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/
Subscribe to the Ideas and Innovations newsletter: https://www.2040digital.com/home-2/ideas-and-innovations-newsletter-home-page-explore-all-issues/

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/

S3 Episode 3|034 On Scope, On Schedule, Off Purpose: Why Following the Plan Is Not the Same as Realizing the Purpose, with Tina Berger

Here is a project every one of you has been near at some point. It finished on scope. It finished on schedule. It came in on budget, or close enough that nobody had to write a memo. The steering committee signed off. Somebody ordered a cake. And eighteen months later, the value that justified the whole thing had not shown up, and no one could quite say why. It was not the technology, and it was not the people resisting it. Somewhere along the way the organization started managing to the plan and stopped managing to the purpose, and because the plan was the thing being measured, the plan is the thing that got delivered.

Tina Berger has spent more than two decades advising Fortune 500 organizations on digital transformation and major capital and technology investments, much of it inside the energy industry, where capital discipline is about as mature as it gets. She began in the early 1990s as a technical writer, documenting the very processes organizations would later mistake for the point. Her conclusion after thirty years inside execution discipline: organizations optimize for process compliance when the purpose called for value realization.

The conversation runs from the technical writer standing in the gap between the documented work and the real work, through the anatomy of a compliant failure (the project manager who schedules the easiest fifty percent first, pilots that never scale, why people resist risk rather than change, and Diane Vaughan's Challenger finding that the processes worked and the alerts did not), into the front end nobody appreciates, why replicating the last project is not discovery, why staying responsive takes more rigor rather than less, and what belongs on a project dashboard. The last third takes it into AI, where leaders assume their data is as available as public data, and into Tina's book Invest Like a Mother and her memoir Coming Around: what invested means everywhere else in life, the oil and gas CEO who cut the dividend to keep his people, and the one thing Tina hopes leaders stop measuring themselves by.

Research referenced: Julian Orr, and John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (canonical versus actual practice), Diane Vaughan (normalization of deviance), Ronald Heifetz (technical problems and adaptive challenges), David Snowden and Mary Boone (a leader's framework for decision making), Gary Klein (the premortem), V.F. Ridgway (dysfunctional consequences of performance measurement), Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (loss aversion), Denise Rousseau (the psychological contract), and Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy).

Full transcript and resources: https://www.2040digital.com/human-factor-podcast/human-factor-podcast-season-3-episode-034-on-scope-on-schedule-off-purpose-why-following-the-plan-is-not-the-same-as-realizing-the-purpose/
Find Tina at https://tinaberger.com and https://investlikeamother.net, and on LinkedIn.
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/

Take two organizations in the same industry, similar size, similar products, nearly identical talent. One performs and the other does not. When leaders of the second one look for the reason, they look at the people, decide they have a talent problem, and hire, train, and bring in a leadership program. A year later the numbers look about the same. They were looking in the wrong place.

David Edward has spent four decades studying why people do what they do, first at Ogilvy & Mather, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Grey Canada, and since 2003 as founder of the Strategic Initiatives Group. His sentence for all of this is one Kevin has been repeating to clients since he first heard it: the capability was always there. The conditions determine how much of it shows up in the work.

In three parts: what brings out the best in people, and why leaders misdiagnose underperformance as a talent problem; how capability becomes performance, including David's quarrel with "culture eats strategy for breakfast," the three layers of culture, the difference between alignment and compliance, and why a shared reality inside the leadership team has to come before any other condition; and what an organization should do with the capacity AI is now handing back, told through a CMO who won back six hours a week and was afraid to tell anyone.

Research referenced: Kurt Lewin (behavior as a function of person and environment), Bryan Weiner (organizational readiness for change), Chris Argyris and Donald Schön (espoused theory and theory in use), Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (self-determination theory), Janis Cannon-Bowers and Eduardo Salas (shared mental models), and Denise Rousseau (the psychological contract).

David's discussion guide for leadership teams, full transcript, and resources: https://www.2040digital.com/human-factor-podcast/
Find David at https://sigunlimited.com and on LinkedIn.
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/

Name one measure your organization has retired in the last three years. Not paused. Retired. If the room goes quiet, you have met the measurement ratchet.

