Available February 20, 2026

Episode 014: Season 2 The Identity Crisis of Expertise – When What You Know Becomes What Holds You Back

DURATION: 32 minutes
HOST: Kevin Novak
SHOW: The Human Factor Podcast

COLD OPEN

I was working with a pharmaceutical company client with my team as we dove into planning for a major digital transformation of their clinical trial processes. The company had invested heavily in AI-powered analytics that would fundamentally change how their research scientists analyzed patient data. The technology was sound. The business case was compelling. And yet, three of their most respected senior scientists had become the biggest obstacles to adoption.

These weren’t resisters in any traditional sense. They had signed off on the initiative. They had attended every training session. They publicly praised the new capabilities. But behind closed doors, they were systematically undermining adoption through a pattern I’ve come to recognize: they questioned the methodology, requested additional validation studies, proposed extended parallel testing protocols. Every concern was scientifically legitimate. Every delay was professionally justifiable.

It took me three months to understand what was really happening. These weren’t scientists protecting their organization from a bad technology decision. These were people protecting themselves from an identity crisis. For twenty years, their careers had been built on a specific form of expertise, on knowing how to interpret data in ways that junior colleagues couldn’t. The new AI didn’t just change their tools. It threatened to make their hard-won intuition obsolete. Their resistance wasn’t about the transformation. It was about who they would become if the transformation succeeded.

I’m 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 and the Ideas and Innovations weekly newsletter. Today we’re exploring the identity crisis of expertise, why the very knowledge and skills that made people successful become the psychological barriers that prevent them from adapting to change.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to The Human Factor Podcast, Season Two. The show that explores the intersection of humanity, technology, and transformation along with the psychology behind transformation success.

If you followed Season One, you heard us explore why transformations fail at the psychological level, from the hidden resistance patterns that operate beneath apparent support to the communication paradoxes that create confusion even when leaders say the right things. We examined why smart people make poor decisions under change, why organizations struggle to let go of approaches that no longer serve them, and why vulnerability creates the foundation for authentic organizational adaptation.

Season Two shifts from diagnosis to intervention. Elizabeth Stewart will be back for a few episodes to share her thoughts and wisdom and I have a variety of guests lined up who as CEOs have lived through change and transformation and have much insight and advice to share. I am excited for the episodes and learning ahead and I hope you are as well.

We are going to be moving from understanding why change transformation often fails to exploring how leaders can actually address the psychological and other barriers that determine success or failure.

And today we’re starting with what I believe is the most underestimated psychological force in organizational change: identity.

In Episode 5 of Season One, we explored the psychology of letting go, why the phrase “we’ve always done it this way” has such a powerful grip on organizational behavior. In Episode 8, we mapped twelve types of hidden resistance that appear as support while systematically preventing progress. Today’s episode goes deeper into the mechanism that drives both of these patterns: what happens psychologically when transformation threatens not just how people work, but who they believe themselves to be.

This is not a minor distinction. When you understand that identity, rather than preference or habit, is the real barrier to change, everything about how you lead transformation needs to shift. Let me show you why.

SEGMENT 1: THE IDENTITY-EXPERTISE FUSION

When Knowledge Becomes Self

To understand why expertise creates such powerful barriers to change and transformation, we need to understand how professional identity forms in the first place. Organizational behavior scholar Blake Ashforth has spent decades studying how people construct their work identities, and his research reveals something crucial: for most professionals, there is no meaningful separation between what they know and who they are.

Think about how you introduce yourself at a professional conference. You don’t say “I perform the functions associated with the accounting profession.” You say, “I’m an accountant.” That linguistic choice reflects a psychological reality. Your profession isn’t something you do; it’s something you are. Your expertise isn’t a tool you use; it’s the foundation of your professional identity.

This fusion of identity and expertise develops over years of professional socialization. When you spend five years mastering a complex skill set, when you build your reputation on knowing things that others don’t, when your colleagues come to you as the expert, when your compensation and status depend on your specialized knowledge, something profound happens neurologically. Your brain literally rewires itself around that expertise. The neural pathways that support your professional competence become intertwined with the networks that maintain your sense of self.

