Episode #35
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
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/
