Available September 24, 2026

Episode 034: On Scope, On Schedule, Off Purpose – Why Following the Plan Is Not the Same as Realizing the Purpose

DURATION: 72 minutes
HOST: Kevin Novak
GUEST: Tina Berger, Digital Transformation Advisor and Author of Invest Like a Mother

FORMAT: Guest Conversation

SHOW: The Human Factor Podcast

COLD OPEN

INTRODUCTION

Kevin Novak: Here’s a project every one of you has been near at some point. It finished on scope. It finished on schedule. It came in on budget or close enough that nobody had to write a memo. The steering committee even signed off. And then, well, somebody ordered a cake. And 18 months later, the value that justified the whole thing hadn’t shown up. And well no one could quite say why. It wasn’t the technology, the system works. And it wasn’t the people resisting it, which is the explanation everyone reaches for next. It was something that happened much earlier in how the decisions were made before and during the work. Somewhere along the way, the organization started managing to the plan and stopped managing to its purpose. And because the plan was the thing being measured, the plan is the thing that got delivered. Those three numbers on the final status report are the easiest thing in a transformation or change effort to count. And they will never tell you whether it actually worked out. 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.

Kevin Novak: This is Season 3, episode three. Season 1 was about seeing the human factor clearly. Season 2 was about what you do once you can see it. This season is about practice, building the human factor into how an organization works so that it survives. After the consultants leave, and the executive sponsor changes jobs. Two threads anchor this season: the dynamic between artificial intelligence and human beings, and measurement, because what you measure determines what you manage. Today’s conversation lands squarely on that second thread. Tina Berger has spent more than two decades advising Fortune 500 organizations on digital transformation and on major capital and technology investments. Much of that work has been inside the energy industry, where capital discipline is about as mature as it gets. Those are organizations that know how to plan, fund, and govern large projects. And you know, that’s exactly what makes her argument so very uncomfortable. She has watched projects succeed by every formal measure and still fail to deliver the value that justified them. Her conclusion is that organizations optimize for process compliance when the purpose called for value realization. What makes that critique credible is where it comes from. Tina began her career in the early 1990s as a technical writer. She documented the very processes that organizations would later mistake for the point. She spent the decades since inside execution discipline before concluding where it stops short. She is not an outsider who finds project management tiresome. She could be considered to have actually written the manual. She’s also the author of a new book, Invest Like a Mother, a new holistic framework for investing. It argues that care, responsibility, and long-term thinking are powerful guides for allocating capital. And she has also written a memoir, Coming Around, about discovering that success by the standard measures can feel hollow. We’re going to get to both today. They turn out to be about the same thing as the projects. Tina, welcome to the Human Factor Podcast.

Tina Berger: Thank you for having me on,

SEGMENT 1: THE PERSON WHO WROTE DOWN HOW THE WORK WAS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN

Kevin Novak: So, Tina, I want to start at the beginning with the technical writer because that’s where everything came after everything started. Early in your career, a mentor told you to ask your questions and then stop talking and listening. That puts you in a really unusual position. First, you were the person writing down how the work was supposed to happen. Then you were the person listening to how it actually happened. Most people in organizations only get one of those views. So I want to share a famous study of exactly that gap. In the late 1980s, an anthropologist named Julian Orr spent months riding along with the technicians who repair Xerox copiers. The company had given them a detailed manual. Orr found that the manual described the machine that didn’t exist in the field. Where the real work happened in stories that the technicians told each other over breakfast, about the machine and how it failed in ways the documentation never mentioned. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid built on that and gave the two versions names: canonical practice, which is the work as organizations describe it, and actual practice. Which is the work as it actually gets done. So you spent years standing in that gap with a notebook. What did that vantage point teach you? And when did you first conclude that following the plan and realizing the purpose weren’t the same thing?

Tina Berger: I think there’s been there it is a complex question and we talked a little bit before coming on live about the complexities of some of these questions and the dangers of simplifying them. Because I’ve been on a long journey of trends to improve in business, you said twenty years, but if you go back to technical writing days, that was more like thirty. But where you started with this question was about listening. And what I would say about that in particular is that even now that’s been consistent from 30 years ago to now. That has supercharged my ability to be useful in whatever role, in whatever way I’m supporting change within organizations. It’s like the better I get at that, and you can get better at listening. The better I understand what people need to do their work better in terms of leadership, in terms of clarity, in terms of communication, and terms of denoising the environment so they can do it, the better I understand that, the better I am to support people and executives trying to implement it. So I have really worked on that. And I would say that has continued to be a key to the success that I’ve been and any of the successes I’ve been involved with or associated with.