Research in cognitive neuroscience has shown that threats to our sense of competence activate overlapping brain systems with those involved in threats to our physical safety. This aligns with broader social-threat research demonstrating that challenges to status, competence, and belonging trigger the same defensive responses originally evolved to protect us from physical danger.

When change and transformation suggests that your expertise might become obsolete, your brain doesn’t process that as an intellectual challenge requiring adaptation. It processes that as an attack on your survival. The fear response you experience isn’t an overreaction; it’s a biologically appropriate response to what your brain perceives as genuine danger.

This is why rational arguments about the benefits of change and transformation often fail with experienced professionals. You’re not dealing with a knowledge gap that can be filled with information. You’re dealing with an identity threat that triggers deep psychological defense mechanisms. The more expertise someone has, the more their identity depends on that expertise, and the more threatened they feel when transformation requires them to become beginners again.

SEGMENT 2: IDENTITY FORECLOSURE

The Psychological Prison of Success

Developmental psychologists use a concept called identity foreclosure to describe what happens when people commit to an identity without genuinely exploring alternatives. Originally applied to adolescent development, this concept has powerful implications for understanding why successful professionals struggle with change and transformation.

Here’s how identity foreclosure works in professional contexts. Early in your career, you discover something you’re good at. You invest in developing that competence. You build a reputation around it. Opportunities come to you because of it. Over time, your entire professional life becomes organized around this identity. You hire people who complement your expertise. You take on projects that leverage your strengths. You avoid situations that might reveal weaknesses. You’ve created what feels like a successful, stable professional identity. In professional life, identity foreclosure is rarely a conscious choice. It’s more often the result of momentum — years of incentives, recognition, reinforcement, and reward that gradually narrow how someone can imagine themselves.

But here’s the trap: the more successful you become within that identity, the more foreclosed your options become. You haven’t explored who else you might be professionally because your current identity has worked so well. You haven’t developed the psychological flexibility to see yourself differently because you’ve never needed to. Your success has created a prison of competence where you can only imagine yourself as who you already are.

Carol Dweck’s research on mindset provides another lens on this phenomenon. Dweck distinguishes between fixed mindset, where people believe their abilities are static traits, and growth mindset, where people believe their abilities can develop through effort and learning. What Dweck’s research shows, and this is critical for understanding transformation resistance, is that fixed mindset isn’t just about intelligence. It’s about identity. People with fixed mindsets have built their self-concept around being a certain kind of person with certain kinds of abilities. Any challenge to those abilities becomes a challenge to their fundamental sense of self.

Now here’s where this gets complicated for leaders. In my experience, fixed mindset often correlates with professional success. The person who committed early and deeply to developing expertise, who built their entire career around being the expert in a specific domain, often succeeded precisely because of that focus. The same psychological pattern that enabled their success now prevents their adaptation.

When you tell a senior engineer with twenty-five years of experience that the programming paradigm they mastered is being replaced by AI-assisted development, you’re not asking them to learn a new skill. You’re asking them to stop being who they’ve been for a quarter century and become someone they can’t yet imagine. Their resistance isn’t stubbornness or fear of technology. It’s a psychological immune response to identity dissolution.

I want you to notice something about how organizations typically respond to this resistance. We send people to training programs that assume the problem is knowledge. We create incentive structures that assume the problem is motivation. We provide coaching that assumes the problem is behavior. But the actual problem is identity, and none of these interventions address it directly. We’re treating symptoms while the underlying condition continues to drive resistance.

SEGMENT 3: THE FIVE IDENTITY THREATS

What Transformation Actually Threatens

Through my work with organizations across industries and sectors, I’ve identified five distinct identity threats that transformation creates for experienced professionals. Understanding these threats is essential for leaders who want to address resistance at its source rather than fighting its symptoms. What’s important to understand is that these threats rarely appear in isolation. In most real transformations, experienced professionals experience several of them simultaneously, which is why the emotional response often feels disproportionate to the change itself.

