Hostility, resistance, complexity, anxiety: these are the four forces that obstruct anyone innovating inside a complex organization, and that I group in the book under the acronym O.R.C.A. Here I focus on the first one.
When you try to change something in a large organization, you step on someone's toes. Always. You break silos, touch habits, shift balances of power — and people react. That reaction has a name: hostility. In the model it is the first letter, and not by chance: it is the force you meet first, and often the one you recognize last.
What hostility actually is
The hostility you meet in innovation projects has little to do with aversion to new ideas as such. It is a physiological reaction of complex organizations: an active form of opposition — more relational than ideological — towards a change perceived as a threat. And it often targets the person promoting or representing the project more than the project itself. In my experience it comes in three main flavours:
Hostility out of conviction. Those who believe the project is wrong, or even harmful to the organization. The most honest variant: at least there is substance to argue about.
Hostility out of interest. Those who acknowledge the project's value but experience it as a risk to their role, their autonomy, or their sphere of influence.
Hostility out of competition. Rivalry over the visibility or leadership of the project, which in the worst cases slides into sabotage or delegitimization.
The public sector is particularly fertile ground for all three. Top-down, siloed structures where each team works end-to-end on its own piece with little cross-functionality; a historical distrust of anything coming from outside; and the deep-rooted habit of "doing everything in-house" — motivated by understandable reasons such as the fear of technology lock-in, but with the side effect of reinventing the wheel every single time, usually at higher cost and below market standards. In such an ecosystem, every change is read first and foremost as a threat to the existing equilibrium.
Change experienced as loss
The emotional engine of hostility is almost always the same: change perceived as loss. In public administration, roles and working practices are the result of years of sedimentation. People don't simply perform a task: they identify with it. When a project touches procedures, decision flows or working tools, it isn't merely modifying a process — it is touching a piece of the professional identity of whoever has guarded that process for years.
That is the space where hostility is born: an emotional reaction to the loss of control, well before any judgement on the project's merits. And in public-sector contexts it rarely shows up in the open. It shows up as meetings that multiply, requests for further checks, restrictive interpretations of the rules: behaviours that formally respect every regulation and, in practice, put the brakes on everything.
Latent versus overt
Overt hostility is the kind you can see: direct opposition, criticism in meetings, formal memos, negative opinions. The classic executive who, feeling excluded from the process, questions the project's legitimacy or discovers regulatory obstacles for it. Or the subtler campaigns: repeated doubts about the team's competence, irony about the language used, endless requests for clarifications and revisions. Unpleasant, sure. But at least it is visible, and what is visible can be dealt with.
Latent hostility is another matter. It is the sneakiest and most widespread form: systematic delays, steps that "get lost" between desks, postponed meetings, strategic silences at decision points. Sometimes it takes the shape of purely cosmetic agreement — "yes, of course, we're on board" — followed by total immobility. The example I always use: the team that formally approves the adoption of the new digital tool and then keeps using the old paper forms "just in case". Nobody ever said no. The change simply doesn't happen.
Latent hostility works in the shadows and can slowly erode the project's energy, until the change fizzles out without anyone ever having openly opposed it.
The countermoves
First: communicate, in the serious sense of the word. In innovation projects, communication means the active management of perceptions and fears — a far cry from the internal newsletter. Hostility almost always stems from a sense of threat — fear of losing role, recognition, control — and communication serves to defuse exactly that fear: explaining honestly why the change is necessary, what it actually entails and, above all, what it does not touch. It also has to be personalized: some fear losing status, others fear lacking the skills to adapt, others simply fear not being heard. Answering different fears in a targeted way is what separates a productive conversation from a sterile conflict.
Second: bring the opponents on board. It sounds counterintuitive, but those who show hostility often hold precious information about the system's weak points — they have spent years guarding it. Including the sceptics in the process, even just in the exploratory phases, produces two virtuous effects: it reduces hostility, because by participating they understand the goals and feel part of the change; and it creates internal sponsors, because a former opponent defending the project is infinitely more credible than the person who proposed it. There are limits, of course: the strategy works when the obstacles are more emotional than rational, and when timelines allow for gradual inclusion.
Third: leadership that shows up. Authoritative sponsors are good for much more than securing resources: they legitimize the change, reduce uncertainty and create the psychological safety people need in order to expose themselves.
Leadership must not stop at declaring its support: it must be there, participate, respond, be seen.
A leader who openly defends the project and explains its value becomes a figure of guarantee, capable of turning hostility into constructive confrontation. Without that cover, even the most promising projects end up wearing themselves out in the desert of everyday opposition — and latent hostility, which is the sand of that desert, wins by attrition.
In short
Budget for hostility from day one: out of conviction, interest or competition, someone will experience your project as a threat. The overt version is handled by arguing the merits. The latent version can only be handled by surfacing it — with communication that takes fears seriously, with opponents turned into allies, and with leadership physically present. The invisible enemy stops being dangerous at the exact moment it stops being invisible.