Back in March, someone posted in r/analytics with a subject that made me wince: hired as a "Foundational Data Lead" to modernize, only to realize he was "just a flashpoint for executive dysfunction." Four months in, he'd diagnosed it himself. Nobody had agreed on what "modernization" meant before they hired him. He'd run into "a significant wall of executive level dissonance regarding the roadmap," a messy ERP migration off Access, and a culture he said put "ego-stroking" ahead of basic structure. He ended with two questions: how do you explain a four-month stint on your resume, and when's the best time to walk?
The best reply in the thread said it sounded "less like a failure and more like you were hired into a company that wanted the idea of modernization without any of the change that comes with it." Another commenter had been in the same spot and got laid off before he could quit.
Kris Saling wrote about the same decision from the other side, in a piece on her Substack, The Talent Code, called "When to Walk Away." Kris led talent management and people analytics in the US Army and now writes for HR leaders about AI and people data. Her piece is for the person leading a change effort that won't get off the ground. She borrows a term from Army air assault, cutting slingload: dropping a load that's gone wrong mid-flight so you don't lose the aircraft. Her version of the problem: "there's a point where pushing harder stops being perseverance and starts being waste."
Cutting Slingload
A thing that really resonated with me in Kris's piece is the line she draws between two kinds of pushback. Temporary resistance comes from uncertainty, overload or not-invented-here, and better communication, a few small wins and visible leadership support can fix it. Terminal opposition comes from deep structural misalignment, entrenched politics, or "leadership turnover that removes your champions." That kind won't shift without a big change in the environment. Temporary resistance calls for persistence. Terminal opposition calls for a pivot or an exit.
She's also honest about why capable people keep pushing past the point: sunk cost, fear of looking like a failure, overconfidence, and attachment to the idea. I recognized myself in at least two of those.
Put her framework next to the Reddit post and the data lead is clearly looking at terminal opposition. The leaders who hired him never agreed on what they were hiring him to change.
I Can Vouch for This One
I've hit this wall twice this year, at two very different companies.
At a seventy-person startup, a VP brought me in to automate how one of their teams worked. I built the pieces: meeting transcripts flowing straight into their project management tool as tracked action items, plus reporting integrations and dashboards generated on top. All of it stalled at adoption. The VP was effectively in the Operator Seat, holding the place together day to day, but the founder wasn't behind him. When he pushed on something the CEO didn't want to hear, his projects stopped, and soon after the founder told him to let me go (the founder and I had never even met).
At a large enterprise, my sponsor tried to empower me in the seat to fill some of the Operator Vacuum in her org. The warning signs were there early. I ran into plenty of what Kris's checklist calls resistance: pushing on the same points again and again with no movement from the people who mattered, and pushback rooted in structure and politics that weren't going to change any time soon. But my sponsor kept backing me to take charge, so it read as resistance I could still work through. Then a senior executive above her left, and almost immediately she asked me to back off a couple of the things I'd been building as priorities just the week before, because a lot of things in the org were up in the air. Not long after, she left too, and by then the decision was clear.
I'd work for either of them again. Both were good operators being eaten alive by their orgs, and Kris would file both situations under terminal opposition.
Who Backs Your Champion?
Kris gets close to this. Her self-check at the end asks, "Have key sponsors or champions moved on, leaving no one at the top actively advocating for it?" That describes my enterprise story exactly. It doesn't describe the startup one. My champion there never moved on. He was in the building every day, advocating hard. The person above him just didn't back him.
A champion can still be around, working hard and right about the problem, and have nothing behind them.
Each of my sponsors was backing me with authority they'd been lent themselves, by someone who either never committed to the change or was about to leave. When that person checked out, the backing evaporated, theirs first and mine right after.
You can only lend an operator the backing you actually have.
Borrowed backing holds up fine for a surprisingly long time. It gets you a budget, a title and permission to build (and building rarely needs much authority anyway. You mostly need to be left alone.)
Adoption is where it runs out. Adoption means somebody else has to change how they work, and the first time they push back, someone has to spend authority to back the change. Your sponsor can only spend what they have. That's why the sign to watch for is work that keeps getting built and then stalling at adoption. The data lead's wall of executive dissonance is the same sign, seen from four months in.
So the question I'd add to Kris's list, and put first: whose backing is your champion running on? If it's someone who has never engaged with the work, or someone with one foot out the door, you're on borrowed backing however good the work is.
Why I'd Skip the Scorecard
Kris's self-check has ten questions, and the score decides the call: zero to three yeses means stay the course, four to six means pause or pivot, seven or more means it's likely time to cut the load. I like a checklist for remembering what to look at. A count of yeses won't tell you which item matters, though, and in my experience one of them usually decides it. Tick only the champions box and the score tells you to stay the course. At the enterprise, I'd have ticked both resistance boxes for months, and the score would have told me to keep going, which is what I did. The champions box is the one that changed the answer.
She's also writing for the person who owns the effort, the one who can pause it, pivot it or pull the plug. The data lead doesn't own the modernization, and I didn't own either of the transformations I described above. People in our position can't pull the plug on someone else's project. We can only decide whether to keep spending ourselves on it.
Giving Up or Reading the Wall?
The test that settled it for me: name the one change that would have to happen for the work to land, then name who could effect that change. If the answer is someone above anyone you can reach, or who has shown no engagement, the lever was never in your hands - this is terminal opposition. Giving up, on the other hand, would be stopping while you're the one holding the lever.
By that test the data lead already has his answer, and the commenter who told him "the signal is already there" was right.
If you're the one bringing someone in to fix something, run it from the other end: who above you would have to want it fixed, and have they said so?