Available May 1, 2026

Episode 021: When Generations Collide – The Generational Fault Lines of Organizational Transformation

DURATION: 71 minutes
HOST: Kevin Novak

GUEST: Ryan Vet
SHOW: The Human Factor PodcastKevin Novak (00:05)

Think about the last major change initiative your organization launched. Now think about who embraced it and who resisted. Was there a pattern? Did the people who had been with the organization the longest push back the hardest? Did the newest employees adopt first? Did the people in the middle, those middle managers, seem to check out entirely? Most leaders explain these differences through personality or politics. She’s always so resistant to change. He’s so difficult. That group is never on board. But what if the pattern isn’t about individual or group personality at all?

What if the way people respond to change and transformation is shaped by something far more foundational than individual or group temperament? Something rooted in when they entered the workforce, what world they grew up in, and what implicit promises they believe their organization made to them. That’s what we’re exploring today. And my guest has spent more than 20 years studying exactly this question.

I’m Kevin Novak, CEO of 2040 Digital, professor at the University of Maryland, and author of the book The Truth About Transformation: Leading in the Age of AI, Uncertainty, and Human Complexity, along with the Ideas and Innovations weekly newsletter.

Welcome to the Human Factor Podcast, the show that explores the intersection of humanity, technology, and transformation, along with the psychology behind transformation success. This is season two, episode eight. And if you’ve been following this season, we’ve been building a diagnostic framework for understanding why change and transformation fails at the very human level.

Episode one explored the identity crisis that transformation triggers. Episode two with my buddy Elizabeth Stewart examined emotional contagion. Episode three unpacked the structural traps of middle management. Episode four looked at the algorithmic mirrors. Episode five with James Elliott examined the organization’s immune system. Episode six explored structural silence, the system that teaches people not to speak. And last episode, episode seven, we explored the psychological contract, the unwritten promises that change and transformation always violates.

Today, we’re adding a dimension that every previous episode touched but none directly addressed: the generational fault lines inside organizational change and transformation. If you’ve been with us in season one, you may remember episode two, the Gen Z Factor. I explored how younger generations are rewiring workplace psychology and why traditional management approaches are failing with nearly 40 percent of the workforce. That episode opened a door. Today, we’re walking through it.

Every concept we’ve explored this season, identity crisis, emotional contagion, structural traps, the immune system, silence, the psychological contract, all of these play out differently depending on when someone entered the workforce and what formative experiences shaped their expectations of institutions, authority, and the work itself.

And the research on this is substantial. Karl Mannheim’s foundational work on generational consciousness, originally published in 1928 and still cited across social science disciplines, established that people who share formative experiences during their impressionable years develop a distinct orientation toward the world. They don’t just have different preferences. They hold different assumptions about authority, about risk, about loyalty and institutional trust. And those assumptions are exactly what determines how someone experiences organizational change and transformation.

To explore today’s topic, I’m joined by Ryan Vet. Ryan is a generational futurist, a USA Today bestselling author of Cracking the Millennial Code, a serial entrepreneur who started his first business at the age of 14. He currently serves as CEO of Boon, an on-demand healthcare staffing platform. He holds an MBA from Purdue and certifications from Harvard Business School and Cornell. He has worked with organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies like Samsung and Warner Brothers. He’s also led four AI powered startups and sits on Elon University’s advisory board for the Doherty Entrepreneurship Center, which means he works directly with the generation that is about to enter the workforce. Ryan, welcome to the Human Factor Podcast.

Ryan Vet (06:09)

Thanks so much for having me, Kevin.

Kevin Novak (06:10)

Ryan, before we get into the research frameworks, I want to ground this in your experience. You describe yourself as a generational futurist, which is specific and very deliberate framing. What does that mean to you? And how did your own experience as a serial entrepreneur, starting at the age of 14 and building across multiple industries, shape how you think about the way different generations experience change inside organizations?

Ryan Vet (06:43)

Thanks for that question, Kevin. I think it’s a little bit humorous how I’ve gotten to each step of the journey, but now where I am today, hindsight’s 20/20, and I can see how it all connects. I was getting on stage speaking about AI. Of course, I have a talk called From Human Hesitation to AI Acceleration. And what does that mean for us? I’m not talking about tools and the latest, greatest thing, because dirty new tools will start by the time I’m done and half of them will have shut down. So it’s really more about what does this mean for society and culture and for us as human beings.

As I’m about to get up, they describe me as a futurist. And I’d heard the title, but I was like, that’s interesting. I’ve never ascribed that title to myself. So I talked to the meeting professional afterwards who had put this all together and wrote my bio. I’ve done over 1,000 live presentations, and you get some interesting intros. Some are completely fabricated, some are not. And so I started unpacking this, and she was like, well, if you look at all of your work, everything you’ve done is leading to the future. You’re always asking questions about the future. So I was like, okay, I’ll take it.

As I processed it, I’m not an economist. I do look at the economy, obviously, but that’s not what I’m focusing on. I’m really looking at generations. And that did start when I was a teenager. My first legally incorporated company was at 14. And so I’ve been very entrepreneurial and had some successes and plenty of failures too. That’s what makes a good entrepreneur. And as I navigated each one of those, especially starting as a teenager, a millennial managing Gen X and boomers at the time, there was a lot of conflict. And I chalked up a lot of that to my age, which absolutely a 14 year old manager of people older than themselves is always going to create conflict on so many levels, just beyond generations.

Then fast forward several years to 2009, a real estate company asked me to come speak to why millennials weren’t buying houses, which at the time was a flawed question because most millennials weren’t old enough to buy houses. But I answered it. Because at that point Twitter was thriving and I had an early Twitter account with a lot of followers at the time. And I think I have just as many followers now because around that time I also got off the platform.

But I started to look at the world through how humans interact with one another, where we’ve been as a culture and society and where we’re going into the future. And so from a generational perspective, because your experiences and my experiences and my kids’ experiences are all very different because of where we were raised, when we were raised, and what was going on in the world and society. So that’s kind of how it all packages together.

Kevin Novak (09:09)

So how do you, on the futurist side, process and conceptualize what that next phase is going to be?