The first identity threat is competence threat. This is the most obvious form, and we touched on it earlier. When transformation requires new skills, people who have built their identity around being highly competent suddenly face the prospect of becoming beginners again. For someone who has spent years being the person others come to for answers, the idea of not knowing is psychologically intolerable. The research on this is clear: competence threat triggers defensive behaviors that look like resistance but are actually attempts to preserve a coherent sense of self. When you see someone raising endless questions about new methodology, requesting additional training before implementation, or questioning whether the organization is really ready for change, you’re often seeing competence threat in action.

The second identity threat is relevance threat. This goes beyond competence to something even more fundamental. Competence threat asks “Can I do the new thing?” Relevance threat asks “Will anyone need what I do?” In an era of rapid technological change, this threat is increasingly acute. The experienced professional who has spent years developing deep expertise in a domain now watches as AI tools can perform aspects of that work in seconds. Their question isn’t whether they can learn the new tools; it’s whether the learning matters. Research on perceived skill obsolescence consistently shows that the fear of becoming irrelevant often emerges well before any actual decline in capability. People aren’t reacting to what they can’t do yet — they’re reacting to what they fear no one will need anymore.

So, if the organization doesn’t need human expertise in their domain anymore, what is their role? Who are they if not the expert?

The third identity threat is status threat. Professional identity isn’t just about what you know; it’s about your position in the organizational hierarchy of knowledge. Senior experts have status because they know things others don’t. They’re consulted on important decisions. Their opinions carry weight. Their experience is valued. Transformation often flattens these knowledge hierarchies. Across industries, studies show that people will tolerate heavier workloads, steeper learning curves, and greater uncertainty if their status is preserved — but will actively resist even beneficial change when status is threatened. When junior employees with digital native skills can outperform senior experts in new systems, the traditional status markers become meaningless. The senior expert hasn’t just lost a skill advantage; they’ve lost their place in the organizational pecking order. Their identity as someone who matters, whose voice carries weight, is under direct threat.

The fourth identity threat is narrative threat. Every professional has a story they tell themselves about their career, a narrative that makes sense of the choices they’ve made, the sacrifices they’ve accepted, the path they’ve followed. Transformation can invalidate that narrative. The person who spent ten years developing deep expertise in a technology that’s now being replaced has to confront uncomfortable questions: Was all that investment wasted? Did I choose the wrong path? What does my career mean if the skills I worked so hard to develop are no longer valued? These aren’t just practical questions about future employment. They’re existential questions about whether your professional life has meaning.

The fifth identity threat is community threat. Professional identity is never purely individual. We define ourselves partly through the communities we belong to, the colleagues who share our expertise, the professional networks built around common knowledge. Transformation can dissolve these communities. When an organization moves from one technology platform to another, the community of experts in the old platform doesn’t just lose their technical skills; they lose their professional tribe. The relationships built through shared expertise, the sense of belonging to a community of practice, the identity that comes from being part of something larger than yourself, all of this is at risk. People often resist change and transformation not because they fear learning new skills, but because they fear losing the community that gives their professional life meaning.

When you look at change and transformation resistance through this lens, it stops being a frustrating obstacle and starts being an understandable human response to genuine psychological threat. The senior scientists I mentioned in my opening story weren’t being difficult. They were experiencing all five of these identity threats simultaneously. Their competence, relevance, status, professional narrative, and community were all under threat from a single initiative. Their resistance was proportional to what they stood to lose.

SEGMENT 4: THE IDENTITY TRANSITION FRAMEWORK

Navigating the Space Between Who You Were and Who You’re Becoming

So what do we do with this understanding? How do leaders address identity-based resistance rather than simply fighting against it? The framework I’m about to share emerged from years of working with organizations where identity threats were the primary barrier to change. I call it the Identity Transition Framework, and it addresses something most change management approaches ignore: the psychological journey between letting go of who you were and becoming who you need to be.

