The old strategy does not leave when the new one arrives: what looks like resistance may be the organisation repeating what previously worked.
Why it matters when the plan changes
An organisation is accumulated context. The priorities that received attention and funding, the incentives that paid out, and the shortcuts that became sensible through repetition were all built deliberately for the strategy being replaced. Donald Sull called the result active inertia: in his case work, companies facing dramatic shifts in their environment got stuck in their tried-and-true activities and responded by accelerating them.
The tension is that inherited logic is usually correct for the past. Calling it resistance points the response at people, who then defend reasonable habits. Treating it as design points the response at the specific priority, incentive or habit that still points elsewhere. Only 11% of managers in the Sull, Homkes and Sull study believed all their company's strategic priorities were resourced, a plausible sign of funding still following the old logic.
In practice
A family business is bought by a fund that wants margin over volume. A year later the sales bonus still pays on revenue, the monthly review still opens with order intake, and regional heads still approve discounts to win volume. Nobody is refusing the new strategy. Each of those routines is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Evidence
Companies facing dramatic shifts in their environment often respond by accelerating the activities that made them successful, a pattern Donald Sull called active inertia.
Donald N. Sull, Why Good Companies Go Bad, Harvard Business Review (1999)Only 11% of managers believed all their company's strategic priorities had the financial and human resources needed for success.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review (2015)Path dependence is the phenomenon of past events or decisions constraining or defining later events or decisions.
Path dependence, Wikipedia (2026)
What it cannot tell you
Inherited logic explains why a new strategy stalls without saying which inherited element matters most in a given case. Accounts of it differ on how many layers to count, and some inherited habits are worth keeping, so the term invites a diagnosis rather than supplying one.
How Atlas reads it
The organisation is not a fixed constraint. It is accumulated context, and that context can be seen, changed and tested. The reading asks which inherited priority, incentive or habit still points at the previous strategy, and which of them the new plan most depends on moving.
Questions
No. Resistance points at people and invites persuasion. Inherited logic points at priorities, incentives and habits that were built on purpose for the previous strategy and are still working as designed. The response is to change what they reward and route, rather than to argue with the people following them.
In the places nobody revisits when a strategy changes: bonus plans, meeting agendas, approval thresholds, the unwritten route an escalation takes. In 2015 only 11% of managers in the Sull, Homkes and Sull study believed all their company's strategic priorities were resourced, a plausible sign that funding often follows the old logic.
Several things. Donald Sull's Harvard Business Review work in 1999 named it active inertia: companies facing dramatic shifts getting stuck in their tried-and-true activities. Economists and sociologists study the wider phenomenon as path dependence, in which past events or decisions constrain the ones that follow.
Accounts differ. Every version includes priorities, incentives and habits; others add roles, dependencies, decision rights, meetings or information flows. The count matters less than the test: for each element, does it still point at the previous strategy, and does the new plan depend on moving it?
Yes. Much of it encodes hard-won judgement about customers, risk and quality that the new strategy still needs. The work is selective: keep what still serves, change what points the wrong way, and say explicitly which is which, so people are not left to guess which habits the new plan wants kept.