Ryan Vet (09:23)

History repeats itself. There’s nothing new under the sun. And if you look at any society, any civilization, whether it’s recent history or you’re going back to the Byzantine Empire, there are certain trends that you can see that replicate time and time again. And then you go and look at the human being. Humans are fairly predictable creatures. I love Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational. It’s just a fantastic book because at the end of the day, we’re all searching for meaning and purpose and we want significance over success, but we often look in the wrong places. So we build something and then it comes tumbling down. It’s a cycle over and over again.

So as we look to the future, a lot of what I do is not as a technological futurist, even though I’ve been involved in AI startups for almost two decades now. That’s not been the point. It’s saying, hey, we’re trying to make humans better. We’re trying to make society better. We’re trying to remove friction, which ultimately backfires. But what are those patterns that we can see and how can we get ahead of that as leaders, as we’re looking into the future to bring our teams, bring our cultures, bring our societies along so that we don’t lose the humanity that makes leadership great.

Kevin Novak (10:30)

Ryan, what you’re describing connects directly to one of the most important and underappreciated concepts in organizational psychology. Karl Mannheim argued that generational identity isn’t just about age. It’s about shared formative experiences that create what he called a generational consciousness, a distinct lens through which an entire cohort interprets the world.

The implications for change and transformation are significant. Boomers entered the workforce during an era of institutional expansion and upward mobility. Gen X came of age during economic disruption, downsizing, and the collapse of the lifetime employment model. Millennials were shaped by the digital revolution and the 2008 financial crisis. And Gen Z, as I explored in season one, episode two, the Gen Z Factor, has never known a world without smartphones, social media, and institutional skepticism. That episode examined how Gen Z is fundamentally rewiring workplace psychology, and what we’re seeing now is that those rewired expectations don’t exist in isolation. They collide with the expectations of every other generation in the building.

Each of these cohorts carries fundamentally different assumptions about what organizations owe them, what loyalty means, how decisions should be made, and how change should be communicated. When a change or transformation initiative enters an organization, it doesn’t land on a homogeneous workforce. It lands on a multi-generational landscape where each group filters that change through their own generational consciousness. And this is where leaders get it wrong. They assume resistance is resistance, when in reality a boomer’s resistance often comes from a different place entirely than a Gen Z employee’s disengagement.

Kevin Novak (12:50)

So in your work with organizations and in writing Cracking the Millennial Code, how have you seen this play out when a major change initiative hits a multi-generational team? You’ve been in a variety of different types of organizations. You’ve started your own company. You now run an on-demand healthcare service. What are the distinct patterns you see in how each generation responds?

Ryan Vet (13:20)

I think one of the things that we have to zoom out on, and this is almost contrarian to my own work, is we have to step away and look past generations for just a minute because I think we have almost pigeonholed ourselves into this conversation about generations when change management comes down the line. The reality is if you look at just basic change management theory, there’s always going to be detractors. There’s always going to be people who are thriving in change that want the change. There’s going to be people who think they want it and then once it happens, become a detractor. And that happens regardless of generation. So I think that’s the first thing that we have to realize. Whether you have all Gen X working in your workplace or you’ve got all the generations from Silent down to Gen Z, there’s going to be people on every side of the conversation. So that’s part of the conversation.

But then the second thing is we have to realize that every single generation’s lived experience, their cohort that they grew up with, and the experiences that they had and the moments in which they were raised are going to shape how they perceive authority, how they perceive trust, how they perceive communication. And those are all common elements when you’re looking at change management initiatives in an organization, because if you don’t have buy-in and trust, and that doesn’t mean everyone has to agree with you, but you have to have the trust that you’re making the best decision for the organization. That’s going to look very different between a baby boomer and a Gen Z, pretty much the bookends in the workforce right now.

That’s a pretty radical difference in how they perceive trust. Baby boomers generally trust institutions, they trust titles, education, experience. Gen Z is very much against that as a whole. They trust authenticity. They want to know that you care about them as a person. They don’t want any fluff. They don’t want corporate jargon. They don’t want any of that. It’s a totally different perception of trust. And so when change is communicated, you can erode trust almost instantly if you communicate it based on one generation’s perceived idea of what is stable and what is not.

Kevin Novak (15:17)

So do you see leaders who are attuned to understanding that?

Ryan Vet (15:24)

There are definitely some leaders who understand that. I think, honestly, sometimes we clutter the conversation too much by talking about generations or even talking about these differences. Because at the end of the day, you’re still human beings leading other human beings. And if you look at the recent body of work, and recent being the last two to three decades, we’ve shifted from these management style books to leadership style books back to management style books and now managing the different generations. And I think there’s actually, and even with some of my earlier work, even with the book you mentioned earlier, I think it’s flawed logic a little bit.

The management techniques in there are absolutely rock solid. I stand behind them. The myths that we cracked about millennials are absolutely rock solid. But the whole premise is saying, because they are millennials at that point, or because they are Gen Z, they’re going to have these characteristics and you have to treat them a certain way. Well, the book was written when millennials were still graduating college. Now they’re all in the workforce and many are well past that in management roles and having kids. Parts of it apply to Gen Z, but part of it is we’re looking at the age of the individual. And a lot of these snapshots, whether it’s articles or books, get stuck looking at a generation at a certain moment in time that is not indicative of their entire life cycle.

Kevin Novak (16:40)

So Ryan, a question on recognizing there’s commonality in change management. To your point, trust is earned differently across the generations based on the values of how people have come up and what they retain. With the research that you’re currently doing, do you see any significant differences with Generation Alpha?

Ryan Vet (17:12)

Gen Alpha, they’re turning 13 this year at the time of this recording, and so we’ve got a limited subset of data, and even less on Gen Beta being born starting 2026. So you’ve got these two younger generations, but what you can start to do, and this is where the futurist hat comes in, is you can look at the parenting decisions and the cultural implications of what has happened to two other generations at around the same age.

One of the frameworks that I use is called the generational prism. If you’re listening, it’s kind of a triangle. On one arm you’ve got the age and the other arm you’ve got the moment, and then a prism refracts light so when you shine light through it the refraction is usually some beautiful color on the table. That’s where the label comes from. So you’ve got this age, moment, label framework that I use when looking at generations, and I think for the longest time we’ve been working backwards. We start with the label saying millennials are lazy, Gen Z are anxious. While there might be some merit to stereotypes because stereotypes do, whether or not we like it, usually have some grain of truth, that’s why they stick. But we start at the wrong spot.

