The Misread: Why Structural Friction Gets Read As Individual Resistance, with Jenny Vazquez-Newsum

Somewhere in your organization right now, there is an initiative that is not landing. Adoption is thinner than the plan said it would be. The middle of the building has gone quiet. The people you were counting on are asking a lot of procedural questions and almost no enthusiastic ones. So a meeting gets called, and in that meeting somebody says the word: resistance. Or they say it more gently. Change fatigue. A communication problem. Not everyone is bought in yet. With one word, the problem moved. It stopped being something about the organization and became something about the people inside it, and the fix followed the diagnosis: more training, better messaging, a session on adaptability and resilience. What almost nobody says in that meeting is that the conditions those people are working inside would produce exactly this behavior from anyone, including everyone in the room.

Jenny Vazquez-Newsum has spent two decades on that gap. She came up through Coro Southern California, where she served as vice president of leadership training and programs, has worked with more than 500 leaders across more than 200 organizations, holds a doctorate in education from UCLA, and is the author of Untapped Leadership (2023). She is the founder and CEO of Untapped Leaders, and she built a method called contextual agility, which runs on four lenses: lived insight, systems thinking, personal agency, and shared vision.

The conversation runs from what is really underneath a people problem (no challenge is just a people challenge), through history as a mechanism and one reading of a philanthropic organization that came in for hiring and found its culture, into the four lenses and why they are not a sequence, every leader's default lens, structural silence and whose reading counts as data, and Jenny's elephant: all of us are too close to one somewhere, and the higher you sit, the closer you are. Then the Untapped Capacity Index and the finding that systems thinking comes back lowest because those are the questions about power, how to keep an index of the system from becoming one more thing the system produces, what a method built on reading conditions does when the reading is increasingly done by AI, the 48-hour decision and the minimum viable reading of a system, and the one assumption Jenny wishes leaders would stop making: that the people experiencing the problem do not have the answers.

Research referenced: Lee Ross (the fundamental attribution error), Edgar Schein (layers of culture and Humble Inquiry), Dorothy Leonard-Barton (core capabilities and core rigidities), Donella Meadows and Jay Forrester (leverage points), Patricia Hill Collins (the outsider within), Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe (high reliability organizations), Subrahmaniam Tangirala and Rangaraj Ramanujam (procedural justice climate and employee silence), Robert Austin and Peter Blau (measurement dysfunction).

Full transcript and resources: https://www.2040digital.com/human-factor-podcast/human-factor-podcast-season-3-episode-036-the-misread-why-structural-friction-gets-read-as-individual-resistance/
Find Jenny at https://www.untappedleaders.com and on LinkedIn. Untapped Leadership: Harnessing the Power of Underrepresented Leaders is available wherever books are sold.
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The Truth About Transformation: Leading in the Age of AI, Uncertainty and Human Complexity: https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Transformation-Uncertainty-Complexity-ebook/dp/B0G3HSBZKD/