Show Notes
Change management often fails for one simple reason: nobody diagnosed why people are actually resisting before throwing more training and communication at the problem.
Matt Quinn, SVP of Sales and Go to Market at IFS Industrial Intelligence, joins the show to unpack how leaders diffuse resistance to disruptive technology, using the ADKAR framework (awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement) as a lens for figuring out where a change effort is actually stalling.
The conversation covers why leadership style has to shift depending on how competent someone is at a specific task, not their general reputation, and why pairing a vision led leader with a detail oriented "bad cop" tends to make change stick where either style alone would not.
The episode also digs into a part of the AI conversation that gets less airtime: the 70 percent of the global workforce who do not sit at a desk. Quinn talks about what it takes to bring AI into industrial settings like production lines and field service, where the disruption looks very different from the desk based AI tools most tech media covers.
He and Ben also talk about reward structures, the risk of mandating change without addressing the fear underneath it, and why looking before you leap beats jumping straight to a training rollout.
Matt Quinn is SVP of Sales and Go to Market at IFS Industrial Intelligence, where he works on embedding AI into established ERP and field management systems. He previously worked at Oracle and Microsoft and has founded startups of his own, giving him a view of change management from both the big tech and founder side of the table. He is only a few months into the role, but the questions he is wrestling with are not new to him.
He talks about the ADKAR framework he leans on repeatedly, the difference between coaching a beginner and coaching someone who has just been made a beginner again, and why he deliberately built his own leadership team around people who think nothing like him.
Show notes:
Listen and subscribe:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1yU6AcoCLySqE1wGn80HOT?si=649d8f8c3d8b47a3
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/tech-world-human-skills/id1674003078
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@techworldhumanskills/podcasts
Newsletter and archive: https://www.techworldhumanskills.com
Connect with Ben: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpthoughts
Technical Storytelling for Individuals: https://www.elevatedyou.live/individuals
Technical Storytelling for Organisations: https://www.elevatedyou.live/organisations
Connect With Matt Quinn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattquinn-aistrategy/
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