And so I always say, let’s take their age, so 13 for Gen Alpha right now, and let’s rewind a generation. So when Gen Z was 13, and yes some last year were 13, but if you go to the middle of the cohort, we’re looking about 15 years ago. What was happening 10 to 15 years ago? When millennials were 15, you’re looking almost 20 to 30 years ago. When you start rewinding saying what was going on in the 90s and early 2000s, what was going on in the late 2010s, and you start looking at the age that they were and then the moment in history that they were, then you can start to see what’s sticking.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha are both, and we use the term digital natives, but they’re actually less accepting of change because of that. While millennials grew up with technology and they saw everything from no phones to smartphones in their growing up years, a rapid curve on technological adoption from no internet to social media and Wi-Fi, all of those things happened within the millennial generation. Every single time they logged into thefacebook.com before they dropped the definite article, every single time it was a different thing. They had timelines and they had walls and they had pokes. And so they’re used to change.

Kevin Novak (19:25)

The Facebook.

Ryan Vet

But by the time Gen Z started getting onto these platforms, and arguably they got on too early, that’s a deeper conversation, but when they started getting on these platforms, there were no more changes. So they were already in the social media era. Gen Alpha is going to have the same thing with AI. All of a sudden from 2022 to today, we saw generative AI take the world by storm, and every single time that it could now generate images, now it could generate video, that was shocking to Gen Z and millennials, Gen X and boomers.

Gen Alpha is going to have lived with that. So I think we’re going to see similar trends with the implications that social media had as a lived reality for the entire life of Gen Z. We’re going to see the same thing with Gen Alpha and AI. And if we’re not careful, we’re going to see the implications of cognitive erosion, just taking normal daily brain practices that you and I have done and seeing them offload that onto a machine. And that’s going to be really dangerous if we’re not careful.

Kevin Novak (20:34)

I think what’s interesting, and I see this in the class that I teach, is the higher levels of anxiety because of all that digital interaction. And that higher level of anxiety permeates across decision making. It permeates across any other physical interaction. And one would not have predicted that that would be an outcome so pervasive around Gen Z. There are a few examples I use in the class about Alpha, where there are indications that it may get even worse. So to your example about AI and in essence being so immersed in it from the get go, it will be interesting to see what cognitive or just general mental health issues may result from that.

Ryan Vet (21:30)

I think the implications are bigger than generative AI, especially with Gen Alpha. We think about the LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and all of that. But there’s the component that we’re not thinking about. A child can hop on and talk to their Apple voice assistant, and they can ask what the weather is today, or ask how long it’s going to take to get to the grocery store at six years old.

And there’s implications to that. While it’s convenient, while it’s beneficial and helpful, they can pick up and they can talk to their parents’ phone assistant and say call whomever. No longer are they scrolling; they’re not learning to read for the names or scroll through phone books or a Rolodex, they’ll never know what that is. They’ll never have to memorize those phone numbers. And we’ve removed these friction points that I don’t think we even think about that this generation has never seen before.

Unlocking the door with voice. Opening blinds and shades with voice. The refrigerator telling you when you need to get milk. Those little things are great innovations and I’m a living paradox because I love and have worked towards those innovations. But there are also massive implications that I don’t think we’re thinking about. We get so sidetracked by these LLMs that there’s a lot of other things that Gen Alpha in particular, is already experiencing as part of their lived life, where they’ve already removed so many friction points that I think are beneficial to formation.

Kevin Novak (23:09)

And not to further digress, but that really comes down to whether there is a necessity for any knowledge retention when it’s so easy to access in the moment. And so that begets a lessening of critical thinking skills that they may need in other situations.

Kevin Novak (23:29)

What Ryan is describing connects to something we explored in depth last episode. Denise Rousseau’s research on psychological contracts established that every employment relationship contains an unwritten set of mutual expectations that goes far beyond the offer letter. But here’s what most applications of that research miss: those psychological contracts are not universal. They are shaped by the generational context.

A boomer’s psychological contract with the organization often centers on loyalty and reciprocity. I give you decades of commitment, you provide stability, upward mobility, and institutional respect. When change or transformation disrupts that contract, the response isn’t just resistance. It’s a sense of betrayal rooted in decades of perceived mutual obligation.

A Gen X employee’s psychological contract is often built on autonomy. I deliver results and you leave me alone to do my work my way. Transformation that centralizes decision-making or introduces new oversight layers violates that contract in a way that can feel suffocating. A millennial’s contract frequently centers on purpose and development. I bring my whole self to work and you provide meaningful work, growth opportunities, and transparent leadership. Transformation that feels performative or disconnected from a clear purpose violates that expectation. And Gen Z, the 40 percent of the workforce, has a psychological contract that many organizations aren’t even equipped to understand yet. It’s one built on flexibility, digital fluency, and institutional skepticism. They’re not looking for a 30-year career. They’re looking for alignment and authenticity.

I want to build on something from Ryan’s own work that I think is one of the most important refrains in transformation thinking. Ryan’s Catalyzing Change framework positions human resistance to change not as opposition to the change itself but as a fear of loss. That distinction shifts the entire diagnostic question from why are people resisting to what do people believe they’re about to lose?

As you all know, I’m big on William Bridges. His research on transitions makes a related and very critical distinction between change and transition. Change is the external event. Transition is the internal psychological process of letting go of the old, navigating the uncertainty of the neutral zone, and forming a new beginning. Most organizations manage the change. Almost none manage the transition. And the transition is where people actually live during change and transformation.

What makes this even more complex is that the losses people fear are often generationally inflected. A boomer facing an AI deployment may fear the loss of institutional expertise that took decades to build. A Gen X manager may fear the loss of autonomy as new systems centralize decisions. A millennial may fear the loss of the growth trajectory they were promised. And a Gen Z employee may fear the loss of flexibility as change and transformation creates new rigidity. The same change initiative or transformation, five different fears of loss. And a leader who diagnoses all of them as resistance will usually craft a single response that addresses none of them.

