People don’t resist change. They resist being surprised by it.
I want to be honest with you upfront: I didn’t figure this out quickly or gracefully. I figured it out in a faculty meeting that went sideways, after months of work that should have gone better, wondering how something so obviously good for students had become so contentious so fast.
We had built a partnership program — a streamlined pathway for community college students to transfer to a university, cutting through the bureaucratic tangle that causes so many students to fall through the cracks. A small team of us had developed the idea, gotten the go-ahead, and started working out the logistics. We were proud of it. We should have been.
And then we told the faculty.
What followed was not the enthusiastic embrace of an obviously student-centered innovation. It was an uproar. Because from where they sat, they hadn’t been part of a conversation — they’d been handed the conclusion of one. Their curriculum, their advising relationships, their daily workflow: all of it was changing, and the first they were hearing about it was in a meeting called to figure out implementation.
Nobody had intended it to go that way. We all wanted the same thing. We just started the conversation about sixty days too late.
The diagnosis is usually wrong
When communication breaks down in organizations, we tend to diagnose it as a message problem. We tell ourselves we need a better deck, a cleaner narrative, a more compelling close. So we go back and work on those things. And then we’re surprised when it still doesn’t land.
But the diagnosis is wrong. And because it’s wrong, the prescription doesn’t work.
Most communication failures aren’t about what was said. They’re about when.
Start too late — when the decision is already made, the plan already built, the rollout already scheduled — and even the best message has to do the impossible. It must inform, persuade, and build trust all at once, in a single high-stakes moment, with people who are processing the idea for the very first time. You’ve framed it as buy-in, but what you’re actually asking people to do is catch up. That’s not bringing people along. That’s dragging them behind you and wondering why there’s so much friction.
What earlier actually looks like
The framework I use is called Shift-Left Communication — borrowed from software development, where “shifting left” means moving quality checks earlier in the process, closer to where the work is created rather than where it ships. The logic is simple: find problems while they’re still cheap to fix.
Applied to human communication, the principle is the same. Move the real conversation upstream. Not a formal presentation. Not a polished argument. Just: here’s what we’re thinking about, here’s why it matters, here’s what we’ll be asking you to weigh in on, and here’s what’s at stake if we don’t figure this out together.
This does something specific in the brain. Research on what psychologist Robert Zajonc called the mere exposure effect shows that repeated, low-stakes familiarity with an idea reliably increases positive reception of it. In plain language: people are more comfortable with things they’ve seen before. Surprise is expensive. Familiarity lowers the social cost of change.
When you start earlier, people have time to absorb an idea before they’re asked to decide on it. They ask questions while there’s still room to incorporate the answers. They feel like participants rather than recipients. And by the time the formal decision arrives, it doesn’t feel like a risk. It feels like the next logical step.
This isn’t just an organizational problem
I’ve watched this play out in conference rooms and technology rollouts and employee lifecycle announcements. I’ve also watched it play out in marriages, in families, in any relationship where someone kept finding reasons to defer the conversation until the moment it couldn’t wait anymore.
The neuroscience of trust doesn’t change depending on whether you’re rolling out an enterprise software system or telling your partner something that’s been sitting on your chest for six months. The timing principle is the same.
Start earlier than feels necessary. Earlier than feels comfortable. Earlier than feels ready.
It almost always is.
Shift-Left Communication is the framework at the center of Corrie’s speaking, workshops, and coaching work — and the subject of her forthcoming book, Start as You Mean to Go On. If this resonated, you might also like [Post 2 link]. Or if you’re ready to bring this thinking to your team, let’s talk.
