The Human Factor: Exploring the Intersection of Humanity, Technology, and Transformation

Kevin Novak
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Welcome to the Human Factor Podcast, where host Kevin Novak, CEO of 2040 Digital and Author of The Truth About Transformation, explores the psychological forces that determine transformation success or failure. Each week, we dive deep into the human side of organizational change with leaders of organizations, transformation experts, and the researchers who understand that technology alone never drives lasting change. This isn’t another business podcast about the latest technology trends. This is about understanding the human factor and why smart people resist change.

  1. 4d ago

    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/

  2. Sep 24

    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

    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/

  3. Sep 17

    S3 Ep. 2|033 Performance Is Lost Before Execution: Why the Conditions Around the Work Decide What Capability Converts, with David Edward

    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/

  4. Sep 10

    Season 3, Episode 1|032: The Measurement Ratchet - Why Nothing You Measure Ever Leaves

    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/

  5. Jul 8

    S2 Episode 18/031: Season 2 Wrap-Up and Season 3 Preview

    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/

  6. Jul 2

    S2 Ep 17|030 The Long Game - Leading Institutional Transformation Across Decades

    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.

  7. Jun 25

    S2 Episode 16|029 Beyond Demographics: Why Data Without Craft Fails and Craft Without Data Guesses

    S2 Episode 16|029 Beyond Demographics: Why Data Without Craft Fails and Craft Without Data Guesses Guests: Deborah Patton and Justin Thorp You can have the most sophisticated data infrastructure in the world and still send communications that land with the emotional weight of a form letter. You can also write something genuinely moving and send it to the wrong people at the wrong moment. The first is data without craft. The second is craft without data. Most organizations operate with one or the other, and never both. In this episode of the Human Factor Podcast, Kevin Novak is joined by Deborah Patton, COO at The Robin Report and co-author of The Truth About Transformation, and Justin Thorp, director of email marketing and audience strategy at Oracle. Together they take apart why most organizational communication fails, why segmentation without storytelling produces personalized mediocrity, and what changes when craft and data finally work as a single system. The conversation covers identity based motivation, the neuroscience of trust, the four psychological mindsets behind engagement, the honest question of where AI fits, and why, in Deborah's words, it should be always human, never AI. Read the full transcript and subscribe to the Ideas and Innovations newsletter at 2040digital.com. Assess your own organization at TransformationAssessment.com.

  8. Jun 19

    S2 Ep 15|028 The Trust Paradox: Transforming the Institutions Built to Stay the Same

    S2 Ep 15|028 The Trust Paradox: Transforming the Institutions Built to Stay the Same Guest Elizabeth Maza Stewart A small category of institution cannot signal change the way everyone else does. Standards bodies, credentialing organizations, and professional associations earn their authority from perceived stability, so the very signals of change that prove innovation everywhere else can read as instability to the people who depend on them. Kevin Novak welcomes back Elizabeth Maza Stewart, senior advisor at 2040 Digital, for a conversation drawn from more than thirty years leading transformation inside three of the most trust dependent institutions in the country: the American Red Cross, the American Institute of Architects, and the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, where she served as Chief Operating Officer. They work through the dual audience problem, where employees need honesty about what is changing while the public needs reassurance that what they rely on is safe. Elizabeth shares how the Red Cross rebuilt its brand promise during the tainted blood crisis, how the CFP Board added the human and counseling skills that clients actually need to its competency standards, and how the AIA reframed what architecture means to the public. The conversation closes on the emotional labor of leading when trust is the product, and what leaders most often get wrong about the relationship between internal change and external credibility. This is Elizabeth's fifth appearance on the show. Earlier conversations explored decision making bias, information overload, the vulnerability advantage, and emotional contagion. Explore the Human Factor Method and the Transformation Readiness Assessment at TransformationAssessment.com. Subscribe to the Ideas and Innovations Newsletter at 2040digital.com.

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Welcome to the Human Factor Podcast, where host Kevin Novak, CEO of 2040 Digital and Author of The Truth About Transformation, explores the psychological forces that determine transformation success or failure. Each week, we dive deep into the human side of organizational change with leaders of organizations, transformation experts, and the researchers who understand that technology alone never drives lasting change. This isn’t another business podcast about the latest technology trends. This is about understanding the human factor and why smart people resist change.

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