CONCEPT
Foot-Dragging
The deliberate slowing of adoption through means that cannot be distinguished from legitimate difficulty — the most universal and most deniable of the weapons of the weak.
Foot-dragging is the tactic Scott found in every setting where a subordinate group faced an imposed change. Its essential design feature is the exploitation of plausible difficulty: the resister extends the adoption timeline beyond its natural duration, buying time during which existing practices remain operative, while each individual delay is explicable as legitimate obstacle rather than political choice. The developer who takes three weeks to 'integrate' an AI tool that could be set up in an afternoon is not refusing; she is proceeding carefully, encountering unexpected challenges, being thorough. The exploitation of informational asymmetry — the manager cannot distinguish genuine from strategic difficulty — is the foot-dragger's primary resource, and AI adoption is abundant in such asymmetry because the tools are new enough that nobody has a reliable baseline for how long adoption 'should' take.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Scott documented foot-dragging across dozens of settings: peasants stretching the harvest, factory workers extending breaks, slaves performing tasks slightly slower than the overseer's ideal pace. The tactic's universality