The headlines for the AM industry from 2015 and 2016 were specific in their promises. “Additive manufacturing to grow 40% annually, disrupting traditional supply chains by 2020.” “3D printing: the revolution that will change everything.”
None of it landed quite the way the industry expected, and the technology has spent the years since stuck in what Alison Wyrick-Mendoza, Founder and Managing Director of Outlook Lab, describes as “trough of disillusionment,” from Gartner’s Hype Cycle framework. This is nowhere more visible than in aerospace additive manufacturing, where the promise of on-demand, flight-ready parts has yet to fully materialize.
Wyrick-Mendoza, a communications strategist most recently responsible for getting 60,000 employees to adopt enterprise AI, delivered her argument at our Additive Manufacturing Advantage: Aerospace, Space and Defense 2025 stating that the stalling “is not about additive’s technical prowess, but a fundamental disconnect in how its value is communicated.” In addition to her communications work, she has been serving as a consultant with ASTM International for the past year.
To diagnose that disconnect, she drew on Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at Wharton whose book “The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind” maps six psychological barriers that block adoption. Berger’s framework, which he calls REDUCE, covers Reactance, Endowment, Distance, Uncertainty, Corroborating Evidence, and Encouragement of others.
Wyrick-Mendoza applied each barrier to three audiences she considers decisive such as engineers and operations teams inside companies, external investors, and regulators and policymakers.
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How to Counter Resistance and Attachment
The first barrier is reactance, the tendency of people to resist ideas more strongly the harder they are pushed. “Instead of asking how could I change someone’s mind,” Wyrick-Mendoza said, “a catalyst will ask why haven’t they changed it already? What’s stopping them?” Her prescription for internal teams is to offer AM as one option among several that engineers can select for problems they have already identified themselves.
For investors, she recommended workshops that never mention the technology by name at the outset, letting participants reason their way to it. “This makes them feel like strategic partners who discovered the opportunity, rather than being sold a prepackaged idea.”
The second barrier, endowment, is rooted in loss aversion. People overvalue what they currently have, including inefficient processes, simply because possession creates attachment. Rather than presenting adoption as a new cost, Wyrick-Mendoza recommends surfacing what the existing process is already costing, going beyond material and labor to include tooling storage, inventory bloat, scrap rates, and rework.
“This isn’t spending on additive,” she said. “It is recapturing funds already bleeding from their budget.” For policymakers, the same calculus applies at a national scale. “Investing in domestic additive capability isn’t a new expenditure. It is a reclamation of strategic independence and a restoration of national resilience that we are actively losing by maintaining the status quo.”
Describing how far a proposed change sits from someone’s existing worldview, the third barrier is distance. Push too far outside the zone of acceptance and the audience disengages before the argument is made.
Wyrick-Mendoza used a football field as an example. The audience starts on their own one-yard line, and a single long pass rarely works. Short gains, compounded, do. She flagged the importance of identifying the “movable middle,” people already closer to center field whose movement builds momentum among those further back.
For investors still carrying scepticism from past AM cycles, she suggested grounding the conversation in technologies that cleared similar hurdles, pointing to “the early days of SaaS adoption, or cloud computing, or even robotics in manufacturing, which were once niche and perceived as risky, but are now ubiquitous.”
When asked whether AI could serve as one of those parallel examples, she did not hesitate. “Absolutely. For the most part, a lot of what I’ve just talked about, you could essentially take additive out and just put emerging tech.”
The enterprise AI adoption work she described, bringing a 60,000-person workforce onto a technology that fundamentally changed how they operated, ran into the same barriers. “A lot of what I talked about today is highly applicable to that technology as well,” she said.
Reducing Risk and Building Social Proof
Returning to the REDUCE framework, the fourth barrier uncertainty is about risk perception. It explains why people default to the familiar even when they know it is costing them. “Knowing that we’ll be late to a meeting feels bad, but wondering if we’ll get there on time or not feels worse,” Wyrick-Mendoza said. The answer is lower stakes for trying.
For internal teams, she recommended a micro-application sprint: the company identifies a single high-pain, low-risk component, designs and prints it at subsidized or no cost, and hands it over with before-and-after performance data. “The key is that this is not just a trial. It is a solved problem delivered.” For investors, she proposed a contained joint venture targeting one product line and one regulated market.
“It is a sandbox for their money in a highly controlled environment.” For policymakers, she recommended interactive policy simulations where officials input variables such as a specific dollar figure in tax incentives and immediately see projected job growth in their own districts.
But, data alone rarely closes the gap. That is the premise behind the fifth barrier, corroborating evidence. Her reference point was Tang, the powdered orange drink developed by General Foods in 1957 that sat largely ignored until NASA used it on space missions. Nobody at NASA issued a testimonial. The association did the work. According to Wyrick-Mendoza, this example was first shared by Nancy Harhut, HBT Marketing, on a panel at the Honeywell Advanced Mobility Policy Summit in Washington, D.C., in September 2024.
“The public saw astronauts consuming Tang, which implicitly endorsed the product,” she said. “NASA wasn’t a part of the initial introduction, but it was rather its use by NASA that became a massive marketing catalyst.” She argued, for AM the equivalent is a visible coalition of materials producers, software developers, contract manufacturers, and blue-chip end users collectively investing in and standardizing AM processes.
Individual proof points can be dismissed. Convergent adoption by recognizable names is harder to ignore.
The sixth and final barrier, encouragement of others, is where social proof comes in. “We are deeply influenced by what others, especially those we consider peers, competitors, or trusted figures, are doing,” Wyrick-Mendoza said. She recommended a rotating centre of excellence roadshow for internal teams, where departments that have implemented AM successfully host brief, interactive sessions for colleagues elsewhere.
“This is not a corporate presentation,” she said. “It is a peer-to-peer demonstration where colleagues from inside the trenches showcase their additive successes firsthand.” For investors, she proposed an industry pioneer consortium of non-competing players across the AM value chain, bringing together materials producers, software developers, contract manufacturers, and blue-chip end users.
The signal such a group sends is different in kind from a single company’s pitch. It suggests not just that AM works, but that the market has already decided.
Laid end to end, the six barriers point to the same underlying problem. The issue is rarely that people lack information about AM. It is that the information is being delivered in ways that trigger resistance, attachment to existing processes, cognitive disengagement, paralysis, or simple disbelief.
“Becoming a catalyst isn’t about being pushy, nor is it about relying solely on technical superiority,” Wyrick-Mendoza said. “It is about profoundly understanding the human psychology of resistance and then systematically dismantling those barriers.”
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