Ryan, when you work with leaders on the Catalyzing Change concepts, what are the most common losses that each generation fears during transformation? And what do leaders consistently miss about the generational dimensions of that fear?

Ryan Vet (28:09)

Both excellent questions. I think the first one, what does each generation fear? You have to look at what has governed each generation for the most part. And for the sake of time and brevity, I’m going to generalize. Obviously it’s much more complex than what I’m going to share. So forgive the generalizations, but for the sake of conversation and time, I think they’re generally helpful.

You’ve got baby boomers who believed in institutions, believed in stability, believed in climbing the corporate ladder. Quantity over quality. If they were the first in last out, that meant they were going to get the raise, they were going to get the corner office. Gen Z listening, corner office used to be achievable, used to be the thing. There wasn’t all open desks and bullpens. So that was the baby boomer’s mindset. And they are working longer than other generations. They’re still trying to fill up that bank account. They’re still trying to build wealth. All these things that they sought to do from day one of their career. Change is scary to someone who believes an institution should be stable. They’re looking at all this technology. They’ve seen enough interruptions to know, okay, the internet didn’t disrupt their jobs that much. It changed how they worked, but they still had a job. But they’re hesitant.

Now you look at Gen X. Gen X has always been skeptical of institutions, mainly because their parents trusted them too much. And you see it flip-flop, and I talk about the generational pendulum. Gen X, they’re hard workers. So they’re not going to be the first one in and last one out, but they’re not going to be the last one in and first one out either. They’re different than both boomers and millennials in that way, kind of the barbell generation. They’re a smaller generation and they kind of are being weighed down by the boomers and millennials on either side.

Kevin Novak (29:50)

We have more angst, supposedly.

Ryan Vet (29:52)

You do, you do, but it’s good. And there’s actually plenty of data to back it up. Gen X is one of the best workers in the workforce today for so many reasons. But they’re big on work-life balance. They saw their parents sell their souls to their jobs. And I say parents plural because generally it was two parents working. And so Gen X was like, I don’t want to do that. Gen X, not millennials, Gen X is who we have to thank for the idea of work-life balance. That was their concept. They’re still, if they have a project that they need to get done, they’ll come in, they’ll stay late, they’ll get the project done, but they also want to protect to some extent their family time and focus more on their family. That’s where we get helicopter parents, because they wanted to be more present for their kids than their parents were for them.

So you fast forward and you look at millennials. Millennials actually are extremely productive individuals. And I think this is a big misnomer. We’ve started to see as millennials have aged and now the youngest millennials are turning 30 next year, so we’ve seen the shift. But especially when millennials first got in the workforce, they seemed to be disrespectful, lazy, entitled, not trusting authority, they were skeptical of anything, especially if it involved pen and paper. And they cared about the planet, so save the paper, don’t print this email, all of that.

We’ve seen some of that fall away, but what’s interesting is millennials’ output was just so much greater than any other generation because they were so efficient and proficient using technology. They could execute tasks at a faster pace, which automatically created trust issues with the previous generations. And millennials would never offer to stay late. If you’re paying them to come in at 8:30 or nine o’clock, they’re going to come in at 8:30 or nine o’clock. And if you stop paying them at four o’clock, they’re going to leave at four o’clock, not four-oh-one. And there’s a lot of truth to that.

Kevin Novak (31:49)

There is. And the research is indicative.

Ryan Vet (31:52)

That’s a stereotype that sticks because there is some grain of truth. And we have seen millennials as they care more about their work and they get to this management level, they are exhibiting more traits of Gen X and boomers where they will, when necessary, stay late, but they’re not going to do it unnecessarily. And so they’ve got a different kind of trust issue. Theirs is all about transparency. They want information because they’ve always had information. They started with Ask Jeeves, then went to Bing, Yahoo, AOL, and Google, and now LLMs.

And what’s interesting is millennials are adapting generative AI faster than any other generation, in large part due to the fact that as they were growing up, the Facebook did become Facebook, MySpace was no longer existent, or barely existent. You had all of these different changes. And so transparency was the big word for millennials.

And then fast forward to Gen Z. They took transparency to the next level. They want authenticity. Meaning, I’m going to show up and I’m going to be my authentic self and if I do not want to be here today, I’m going to wear it on my face and you’re going to know that I don’t want to be here and I’m going to let you know that I don’t want to be here, and you better treat me the same.

I think the biggest issue for trust that’s really alarming and really challenging for most leaders is this idea that Gen Z believes, almost three quarters, just shy of three quarters of Gen Z members, believe that their company and their boss should take a political stand on current social issues. That’s extremely shocking and really frightening to a lot of leaders, especially older leaders that have been more reserved and have always been told that their politics stay at home and they check their personal stuff at the door. That’s become a tremendous issue.

Which brings me to the answer to your second question, what do you do about that? How can you navigate those changes? Is it even possible to overcome that? And I think it goes back to something really simple. Somewhere along the line, we got sidetracked by looking at labels and by trying to overanalyze all of the data on generations, and we forgot something really simple as leaders. We need a clear vision and mission of where we’re going. And when you have that extremely clear vision and mission, you can stay out of some of the political conversations. You can stay out of some of the things and say, this is where we’re going as an organization. These are our values and you bought into this and this is where we’re marching forward together. And we don’t have to answer those questions because it’s not relevant to our mission. Not all Gen Z is going to like that. But so often we’ve just lost sight of that because we keep trying to manage problems instead of lead people.

Kevin Novak (34:35)

An interesting element, because we do this in the work with clients where we’re focused on strategic planning. And to your point on the mission, we frame it as a shared purpose and trying to have them align and be articulate, not simply to what the leadership believes that should be, but also communicative to the others across the workforce, with the end aspiration that people do indeed get to rally behind that shared purpose. Not to dismiss the political statements or taking a stand, but it does seek to give some purpose related to the organization that perhaps the younger generations can better identify with.

Ryan Vet (35:32)

Exactly. I think you use the word purpose and what’s consistent across every generation, and it manifests itself differently, but what’s consistent is every single person wants purpose in their life. Everybody seeks meaning. And again, each generation has taken that differently. Boomers wanted meaning from their job titles that they collected, their degrees that they collected, things like that. Gen X wanted meaning by what their family life looked like, what their personal and community life looked like.