Kevin Novak: So a side question on this one, is there an opportunity or what has shifted, if anything has shifted in the past 20 years, where there is more or not an openness for you to raise your hand? And say, here’s what I heard. Here’s what I think is wrong. Here’s what I think needs to be communicated better or documented better or so forth. Is criticism more accepted in that regard?

Tina Berger: Depends on the leader. And if you ask me what the some of the key criteria for success in transformation projects are, I would say a leader that listens, because I can bring my same experience, my same examples, my same toolkit, my same facilitation and engagement processes to bear on one project that and then another very similar one that has a that is tuned that has a leader that’s very tuned to listening and taking on Advice or steer or support from an expert, and they’ll have very different results and outcomes. So I always call it getting a live one. Look I’ve got a live one on here. It’s somebody who’s gonna work with me to figure out how to make this project successful. Because it used to be 20 and 30 years ago that you could be successful as the person on the front of the magazine as a leader. And now it’s not possible for leaders to have a depth of understanding of all of the elements, the aspects, and the disciplines and the functions impacting the levers they need to turn. So if you’re not good at listening, and we tend to elevate people that are often not great at it, But there are some. But if you’re good at it, you can really do some amazing things inside of organizations as a leader.

Kevin Novak: And you hit on something, but I often on the podcast as well as in my writing bring up the cognitive load limitations to your point, because I think we’re existing in a significant complexity opposed to 20 years ago. Yes, there are some things that are the same, but there is a urgency, there is a speed, and there is more of a complexity to being a leader in an organization.

Tina Berger: Yes. And there’s the speed is I think the speed is one of the most important factors right now. The push for faster growth, the push for increased profitability in large corporations that are so very large that there’s so many trade-offs that you’re having to make as a leader from what would be ideal, So you’re under resourcing projects sometimes. We’ve leaned out all of the support for folks who are trying to do things in a new and different way. So it becomes a real need for leaders to advocate for the time and space they need, versus saying, yes, we can do this. And then also to get creative with the people on their teams. And we haven’t developed a lot of creative DNA over the last 25 years. We’ve done a lot of efficiency DNA, like how do we take waste out of our linear processes?

Kevin Novak: Very much so. I and I very much agree with that. My next question speaks to this in some ways. So was there a moment, Tina, a specific project, where you watched the document win, where the process was followed to the letter, and you could see from where you sat that the point had already been lost.

Tina Berger: Usually there are multiple points of failure to your point. It’s like what I just said previously. It’s like if we continued to run projects like we did 20 years ago, we’d be great at them. I’m pretty sure about that. But because there’s always layers of new challenge that we’re putting on top of what the challenges were twenty years ago, people are kind of trying to run as fast as they can. So so what I see is people looking at what they’re being measured on. So you’ve got it’s you’ve got orchestration that you’re doing on in the digital space. You’ve got people working on the data problem, and that’s a whole team. You’ve got people working on the IT and security and delivery side, that’s a whole team. You’ve got people on the business that are trying to understand the requirements and work with your business analysts. So you’ve got these th these different teams. That are led by different leaders that are extracting out of the overall picture of what success is their goals and trying to make those clear to people who don’t necessarily hold the big picture thread. So as an IT project manager who’s kind of looking at a year-long project and has to report on that by weeks. By months and says by the middle of the year we need to be 50% done, they might architect their work plans so that they do the easiest 50% of the work at the end of six months, but it doesn’t, but there’s no interim value that’s delivered during that time. And there’s no real way of saying that is really 50% of the effort, right? But you’re going to say that it is. So we’re talking about my metrics. I’m looking at them, I’m trying to help my team be successful. There might be some bias in it, and I’ve and I haven’t really solved anybody’s problem at after six months. And more there’s pressure on this because you’re drawing down the business and there’s a real pressure to deliver faster than a year, even if that’s what’s on the schedule. So it’s like so what I’m I what I am kind of reflecting, for you is that yes, people are kind of trying to extract their goals that support the overall goal, but if there’s not some different ways of managing that, we’re not really good at hitting those all together as an orchestrated collective. And those are complex, large projects that all each of them has its own surprises. So There’s going to be data issues consistently and we’re not going to anticipate them consistently. There’s gonna be IT security things that pop up that are brand new that never happened to before consistently. There’s cloud communication. So we’re not running the same kind of projects. So yes, it would be easy for me to say, we’re just bad at doing projects, but we’re learning it’s like we’re learning as fast as we can. And the teams that will be successful will actually run these projects differently. They will start to look at how to deliver interim value to a part of the business because the kinds of changes that we’re actually dealing with are very different from the ones we were implementing 20 years ago and even 15 and 5 years ago.