The first element is acknowledging the loss. Most change and transformation communications focus entirely on the future: the exciting capabilities, the competitive advantages, the growth opportunities. But for people experiencing identity threat, the future is abstract while the loss is concrete and immediate. Before they can move toward a new identity, they need permission to grieve the one they’re losing. This isn’t weakness or sentimentality; it’s psychology. Research on identity transitions shows that people who are allowed to acknowledge what they’re leaving behind adapt more successfully than those who are pressured to immediately embrace what’s next. When loss is ignored, resistance intensifies. When loss is named, adaptation begins.

When you tell someone that their twenty years of expertise in the old system will still be valuable, while simultaneously replacing that system with something entirely new, you’re creating cognitive dissonance. A better approach is honest acknowledgment: “Your expertise in the current approach represents real value, and it’s true that some of that specific knowledge won’t transfer directly to the new system. That’s a genuine loss, and it’s reasonable to feel that.”

The second element is building bridges to new identity. People struggling with identity threat need to see a path from who they are to who they could become, a path that preserves continuity rather than requiring complete reinvention. This is where understanding the specific components of someone’s professional identity becomes crucial. What do they value most about their expertise? Is it the knowledge itself, or is it being the person others come to for help? Is it the technical skills, or is it the judgment developed through years of experience? Once you understand what aspects of identity are most threatened, you can help people see how those aspects might transfer to the new context. The senior scientist isn’t becoming irrelevant; they’re becoming someone who can apply decades of scientific judgment to validate and improve AI-generated insights. Their identity as a wise counselor remains intact even as the specific tools change.

The third element is creating legitimate peripheral participation. This concept, originally developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger to describe how newcomers learn within communities of practice, offers a powerful principle I’ve adapted for experienced professionals navigating transformation. Rather than throwing people into full immersion where their novice status is constantly visible, legitimate peripheral participation allows them to engage with new practices in ways that don’t threaten their identity as competent professionals. They contribute their existing expertise while gradually developing new capabilities. They mentor others in judgment and context while learning alongside them about new tools. They remain valuable to the community even while their specific role within it evolves. This approach reduces the competence threat that makes people defensive and creates space for genuine learning.

The fourth element is reconstructing professional narrative. Remember that people need a story that makes sense of their career. When change and transformation invalidate the old story, you need to help them construct a new one that honors their past while creating meaning in the future. The narrative isn’t “Your old skills are obsolete and you need to start over.” The narrative is “Your career has been a journey of continuous development, and this transformation is the next chapter in that journey. The judgment, the perspective, the wisdom you’ve developed through decades of experience are exactly what the organization needs to navigate this transition successfully.” This isn’t spin or manipulation. It’s genuine reframing that helps people see their situation in ways that support psychological adaptation rather than resistance.

The fifth element is building new communities of practice. If change and transformation threatens to dissolve the communities that give professional life meaning, you need to create new communities that can provide that same sense of belonging. This might mean forming cohorts of people going through similar transitions who can support each other. It might mean creating hybrid communities where experts in the old and new approaches work together on shared problems. It might mean establishing new professional identities with their own communities, like “transformation pioneers” or “digital translators” who bridge between legacy expertise and emerging capabilities. The goal is ensuring that people don’t feel alone in their identity transition.

SEGMENT 5: PRACTICAL APPLICATION

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let me bring this framework to life with the pharmaceutical company example I opened with. Once I understood that those three senior scientists were experiencing identity threat rather than simply resisting technology, the intervention changed completely.

Instead of more training on the new AI tools, we started by explicitly acknowledging what they were being asked to give up. In a private conversation with each scientist, I said something like this: “You’ve spent twenty years developing intuition about data patterns that younger researchers can’t see. The organization has benefited enormously from that expertise. And now we’re asking you to work with a system that might challenge that intuition or make some of it less relevant. That’s a significant ask, and I want you to know that we recognize what we’re asking of you.”

That acknowledgment alone changed the emotional temperature of subsequent conversations. They no longer felt they had to hide their concerns behind scientific objections.