Millennials wanted purpose to be transcendent. That’s the first generation that saw the world as effectively becoming one. You could reach out to anyone in the world for almost nothing. Whereas before, I remember I had aunts and uncles who lived overseas. I had to go buy a calling card at Walmart, dial in the forever long number from Vonage, and you would hope that they were available next to their phone. And if they weren’t, you just wasted however much money trying to call them. And that’s gone, which there’s a lot of benefit to that. But millennials saw the world with all the issues and so they became concerned global citizens, which I think is valuable.

And now what’s interesting is we see Gen Z going back and focusing on the self. There’s a lot of talk right now, Gen Z revival, are they going back to church? And the data actually says no, which contradicts a lot of headlines, but they are one of the most spiritual generations, meaning they’re seeking some sort of transcendent identity beyond organized religion, whether that is things as new age as ayahuasca retreats in South America, or whether that’s practicing Eastern traditions. We’re seeing a lot of Eastern traditions and faith practices come back in, as well as Gen Z males in particular that do commit to an evangelical or Christian based religion are doubling down on it. Even though the number is the smallest it’s ever been, those that have chosen to go into organized religion are going with full force.

And the pattern across all of that, the fact that Gen Z is one of the more spiritual generations as a whole, is really fascinating because it shows that they want this sense of purpose and they thought they could get meaning from likes and instant gratification and comments and being connected to all their friends, and they figured that that’s not it. So they’re asking, there’s got to be something more. What is that?

Kevin Novak (37:48)

So Ryan, earlier you talked about what may have been in place 15 years ago or so when a generation was forming their values. Related to the spiritualism, do you see where, and this is related to some of the headlines out there, Gen Z believes the world is ending, the climate is going to collapse, there is documented hesitation both with millennials and Gen Z about having kids in this world. Do you see those initial values coming into a maturity related to that spiritualism or those perspectives?

Ryan Vet (38:38)

I think there’s a lot of things we could go deep with on family dynamics over the years. I’m going to generalize really grossly here for the sake of time, but boomers basically made divorce not taboo. Gen X didn’t like that. And so we saw divorce rates actually hold fairly steady but declined slightly. And millennials, we’re seeing this huge drop-off in divorce as a whole. But we’re also seeing a much lower percentage of marriage because they have moved to cohabitation. And so they’ve changed this family dynamic.

A lot of that we can trace to religious constructs of family dynamics or what a family looks like, of course. But there is an underlying fear, specifically of Gen Z, some later-born millennials, but specifically of Gen Z saying I don’t want to bring kids into this world, I don’t want my kids to experience this. And I would argue while some of that is rhetoric and we’re just seeing a slow life adoption of marriage and cohabitation and reproduction in younger generations, I think a lot of it is they just haven’t seen healthy relationships modeled in any aspect. I’m not talking about romantic necessarily, but even platonic. They haven’t had those real-life interactions.

I liken it to going to the mall. Gen X, the mall was their sanctuary if you will. The arcades, the movie theaters. It was just a place where they could go and hang out. And millennials caught the tail end of that. But I often say, when you’re walking down the mall with your friends and you could smell the popcorn from the cinema, you could smell Mrs. Fields and Auntie Anne’s pretzels and cookies. And you found a penny on the ground, you picked it up with a friend and you tossed it into the fountain. All those little things that you can’t achieve in a relationship that’s digital. You just can’t. You might be in constant communication and texting all the time, but those little interactions that round out a full human experience are largely lacking with these younger generations.

So you look at Gen Z in particular, and the loneliness studies are unbelievable. The US Surgeon General in 2023 said that loneliness is now one of the greatest health concerns in our country. We exchanged what we thought connectivity was to enhance the human experience. We’ve actually removed the most important elements of the human experience from interacting and communicating. And so I think a lot of that is that Gen Z doesn’t know how that translates into deeper relationships beyond surface level friendships, platonic or even romantic. And you’re starting to see some of that play out in society.

Kevin Novak (41:14)

Definitely. You hit on so many great points. I have students who bring forward how anxious they are when they have a physical interview or they have to have a physical interaction. Beyond the headlines, I think we all see that or hear about it on a personal and professional level, which I think that element of relationship has impact in an organizational setting. In our generations, we equated that to organizational politics or this was just the way work worked. And they’re having so much issue with that and they’re not expecting that to be the case. But indeed it is. And then they’re getting more and more anxious to actually navigate that kind of situation.

Kevin Novak (42:09)

We’ve diagnosed the problem. Generational identity shapes how people experience change and transformation. Psychological contracts vary by generation. Fears of loss are generationally inflected. Most leaders treat a multi-generational workforce as a monolith and wonder why their change or transformation stalls or outright fails.

So what do we do about it? The research points in a clear direction. Organizations that successfully transform across generational lines do three things very differently.

First, they segment their change communication. Not in a manipulative way, but in the same way any effective communication adapts to its audience. The message to a tenured employee needs to honor the institutional knowledge that they carry. The message to a mid-career professional needs to preserve their sense of autonomy. The message to a newer employee needs to connect the change to purpose and growth.

Second, they create multiple on-ramps for adoption. Not everyone processes change at the same pace or in the same way. Research on technology adoption curves shows that generational digital fluency creates asymmetric responses to technological disruption. Some people need to understand the why before they even engage. Others need to experiment with the tool before they believe in the strategy. Forcing a single adoption path is how you trigger the organization’s immune system across every generation simultaneously.

Third, and this connects to Ryan’s work at Elon University, they invest in intergenerational exchange. The organizations that transform best are the ones where generational differences become a strategic asset rather than a source of friction.

Kevin Novak (44:18)

So to bring this back. You’ve led four AI-powered startups across different industries. AI is arguably, and you mentioned this earlier, the most significant transformation pressure right now. And it carries a unique generational dimension because assumptions about technology, automation, and the nature of work itself change dramatically across age groups. How are you seeing generational fault lines shape the way organizations adopt or resist AI?

Ryan Vet (44:52)

I think the first and most important thing to realize is which generations are leading the charge on AI and which are not. And studies time and time again are showing millennials are leading the charge, which is really fascinating.

