difficulty."

August 4, 2026

Inoculate Against the Inevitable

The most powerful thing you can say before a change initiative launches costs nothing and takes two minutes. Almost no one says it.

I want to start this one with a small scene from ordinary life, because I think it illustrates something leaders miss all the time.

Imagine you've hired a contractor to renovate your kitchen. The good ones, the experienced ones, sit down with you before the work begins and walk you through what's about to happen. They talk about the timeline. They talk about the design. And somewhere in that conversation, they say something like this, "...at some point during this project, probably around the middle, it's going to look like a disaster. The walls are going to be open. There's going to be dust everywhere. You won't have a functioning kitchen. And you're going to wonder whether you made a mistake by starting this. That's normal. It's part of the process. When it happens, don't panic. It doesn't mean the project is failing. It means we're in the middle of it."

Now imagine that same contractor had never said any of that. Imagine you signed the contract, they started the work, and three weeks in you walked into your house to find your kitchen torn apart, your floors covered in debris, and no clear sense of when it would end. What would you think? You might think the project was going wrong. You'd probably call the contractor and demand answers. You'd certainly start second-guessing your decision. You might even try to stop the work.

The difference between those two experiences isn't the reality of what's happening. The reality is identical. What's different is whether you were told, in advance, what to expect.

What contractors know that most leaders don't

The technical term for what the contractor is doing in that scenario is inoculation. It's borrowed from medicine. You expose someone to a small, controlled version of something they're going to encounter in a larger form later, and it prepares their system to handle it without breaking down.

In leadership, inoculation works the same way. You tell people, before a change initiative starts, what's going to feel hard about it. You name the performance dip. You name the frustration. You name the moment when it's going to feel like the change isn't working. You describe, honestly and specifically, what your people are likely to experience along the way.

You do this not to scare them, and not to lower their expectations. You do it to prepare them for a moment that would otherwise feel like a failure, and to help them recognize that moment as a normal part of the process rather than a sign that everything is going wrong.

This is one of the most powerful, most under-used tools in change leadership. It costs nothing. It takes almost no time. And almost no leader does it.

Why leaders don't do this

The reason leaders don't inoculate is easy to understand once you think about it.

At the start of a change initiative, the instinct is to build energy. You want people to feel excited. You want them to see the possibility. You want momentum. And you worry, understandably, that if you spend time talking about what's going to be hard, you'll undermine the energy you're trying to build.

There's also a subtler reason. Naming the difficulty in advance feels, to a lot of leaders, like giving people a reason to disengage. If I tell them it's going to be hard, won't some of them decide not to try? Won't I create the resistance I'm trying to avoid?

The evidence, and my experience, suggests the opposite is true. What creates disengagement isn't difficulty. It's unexpected difficulty. What creates loss of confidence isn't the performance dip. It's the performance dip you weren't warned about. When people hit a hard moment in a change they were told would be smooth, they conclude the change isn't working. When they hit the same hard moment in a change they were told to expect, they push through it, because they understand it's part of the process rather than a signal to stop.

Inoculation doesn't reduce commitment. It protects commitment from the predictable moments that would otherwise erode it.

What good inoculation actually sounds like

I want to be specific about what this looks like, because it's easy to get wrong.

Bad inoculation is vague. It sounds like, this is going to be a journey and there will be ups and downs along the way. That kind of language is so generic that it doesn't prepare anyone for anything. It's a phrase leaders use to feel like they've done the acknowledgment without actually doing it.

Good inoculation is concrete. It names specific things. It sounds like, in about three months, you're going to hit a point where the new system feels slower than the old one, because you're learning it and not yet fluent. That's the moment when most change initiatives lose people, because it feels like the system is worse rather than that the learning isn't finished. When you hit that moment, and you will, remember that it's exactly what we expected. It doesn't mean anything's gone wrong.

That kind of specificity does something the vague version can't. It tells your people that you actually understand what they're about to experience. It signals that you've thought this through. It gives them a mental placeholder for the hard moment, so when it arrives, they can recognize it and put it in context rather than treating it as a crisis.

The hopes and fears companion

There's a companion practice that pairs well with inoculation, and I want to mention it briefly.

Before a change initiative launches, get your people talking, openly and honestly, about what they're hoping for and what they're worried about. Not a survey. An actual conversation, in small groups where people feel safe enough to say real things.

What you learn from this is often more valuable than what any communication plan will tell you. You'll hear concerns you hadn't considered. You'll hear hopes you didn't know people had. You'll get an accurate picture of what your people are actually bringing into the change, which lets you shape your communication and support around what they actually need rather than what you assume they need.

You'll also, and this is the part leaders often don't appreciate, do a version of inoculation just by inviting the conversation. The act of naming fears openly, in a room where the leader is listening seriously and not dismissing them, defuses much of their power. Fears that stay unspoken tend to grow. Fears that get named and heard tend to shrink.

Combined with a good inoculation, the hopes and fears conversation sets up a change initiative on a foundation that most launches never get. Your people know what to expect. They've been heard about their concerns. And they trust that the leader in front of them is engaging with reality rather than pretending it isn't there.

The uncomfortable question for leaders

If you're about to launch a change of any consequence, ask yourself this. Have you told your people, specifically and concretely, what's going to be hard about it? Have you named the moment when the change is going to feel like it's failing? Have you given them the mental framework they'll need to recognize that moment for what it is when it arrives?

If the honest answer is no, then you've done something most leaders do. You've optimized the launch for energy at the expense of durability. The initiative will start well. But when the predictable hard moment arrives, your people will experience it as evidence that the change isn't working, because nothing you said prepared them for anything else.

Inoculation is one of the cheapest, most powerful tools in change leadership. It doesn't take a communication campaign. It doesn't require a budget. It takes two minutes at the front end of a change conversation to name, honestly, what your people are going to experience along the way.

Two minutes.

Most leaders can't be persuaded to spend them.

The ones who do get change initiatives that hold together when the middle gets hard.