Kevin Novak: I agree with you completely. And I think the human factor is something that easily gets dismissed or not even considered. And that flow is so critical because not one person can know everything in a hyper fastly moving environment, both externally and internally to organizations. So the question. When you were the writer, the technical writer, did anyone ever ask you whether the process that you were documenting was the right one? Or was the assumption that if it was written down, it was correct?

Tina Berger: Back then the assumption was that it was written, if it was written, it was correct. We’re still writing down processes. I actually spoke with a guy yesterday who is documenting processes in upstream. And I’m thinking, what are you gonna do? What is the point of that? Did they identify the highest value ones to have written down and what will be done with them? Will they be used for an assurance or quality process? Because back then people would refer to actual paper manuals back when I was writing, and they would use those as ways to train people, which is not was not a bad thing. It’s like let’s train you to the manual that you’re gonna be using. Here’s how you find how you do that process, here’s where that policy is. Now it’s all online, and it still looks remarkably the same as it did when it was in a Manual. So I think most of the time those provide a reference point for people, but they’re only one reference point. People don’t trust that they are final. They’re often not the Bible of what actually tracks for quality. And there’s also some real need to be contextually aware about what you do with the process. And it’s one of the challenges that I’ve seen. So if you say, for example, and we consistently are asking people who were not trained to be leaders of PL to understand it. So if I’m a I’m an engineer and you ask me to do a high-level draft design, because I want to see if we should invest here. I want to see If there’s enough reason for us to go over here and do this project. But you’re an engineer and your idea of quality is written down here in this manual, and you don’t want to let go of that piece of work until it’s where you feel like quality is. That I think the documentation can work o against what’s fit for purpose in certain cases.

Kevin Novak: Well, I wanna in some ways look at it in a contradictory way. And what we’ve seen over the years is organizational pressure to oversimplify. People will not understand this if there’s more than five bullets, or make sure the visual diagram includes the ten steps, but don’t explain the ten steps, just let’s say step one, step two, step three, and so forth. What has been your experience? I in that. And I appreciate the engineer correlation and I can respect that they are very detail oriented and want that in the process. But the assumption again is that people don’t think or they don’t want people to think and not understanding the challenges.

Tina Berger: I think there’s a lot of improvement to improve communications. I don’t see communications around transformations and business changes and projects being done very well. There’s still this tension between what you’re highlighting, which is tell me what to do, tell me all tell me everything from how you decided to put your team together. To how you decided to purchase the technology, to how everybody’s gonna use the technology. It’s like people have limited time and attention, and really they want to know why this is important. They do want to know why. They wanna know what’s the minimum you can tell me and teach me so that I know what to do here. They want relevant material, relevant information. They’re used to fishing it out for themselves, but they have to know where, and they have to know that they’ll be successful with it. Several times, you know, I hear this story about people resist change. They just resist change. And I’m like, no, actually they don’t. They resist risk. They resist risk. So if they feel like the change you’re asking them to make is risky because you’re not serious about it, you’re not going to follow through with it, you’re not going to advocate them when they need it, then they resist it. If they think what you’re asking them to do is not doable, so there’s a risk there, they’ll resist it. So it’s like you have to listen You have to listen to what’s behind the resistance. You have to reduce the amount of noise you put into the system. You have to listen to them when they tell you the reasons why what you’re trying to do is gonna be difficult or the noise you’re gonna get. One of the things that I feel like is really important is to listen deeply to the resistance, bring it back to the leaders and say, here’s the noise that you’re gonna hear when this moves forward. Are you seriously committed to pushing for this behavior, and this work process? And if you’re not, let’s not do this. Let’s not say it’s important

SEGMENT 2: THE ANATOMY OF A COMPLIANT FAILURE

Kevin Novak: So Tina, because you’ve had years in seeing gap after gap in organizations through your work. And I want to take this a bit further and in some ways pulling apart a project, the kind that finishes on scope, on schedule, and on budget, and delivers nothing that matters. So to give some context, last season I did an episode called Transformation Theater. And it was about the way the performance of change can quietly substitute for the actual substance of it. It’s the pilot that never scales, the steering committee that meets and decides completely nothing. The status report that is green because green is what the report is for. So over the things that you described, you know, it’s the most respectable version of that theater because it isn’t theater really at all. And the work was real, the discipline was real, the project simply answered a question that nobody was really asking. Or was a question that they didn’t even know to ask. So walk me through the anatomy. What does everyone in the room believe turned out to be wrong when you identify a project that has not gone well?