Kevin Novak (45:08)

Would you equate that to being of the age to be more in middle management at that point?

Ryan Vet (45:14)

Yes, and I think that’s absolutely a part of the equation, the fact that they’re in places where they can adopt it. But a lot of these studies are showing independent use too. Not completely sanctioned, if you will, or just using it for certain projects. I really think the biggest thing is if you look at this trend line that millennials always were changing in technology. They started with a car phone to a Nokia phone that they could play Snake on to a Razr flip phone to now iPhone. Just think about the massive change in technology in that short amount of time. From having to plug in with your Gateway computer, those cow checkered boxes, and you had a separate monitor that two people had to carry, to a unified computer like an iMac or eMac, and then finally a laptop. They’ve never seen technology be the same, and so they’re early adopters naturally. They’ve been trained and conditioned to say, new technology is not going to break us, let’s try it.

And then you brought up the other point of where they are in their career. What’s interesting, if you look at whether it’s the political landscape in Congress or even the White House, or you look at companies, you see baby boomers and millennials as the primary leaders across these institutions. And yet Gen X, who makes almost a third of the workforce right now, and I’m not saying they’re not in leadership roles, but disproportionately they’re not. The question is why is Gen X not in those leadership roles? I think part of it’s the way they were raised, part of it’s the stage of life. They’re being pulled in tension. Their parents are old and aging and living longer than humans have ever lived, so there’s a lot of elder care. And then their kids are in college or just having families and they’re more concerned about being grandparents. Part of that is the stage of life and where they find themselves. They’re not so concerned about climbing the corporate ladder.

So with the adoption of AI, millennials know that they’ve got to be relevant and it’s their moment in their corporate life cycle to prove themselves. And they’re not afraid of technology. So it’s kind of the perfect storm for them.

With Gen Z, you’re seeing mixed reviews. A lot of them are skeptical of AI and yet using AI. A lot of them are using it for their personal lives. I just saw, even on Valentine’s Day, I wrote a piece on how about a third of Gen Z had admitted to being in a romantic relationship with technology. Just yesterday I saw a headline that we’re up to three quarters. Three-quarters have engaged, and that doesn’t mean that they’re currently in a relationship, but they’re defining it as being in a relationship with some sort of LLM or generative AI robot girlfriend or boyfriend. Really fascinating to look at that. So they distrust it for corporate use and yet they’re engaging it in their personal use, and it’s very much like social media. They think there’s no business for social media in the workplace, which makes boomers happy.

Gen Z doesn’t like that mixing of work and pleasure. But we’re seeing the same resistance in AI in the workplace with Gen Z because they’re afraid, like anyone has been afraid, that it’s going to take their jobs. Just like we thought when Gen X was coming out, we’re not going to have jobs because computers are the main thing. And before that it was the assembly line, the assembly line is going to get rid of jobs. And yes, it absolutely eliminates jobs, but technology has also increased more jobs because you need more people to make more efficient assembly lines and monitor the data on those assembly lines and build the factories and fix computers or develop software or work on this thing called the internet.

And so, yes, AI is absolutely going to eradicate some jobs, but it’s also creating a new job market. And we saw growth this past quarter in the job market amongst Gen Z in particular, meaning that they’re getting placed in jobs. So where we saw a bunch of corporations stop hiring those entry-level roles, we’re seeing it already, that rapid. I wouldn’t say swing back. It was a nominal increase, but we’re seeing some trends positively.

Kevin Novak (49:05)

I think there’s a bit of a reality check happening with the companies. With the millennials who are driving a lot of the implementation and use inside organizations at the middle management layer, I think there’s the hype and the translation of the hype to reality, and it’s more so on the applicability to the actual business problems trying to be solved.

We’ve seen a few instances where a CEO was using AI to make decisions. But then when the questions about that decision-making came from others, that CEO could not explain what the rationale was for the decisions, what the information was based on, whether it was valid information, and so forth. So I think there’s obviously that which relates to hallucination, but you’re seeing some of that natural organic output come and then be questioned. There is a rationalization, so to speak, on what companies and organizations believe is possible. And I think to your earlier point, that’s just simply a maturation of a technology as people adapt to it and see where the true value is.

Kevin Novak (50:35)

Ryan, you sit on Elon University’s advisory board and you work directly with the generation who is now 40 percent of the workforce. What are you seeing in that generation’s relationship to institutions and authority that should shape how leaders think about building organizations capable of sustained change and transformation?

Ryan Vet (50:56)

I think we’re going to see a lot of disruption in the upcoming workforce. Even zooming out to kids not in college and university yet, you’ve got Gen Alpha turning 13 this year. They’re going to be able to work within the next two to three years, depending on their state. And they’ll be in college within the next five. You’re already starting to see the trend. We’ve seen tremendous dips in college enrollment in the last several years. And there’s a lot of reasons for that. Gen Z is staying at home longer. Gen Z is saying college is too expensive and they don’t want to have the debt burden that even their older siblings did or their parents did. And we’re seeing this return to manual labor, more blue collar work, which I actually think is really good. That’s what the American economy was built on, mainstream business and manual work. I’m not saying that’s the only thing that’s going to build our economy. I’m not an economist. But I think there are some really positive trends that we’re seeing in these younger generations.

But that also means that it could be devastating for higher education institutions. I think one of the big trends is that baby boomers in particular, again gross generalization, but statistically they were the first generation where both males and females could go and graduate from college generally. That’s where we started to see that trend and it became even more prevalent with Gen X. And then by millennials, it was required if you wanted a job. Baby boomers and earlier-born Gen X are now parents of those applying to school. And they’re starting to say, was that debt worth it? Was all that worth it?

And I think by the time you get millennial parents with Gen Alpha and even Gen Beta kids, they’re going to be pushing back against institutions. And institutions better pull it together real quick and figure out what does the new four-year education look like. Because so many people are going through freshman and sophomore year of high school and then junior and senior year, they’re splitting between a community college and high school credit. So by the time they graduate high school, they’re already a quarter or halfway into their four-year education. And that’s changing the landscape of the student that’s attending.

