Guest: Dr. Michelle Pipes, Creator of Joyful Change and Author of Stewarding Joyful Change.

Picture the dashboard for a change initiative that is about halfway through. Milestones green. Budget tracking. Adoption counted by logins. Now picture the floor where the change is actually landing. People are tired. Nobody is sure what it means for their job. The managers have stopped asking questions because the answers never change anything. The dashboard measures the mechanics. The human signal went dark, and no one built a gauge for that.

Dr. Michelle Pipes built one. She has spent more than two decades in organizational development, change management, and strategic communications, much of it inside STEM, higher education, and corporate environments. She has been Prosci certified since 2002 and consulted on the original foundational Prosci text, which is what makes her view of where the established models stop short so credible. What she built in response is Joyful Change, and at its center the Joyful Change Quotient, which tracks six human signals that decide how a change lands: Meaning, Safety, Belonging, Progress, Recognition, and Play.

This conversation ran long and earned every minute, so it arrives in two parts. Part 1 covers where the established models stop short and why Michelle argues that change itself has changed; why resistance is a readout rather than an obstacle, and what a leader does differently on Monday morning once they start reading signals; the six signals and the research underneath them, from Edmondson on psychological safety to Amabile and Kramer on progress, Baumeister and Leary on belonging, and Deci and Ryan on motivation; and what a leader owes people the moment they start measuring how change feels.

Along the way: polished reporting and why decisions made far from the impact are not made on reality; the invisible backpack of personal change every employee carries into work; the shared carry architecture of executive stewards, designers of fit, and navigators; why "great work, team" is the laziest thing a leader can say; and why launch is the beginning, not the end.

Part 2 arrives October 22: what happens to the six signals when the new colleague is not a person, change accumulation, Personal Change Management, and the reflection question this season asks every guest.

Host: Kevin Novak, CEO of 2040 Digital, Professor at the University of Maryland, and author of The Truth About Transformation: Leading in the Age of AI, Uncertainty and Human Complexity.

Episode page and transcript: https://www.2040digital.com/human-factor-podcast/human-factor-podcast-season-3-episode-037-measuring-what-change-feels-like-the-joyful-change-quotient-and-the-signals-leaders-miss-part-1/
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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.
Subscribe to the Ideas and Innovations newsletter: https://www.2040digital.com/home-2/ideas-and-innovations-newsletter-home-page-explore-all-issues/
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/

S3 Ep 4|035 The Missing Half of Change Management: Why Transformation Has a Model for Everything Except the Person Inside It, with Dr Grant Van Ulbrich

Think about the last transformation you were part of. Not the one you led, the one that happened to you. There was a plan for it, a process, a communications calendar, a training schedule, an adoption curve with your name somewhere on it. The organization had a model for every piece of that change except for you. Nobody handed you a way to work out what you felt about it. Nobody asked whether you agreed with it. The model assumed you would resist for a while and then eventually accept, and the whole machine was built to wait you out.

Dr Grant Van Ulbrich noticed what the field skipped. An air traffic controller on the USS Carl Vinson, then more than twenty years in the cruise industry, where he launched the first modern luxury retail travel sales centers at sea and founded the Royal Caribbean Group's first Office of Diversity and Inclusion, he sat in a master's classroom in London looking at thirty change management models and asked a question the room could not answer: if a person can accept change and can reject it, why does every model end in acceptance? The model he built, Scared So What, treats rejecting the change as a legitimate outcome, a decision rather than a stage to be managed.

The conversation runs from the moment Grant went looking and found nothing, through the Navy that shaped him and then discharged him, into the right to say no (Brehm's reactance, Piderit's ambivalence, and why leaders find a workforce that can think for itself so frightening), the London police assessor who was never told he was allowed to feel, and the model walked through letter by letter in an AI rollout. Then scaling: the supervisor who says ask IT and the trust that breaks in that instant, the difference between change and transformation, an anonymized case where rejecting the change was the right answer and nobody quit, and the measurement thread that anchors the season: Campbell's law, what aggregated Scared states tell a leadership team that an engagement survey cannot, and how you keep an instrument honest when it asks people to admit they are conflicted. It closes on AI and bias, the one assumption Grant wishes leaders would stop making, and what transformation would look like if every plan had to answer what happens to the person.

Research referenced: James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente (stages of change), Jack Brehm (psychological reactance), Sandy Piderit (ambivalence), Shaul Oreg (dispositional resistance to change), Donald Campbell (Campbell's law), Jennifer Kish-Gephart and colleagues (fear at work), William Bridges (transitions), Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and Nancy Kline (Time to Think).

Full transcript and resources: https://www.2040digital.com/human-factor-podcast/human-factor-podcast-season-3-episode-035-the-missing-half-of-change-management-why-transformation-has-a-model-for-everything-except-the-person-inside-it/
Find Grant at https://drgrant.com and https://thepcmcompany.com, and on LinkedIn. The first-generation Scared So What app is free on the Apple and Android app stores.
Subscribe to the Ideas and Innovations newsletter: https://www.2040digital.com/home-2/ideas-and-innovations-newsletter-home-page-explore-all-issues/
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/