Tina Berger: So out of the spectrum of project types that you mentioned, it feels one of the things that one of the types that feels alive right now is pilots that don’t scale. And it connects a lot of dots to talk about an example like that. Partially because when you pull together a proof of concept or a pilot, you’re imagining a future that doesn’t exist yet. And And usually the people involved in those projects are people that are from the business that have a lot of enthusiasm about new technology and new possibilities and have seen a problem, at least of they have a view of a problem that they want to be involved in solving and that’s often how a pilot spins up. And so then they get all of this synthetic data, they engage a team of to identify what’s on the market or to build something internally as is sometimes the case and they pull a team together and they keep showing and there’s a point past which you’re gonna say yes this is a a good pilot to scale and take forward. And they’ve presented it, people love it, they’re excited about it, but they have not screened it adequately for the complexity to actually Roll it out and scale it in a in an enterprise. And they’re kind of looking at lowercase workflow, okay. Best case they’re looking at least at that. They’re saying, I think people will use this thing. But they’re not looking at the limitations of data. They’re not looking at how much effort would it take to get the data that’s in a quality in a level of quality of the format that this actually would work consistently in a way that scales value. Because you can get value in one small business unit by using its data, and that’s going to take you a year to gather and integrate and present up into the view that you’re trying to use, the application you’re trying to use. So they run into data problems, even though they showed them a working prototype. Most of the leadership teams that I have engaged with are from the business. They’re people from the business that are not fluent in the challenges at the data layer. So there’s tech there’s a problem with them anticipating and there’s a problem with people on the teams explaining what the barriers are to implementation and what kind of effort it would take to get that data ready. The other thing is you usually have to have really strong connections with people. That are leaders and assurance people that manage the quality of delivery in the business engaged to a level that they will support the use of a new technology and a new tool in a process that they have documented in manuals over years and put online for people. So there’s resistance from a risk point of view. Like I said, it’s always risk that people are awaiting for, but a lot of a lot of these things just add up and it just becomes such a kludgy thing to figure out how to get a small pilot that has strong incremental value that could be very useful to scale. It just hits so many barriers, so much resistance.

Kevin Novak: so I Tina, I wanna hit on something it’s a serious example a serious situation. So what we have been talking about has a well-documented parallel. The sociologist Diane Vaughan spent years reconstructing the Challenger launch decision. And it’s something I have written about a ways back and using that as an example. So her finding was that nobody actually broke a rule from a process perspective. The engineers that you brought up earlier, they had raised doubts through the proper channels. The proper channels processed them. And then the launch went ahead on schedule. And she called it the normalization of deviance. Each small acceptance of a warning sign made the next one so much easier until the warning signs were really not part of the process anymore. So the process itself didn’t fail. The process worked exactly as they had designed it. So a question. Why is process compliance so very comfortable for people? And what makes the value realization so much harder for anyone to hold on to?

Tina Berger: Yeah, I think it sounds like the processes worked but that the alerts didn’t. So the processes worked as they were supposed to do, but the alerts on the processes were ignored because there’s a bias to action and there’s a bias to production and there’s a bias to movement and to the things that are considered to be high value. So it’s not valuable to delay. It’s not valuable to have shutdowns on oil rigs. It’s not valuable to have more people on the rig than the minimum necessary to execute these processes. And we don’t want you to stop because of something that’s not life threatening. Now, yeah.

Kevin Novak: Is that a misdefinition in some regards of what value should be realized? Is something getting, I guess What I’m trying to say is something getting assigned value in the process And the clarity on the end value, and unfortunately in this regard, I’ll say the launch, right? That somehow got diluted because the realization was happening throughout the process.