You used to have students who wanted to go as far away from home as possible to get away from mom and dad and experience that four-year education. Now you’re seeing students look more closely to home. The other thing that has always been the case but is even becoming more prevalent, is that students are looking for universities that already support their ideas. And I think there’s a lot of danger in that. That scares me.

We know statistically that liberal arts four-year education leans far liberal and far left as a whole. And it’s actually increasing more and more. But what used to be so amazing about a four-year education, which a lot of schools have lost, is that discourse where you could go and have a conversation with someone that was super right-wing and super left-wing and a university was a place where you were supposed to talk about those things on the quad and you could still be friends and have dinner. And now we’re seeing almost this ideological sorting with universities. I’m going to go to a school that teaches conservative policy because that’s what I believe in, or I’m going to go to a school that teaches more liberal left-leaning policy because that’s what I believe in. And while I think that’s absolutely okay to some extent, and we naturally gravitate towards people that think like us, the beauty of a four-year education, in my opinion, one of the beauties of it is that discourse, that experience of rooming with someone that you don’t agree with on anything, but you still room together and you get along and you figure out how to talk about the things in life that your lived experiences make you who you are. That makes you a well-rounded individual.

So I see a lot of those things changing. Elon in particular, I’ll brag on them, has been on the forefront of AI. They’ve got some great AI teams, but they’re also very strict on how it’s used. While they have been cited early in research around AI and how higher education should be using AI, and they’re on these think tanks, they’re also really promoting critical thinking. And that is ultimately what we need to do. Otherwise we’re going to be George Orwell’s 1984. We’re going to have newspeak. And Disney’s Wall-E I think is even a great example where we’re programmed by the machine. The institutions that still encourage those conversations will be so helpful.

I’ll give one personal example. We’ve got young kids at home and everyone asks, oh, are you teaching your kids how to use ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever you’re using today? And I said I did and then I didn’t. I let my son, after he graduated from preschool, before he started kindergarten, I said I would love for you to plan a trip. I want you to be responsible for the trip. Here’s the budget and everything. Good parenting move, right? Giving responsibility. And I let him do it on ChatGPT. He planned a great trip. We went to Asheville, North Carolina, went to some caves that he wanted. He planned exactly what we did, stayed within budget with the help of AI.

After that, I’ve never let him use AI again. And the reason being is there was no critical thinking involved. Not at all. He didn’t have to budget the money we had said that he could use, or the distance from our house. I should have gone to AAA, if they even have physical AAA locations, and gotten him a map. As a five-year-old, he probably could have done it. And yet we have outsourced so much of this thinking because we think they’re not able to do it, and that is so incorrect.

Could he have driven us there and gotten it accurate? Absolutely not. But we could have pointed him in the right direction. So I tell people when they ask me, are your kids using AI, I say they’re absolutely not. And they say, well, they’re going to be behind. And no, they’re not. If they can talk to a human in logic and be reasonable, that’s how they can talk to AI better than anyone else. They’re going to be able to think creatively, and when AI hallucinates or fails or even when the executive outsources something and can’t even defend their own reasoning, if you teach them logic and how to talk, they can talk to a machine.

Kevin Novak (57:02)

It’s interesting, the parenting decision you made. And across my students, many of them being Gen Z, they have based on taking the class I teach and doing some research made a decision that their kids will not have the phone as early as they did. And the recognition now in later years of what they were exposed to then and their own understood consequences of that use. I think the critical thinking element is still preserved in some regard, and it may be more of the social psychological elements that they’re speaking to at times. But it’s an interesting output of, to your earlier point at the beginning, history in many ways offers a pattern and there are some things that come in and out as far as a revolving door, and that can be indicative of the future.

Ryan Vet (58:10)

Exactly. I think one of the biggest detriments that we have to be aware of is we are seeing these positive trends. Younger millennials and Gen Z are saying they’re not giving their kids phones. And yet they are still living in the phone world, which means they’re outsourcing parenting to ChatGPT. My kid got bit at school, what do I do? Write the letter to the principal. Those are friction points that we cannot remove. And I think taking screens away is great. I’m all for that. Our kids don’t have screen time at all. My friends are talking about how many minutes and I’m like, ours are zero.

We’ll watch a family movie every once in a while. We can’t even get through a full 90-minute Disney movie, which is great. I’m okay with that. I’m thrilled with that. They’d rather be outside. And the number of started Disney movies is pretty significant on our Disney Plus. But what I think is really concerning is yes, we’re telling our kids not to do this, but we’re still outsourcing our thinking, our parenting to these LLMs and other things. And I think that is a bigger trap and of more detriment because you’re removing the emotion from being a parent. And parenting is hard.

We’re talking a lot about parenting, but it also has to do with leaders. We can’t outsource leadership either. We can’t outsource the difficult decisions in the workplace or the HR situation to LLMs. Think about it first. Come up with your solution. And if you absolutely must use AI, put your solution in there and help them poke holes from a legal perspective, from a compliance perspective or something like that. But my goodness, go sit down with someone on your team and hash it out and do a whiteboard session. It seems like a waste of time, but I can tell you those exercises, putting that friction back into the decisions, are actually going to be much more beneficial long term.

Kevin Novak (59:46)

Agreed. So after 20 plus years of building companies, advising leaders, and studying how generations shape organizational behavior, what have you learned about change and transformation that surprises people?

Ryan Vet (1:00:04)

I think it’s that it hasn’t changed. Everyone asks, why is change so hard right now? And I say, because we’ve gone away from the roots of what makes change important. And a lot of it is leaders being afraid to lead. It is a scary time to lead, but leadership was never an easy calling. I think for a season, leadership might have been easier than it was early on and than it is right now. I think there’s definitely a sweet spot of leadership when, not saying it was ever easy, but it was easier. And now leadership is hard again.

If you aspire to that office, to that title, you have to take on responsibility and that means not everyone is going to be your friend. And I think that is counter-cultural. Older generations knew that. They often had abuse of power and other issues. And I’m not saying you have to go back to that route, but it also means you have to be decisive and make decisions that are best for the company and best for your team. That’s the main part of your company. But you’ve got to do them decisively and with integrity and move forward even if you don’t win everyone over.