In the Season 3 opener, Kevin Novak makes the case that organizations can add a measure but almost never subtract one, and that the reason is not analytics. It is accountability. Adding a metric distributes responsibility across everyone who nodded. Removing one concentrates it on the person who made the call. So measures survive the initiatives that created them, wire themselves into compensation formulas and board slides, and keep shaping behavior from the background long after anyone remembers asking for them.

The research on this is seventy years old. Ridgway saw the dysfunction in 1956. Goodhart, Campbell, and Strathern turned it into law. Bevan and Hood documented gaming at national scale. What is new is the volume, the fact that systems now read what we measure, and a framing that has kept handing a human factor problem to the people who are good at measurement. Theodore Porter supplies the reframe: numbers do their heaviest work where trust is thin and judgment is exposed.

Kevin walks into the room where a leadership team tries to retire a measure, names the question that shuts it down and the one that opens it up, and lays out the four questions he puts to every measure and the six moves that make retirement a practice rather than a purge. The episode closes with what Season 3 is built to do and a preview of the first seven guests.

Companion piece: Ideas and Innovations Issue 280, "Who Owns That Number?"

https://www.2040digital.com/ideas-and-innovations-newsletter/who-owns-that-number-why-organizations-can-add-a-measure-and-never-subtract-one/

Tell Kevin about a measure your organization actually retired: who owned the removal, what broke, and what it cost the person who put their name on it.

Episode page and transcript: https://www.2040digital.com/human-factor-podcast/

Newsletter (free): https://www.2040digital.com/home-2/ideas-and-innovations-newsletter-home-page-explore-all-issues/

The Truth About Transformation: https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Transformation-Uncertainty-Complexity-ebook/dp/B0G3HSBZKD/

Season 2 comes to a close. In this solo finale, Kevin Novak traces the arc of all eighteen episodes, from the identity crisis of expertise to the long game of institutional transformation, and names the three discoveries that emerged when the research met lived experience: resistance is information, structure usually beats intention, and transformation is not an event but a practice. Patience, repeated.

Along the way, Kevin revisits the conversations that shaped the season, with Elizabeth Stewart, James Eliott, Ryan Vet, Erin Fuller, Mike Peroni, Eric Hoplin, Deborah Patton and Justin Thorp, and Tom Serena, whose observation gives the season its plainest definition of the work: the denominator of change is pace and patience.

The episode closes with a preview of Season 3, which turns to the dynamic between artificial intelligence and human beings, not as a technology story but as the clearest case study of the human factor ever run, unfolding in real time, along with a deeper commitment to field voices and to measuring the human factor itself.

Season 3 begins in late August or September. Between now and then, the work does not stop.

Resources:

Ideas and Innovations Newsletter: https://www.2040digital.com/home-2/ideas-and-innovations-newsletter-home-page-explore-all-issues/

Newsletter on Substack: https://20forty.substack.com

The Truth About Transformation: https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Transformation-Uncertainty-Complexity/dp/B0G3HRTQ3C/

Transformation Readiness Assessment: https://www.2040digital.com/human-factor-method/transformation-readiness-assessment/

All episodes: https://www.2040digital.com/human-factor-podcast/

Guest: Tom Serena, CEO, American Gastroenterological Association

Most organizational change happens on a clock measured in quarters. A leader arrives, launches an initiative, claims a win, and moves on before anyone can tell whether the change actually held. Every so often you meet someone who has stayed long enough to see the whole arc.

In this episode of the Human Factor Podcast, Kevin Novak is joined by Tom Serena, chief executive of the American Gastroenterological Association, who has led one institution since the nineteen nineties and steadily expanded what it believes it is even allowed to do. Drawing on institutional theory, organizational ambidexterity, and Ronald Heifetz's distinction between technical and adaptive challenges, Kevin and Tom examine what transformation looks like when it unfolds not over quarters but across decades.

Tom shares what three decades taught him. Why the denominator of change is pace and patience, why what often looks like resistance is really a pace mismatch, why you cannot change what an organization does until you change how it decides, and why a new leader should not arrive to transform but to find out what needs to be transformed.

Read the full transcript and subscribe to the Ideas and Innovations newsletter at 2040digital.com. Assess your own organization at TransformationAssessment.com.