Next, we reframed their role. Instead of positioning them as users of the new AI system, which placed them in a subordinate relationship to technology, we positioned them as validators the experts whose judgment the AI needed to be compared against. Their job wasn’t to learn to trust the AI; their job was to determine whether the AI deserved trust. This preserved their identity as the people with superior scientific judgment while creating a natural pathway to engagement with the new tools.

We created what I called an “insight council” where these senior scientists, along with other experienced researchers, would review AI-generated analyses and identify cases where the AI missed something their human judgment caught. This gave them legitimate peripheral participation, real engagement with the new system that leveraged rather than threatened their expertise. Over time, they developed their own expertise in understanding the AI’s patterns and limitations, but they came to it through the door of their existing identity rather than by abandoning it.

Finally, we helped them reconstruct their professional narrative. Instead of “a scientist whose expertise is being replaced by AI,” the new story became “a scientist who helps the organization understand when AI can and can’t be trusted.” That narrative positioned them as more valuable in the AI era, not less, because they possessed exactly the judgment and experience needed to prevent AI from making mistakes that less experienced researchers wouldn’t catch.

Within six months, those same three scientists who had been the biggest obstacles became the most credible advocates for the new system. Not because they had been convinced or defeated, but because the transformation had been reframed in ways that addressed their identity needs rather than threatening them.

CLOSING

The identity crisis of expertise that I’ve described today exists in every organization undergoing significant change and transformation. Your most experienced people, your subject matter experts, your senior leaders who built their careers on specific knowledge and capabilities, all of them are facing questions about who they will become if the change or transformation succeeds. Their resistance isn’t about the change or transformation; it’s about themselves.

Most leaders fight this resistance as if it were opposition to the initiative. They provide more information about why the change is necessary. They create incentives for adoption. They apply pressure through accountability structures. And they’re consistently surprised when highly intelligent, highly capable people continue to resist changes that seem obviously beneficial.

The framework I’ve shared today, the Identity Transition Framework, offers a different approach. Rather than fighting identity-based resistance, it addresses the underlying psychological needs that generate resistance in the first place. Acknowledge the loss people are experiencing. Build bridges from current identity to future identity. Create ways for people to participate in new practices without threatening their sense of competence. Help them reconstruct professional narratives that make sense of the transition. And build communities that provide belonging in the new organizational reality.

Adult development research is clear on this point: identity transitions, not skill gaps, are the hardest part of mid-career change. This isn’t soft work. It’s the hard work that determines whether change and transformation succeeds or fails. The 70% failure rate in organizational change and transformation isn’t primarily about strategy or technology or project management. It’s about human psychology. And identity is at the center of that psychology.

 

In our next episode, Elizabeth Stewart returns to help me explore something that connects directly to what we’ve discussed today: the contagion effect, how emotions spread through organizations during change and transformation. When leaders are experiencing identity threat and the anxiety that comes with it, that emotion doesn’t stay contained. It spreads through their teams, through their departments, through the entire organization in ways that can accelerate adoption or silently destroy initiatives. Understanding emotional contagion is essential for anyone leading change and transformation in complex organizations.

If you found today’s episode valuable, subscribe to The Human Factor Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a rating and a comment. And please share this episode with the leaders in your organization who are wrestling with resistance from their most experienced people. Understanding identity threat changes how you approach that resistance.

If you want weekly insights about change and transformation psychology, organizational behavior, and the human factors that determine change and transformation success, subscribe to my Ideas and Innovations newsletter on Substack.

Until next time, remember: The people resisting aren’t fighting change. They’re fighting for their sense of self. When you understand that, you can help them find a new self worth becoming.

This is The Human Factor Podcast. I’m Kevin Novak. Thanks for watching or listening.

END OF EPISODE

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Upcoming: Episode 015: The Contagion Effect

Elizabeth Stewart returns to help Kevin Novak explore the contagion effect: how emotions spread through organizations during change and transformation.

Season 2 Launched on February 20, 2026

More Episodes Coming Soon

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