In change management, I just see so many leaders apologizing. They have all these caveats and all these qualifications, and it’s just like, this is the decision we made and this is where we’re going and this is why I think it’s best for our company. And then stop talking.

Kevin Novak (1:01:24)

That’s an important point because I did an episode a few episodes ago and I write a lot about this as well. There’s more picked up in the body language and there’s more insecurity that comes by virtue of the body language if the leader, to your point, is not definitive. And it’s okay to say, I don’t know what I don’t know. I’m not quite sure that these outcomes are going to happen, but I believe with some level of confidence this is the right direction. There is a human element to that that people respect, and there is also authenticity that permeates to those that are needing to rally around that and move those balls forward.

And to your point, I think there are people who are afraid to be leaders. I am in the school of there are people who are natural leaders and there are people who just can’t be leaders, even with training. But there is something deep down about that authenticity that is necessary. And I think that will remain.

Kevin Novak (1:02:46)

So if a CEO asked you for one piece of advice before leading a major change or transformation across a multi-generational workforce, what would you tell them?

Ryan Vet (1:02:58)

Rewind 30, 40 years to when you were sitting around and you pulled in key stakeholders, you interviewed them, you asked them their opinion, and you realized that not everyone was going to be on board. And that’s part of change. And how can you most graciously and kindly lead an organization through change, realizing you’re not going to have 100 percent buy-in?

I can think of a leader I greatly admire, and I’ve watched him for many, many years and been a part of, a voice in his organization for many years. They went down an initiative that was generally controversial, took a political stand in an organization that had never taken a political stand before. They had no reason to. And they took a very political stand on a hire they made and a division that they spun up. The entire time this leader was saying, hey, we’re doing this because there’s a group of our employees or members that don’t feel heard. And then he started apologizing. And he then apologized for each side of an argument. And I was like, he didn’t definitively say this is what we’re doing because it’s best for our team and our company moving forward. Full stop.

He had gotten a lot of insight and wisdom. That was the interesting thing. He approached the change management probably the best you could. Cornell has a great eight week program on change management. And if you follow their framework, he probably did all the things right. Papers, found the detractors, had the individual conversations, trickle down, beautiful. Until he stood up in front of his organization and started apologizing. His body language lacked confidence.

As a leader, if you didn’t think this was the right decision, you shouldn’t have done it. You’re leading. And that means sometimes you have to do things that are unpopular. Or if you thought it was the right decision, don’t apologize for it. Just lead with confidence. Because then what happened was the group he was trying to un-alienate became alienated. He had a mass exodus from his organization. And it totally backfired, even though on paper his whole change management strategy was appropriate.

And so to leaders I say, understand where you’re going. Understand why you’re going there. Bring in stakeholders. Have real one-on-one conversations, ideally in person, so you can see what makes someone uncomfortable. Ask them about it. Ask the hard questions. Don’t be so defensive in those conversations. Be open to new ideas. And then when you do make your decision, lead. Just be a leader.

Again, it sounds oversimplified, but I think we’re so afraid of young employees posting on Indeed or a subreddit or chewing us out on the internet that we’re afraid to make difficult decisions. But leadership is a difficult role. You’re not going to win 100 percent of the time, but you’ve got to at least lead confidently.

Kevin Novak (1:05:45)

Definitely. Ryan, thanks so much for coming on the Human Factor Podcast and joining us today. Your work as a generational futurist, combined with your experience building and scaling organizations from the ground up at the age of 14, brings a practitioner’s depth to this research that I think our audience is going to find genuinely valuable. Thank you, and please mention your newsletter, your research, and your book as we close.

Ryan Vet (1:06:18)

I appreciate that, Kevin. Thanks for the opportunity. Thanks for having this conversation. I think it’s an important one. As leaders, just remembering that we’ve got to put the human back into what we’re doing. We can’t outsource the human. We just can’t.

A lot of my work recently has been on a newsletter called Collide. It’s completely free. You can find it at RyanVet.com/Collide. And every single week, it’s an essay on trends, everything from topics we covered today like, is Gen Z actually going to church or are they just more spiritual, to why Justin Bieber is the quintessential millennial, to much heavier topics about what loneliness is or what’s going on in the world with certain generations and behaviors. It covers a lot of different things that helps and equips leaders, gives a mirror of where we are in the world today and hopefully sheds light on where we’re going. And the world doesn’t have to be as scary as we’re making it out to be. We just have to remember that leadership is a high calling. And as leaders, we have to make difficult decisions and lead well. Treat people with dignity as we lead, and you’ll win more people over than you think you will.

Kevin Novak (1:07:29)

Excellent. Thank you, Ryan. You’re awesome.

Ryan Vet (1:07:34)

Thanks, Kevin. I appreciate it. Fun conversation.

Kevin Novak (1:07:38)

The generational dimension of change and transformation is not a nice-to-have consideration. It is a structural factor that determines whether your change initiative generates alignment or generates fracture. When you understand that each generation carries a different psychological contract, fears different losses, and responds to different communication approaches, you stop designing change and transformation for a monolithic workforce and you start designing it for the actual human beings in the room.

Every episode of this season has been building towards a more complete picture of why change and transformation fails at the human level. Identity, contagion, structural traps, algorithmic blind spots, the immune system, structural silence, the psychological contract, and now generational fault lines. These aren’t separate problems. They are dimensions of the same underlying reality. Change and transformation is a human process. And the organizations that treat it as a technical process continue to fail at the rates the research predicts.

If you found today’s episode valuable, subscribe to the Human Factor Podcast wherever you watch or listen to the podcast. Leave a rating and a comment and share this episode with your leadership team, especially if your organization is navigating change and transformation across a multi-generational workforce.

Also, subscribe to my Ideas and Innovations newsletter on 2040 Digital’s website or on Substack. You may need the weekly frameworks and research on why change succeeds or fails. Lastly, connect with me on LinkedIn where I post regularly about the psychology of transformation.

Next episode, we’re going to continue the journey. Until then, remember, change and transformation doesn’t fail because of technology, strategy, or market conditions. It fails because of people. And the more deeply you understand the human factor, the more likely your change or transformation is to succeed. I’m Kevin Novak. Thanks for watching or listening.

END OF EPISODE

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