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
The Human Factor: Exploring the Intersection of Humanity, Technology, and TransformationShow Notes
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/
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Picture a transformation dashboard that is all green. Milestones on track, budget holding, adoption counted by logins. Now picture the people underneath it. They are tired, unsure what the change means for their jobs, and quiet, because speaking up stopped changing anything. In Part 1, Dr. Michelle Pipes made the case that what change feels like can be measured, through six signals: Meaning, Safety, Belonging, Progress, Recognition, and Play. In Part 2, that instrument goes under real pressure. The pressure comes from three directions. First, what happens to the six signals when the new colleague is not a person, and work that used to define people starts being done by software. Kevin frames it with Robert Karasek's demand-control model: strain comes from high demands combined with low control, and an AI transformation sets the pace from outside the room. Michelle answers with how she actually works with AI every day, why there is no play when a tool lands in your lap, and why the resistance leaders are seeing may simply be fear of something people cannot yet name. Second, change accumulation and the personal discipline everyone now needs. Michelle talks about reinventing herself more than once, the lifelong-learning mindset that turns AI into just another tool, and the choice she says every person makes every day: coming out of a change better, or bitter. She tells the story behind that conviction plainly, and then widens it to leadership: organizations that announce an AI initiative one day and layoffs the next are telling their best people exactly where they stand, and those people have choices. Third, the reflection question this season asks every guest, framed around the nine-year-olds Michelle is teaching to navigate change before most executives learn how. The conversation closes with where to find her books and a line worth sitting with: you do not have to wait. You can start being a different person today. 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. Part 1: 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/ Episode page and transcript: https://www.2040digital.com/human-factor-podcast/human-factor-podcast-season-3-episode-038-measuring-what-change-feels-like-the-joyful-change-quotient-and-the-signals-leaders-miss-part-2/ Subscribe to the Ideas and Innovations newsletter: https://www.2040digital.com/home-2/ideas-and-innovations-newsletter-home-page-explore-all-issues/
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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/
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