Tina Berger: I love that question because I believe that we have come to in many large organizations come to be pushing people on value that is a singular factor, and that is does this drive profit to the business? And so all of the other things are supposed to line up to make that happen. And we’re even trying to get people who have different jobs. When I was starting to write my process documentation and even well into my the first 20 years or 15 years of my career, people really were like, What I need to do is my job, and I need to do it at a high level of quality, and that’s what I’m measured on. Now we want human resources people, IT people to understand and people that are doing well operations to understand. The value that they’re bringing to either cost reduction for the enterprise or increased revenue to the enterprise. And those everybody knows that’s the value. That’s what’s being measured. That’s what’s being looked at. So when we had smaller organizations, and it’s all relative now, but if you look at the size of these corporations that have constant pressure on them to grow earnings year over year, Then you start looking at. How much cost you have to cut out every year and how much growth you have to get every year to hit those numbers, what you’re asking people to do eventually becomes impossible within a r a reasonable level of quality because You’re basically telling me, you might be telling me, hey, we value you as people, but you’ve taken away my support, you’ve taken away my help, you’ve taken away the coworkers that I used to work with to get the same amount of work done. So the risk increases.

Kevin Novak: So I want to explore this with you because I for years have worked in the media industry. And obviously, that industry is challenged as the internet matures, as social media matures, as the tools mature, because in essence, everyone can become a content producer. And who the audience, individuals pay attention to can be a very personal decision. And where subscriptions and advertising were their core revenue generators. What is happening in that space over the last five or so years is equity firms purchasing and In essence consolidating to create bigger companies. But you hit on something in that it’s always a maximization of revenue and over efficiency, a lack of investment on the firm. And so when that value is being dictated, how does that play out in trying to get to what should be the value realization, the true one, the right one?

Tina Berger: this relates a little bit to my book, Invest Like a Mother, which we Which, you know, kind of takes this whole picture and goes, Hey, what are we doing? Right? Like what are we doing? What are we About? Because we did used to be when I started in the energy industry, they were looking at how can we do things in a lower-impact way on the planet? How can we reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So they had some largely well-funded solar initiatives and other initiatives that were green operations, all these things, but those are their costs until they’re not. And if you end up being first in your sector in your vertical to go after better, like a broader set of values than just profit and loss, you know, reducing that, bringing your earnings number up. Then you’re being compared to your peers by Wall Street and shareholders, and they’re saying, Hey, you’re underperforming your peers. We’ve got high gas prices, oil and gas prices. Go back into that business and do that business and let all this other stuff go. So they end up having to cut all of those things, which were inspiring to people and also useful from a trying to keep the planet alive for future generations type of Point of view, exactly right. So I feel like it’s a bit of a runaway train as far as like what’s happening with our largest corporations in the world and this and the stock market. So the question is and I you can see it in so many like you start out these companies start out with sometimes really great and visionary leaders that have we’re they’re we’re about this and we’re about farmers and we’re about local foods and we’re about fair trade and this is what Whole Foods was. We’re about fairly play paying our employees and in paying for some college costs. And there was a multiplier between the lowest-compensated people in the company and the leaders of the company. And then over time as that company grew and became and the market became saturated with companies like Whole Foods that were working in organics and some of the other large grocers started to catch up with them, they started having to cut costs and reduce the quality of the foods that they had. And the difference culturally can be felt when you walk in from what it was 15 years ago. So it’s like all one value f every value falls away until you’re left with nothing but driving this n one number and it’s like, man, when do we tell Citicorp, hey, you know, you’re big enough. You know you’re you’re bigger than most countries’ gross domestic product. Maybe you’re big enough.

Kevin Novak: Well, and there’s so many things to explore on that when you look at I’m very much a person that sees decentralization and centralization almost as a revolving door. And decentralization Almost comes with we need to continue to get bigger and bigger. And you see leaders come in to do that and use a perennial example of GE. And then in recent years, GE again decentralizing and moving out and selling off pieces of the business because they see those pieces better to survive on their own without the overhead of the larger organization. And so you know and we really want to pick your brain from the energy industry and the organization. So capital discipline is a source of real pride for anybody. And for those Companies particularly. So it’s how the organizations have survived downturns. And when you tell that organization’s its discipline is delivering the wrong thing, what do you hear back from them?

Tina Berger: So there’s a lot in that question, and that isn’t what I would say to them. I wouldn’t say your discipline is delivering the wrong thing. Because they these are people that have operated at the edge of technical capability for years and years. It’s like they’re always pushing the limits, finding new oil, getting it out of the ground from hundreds and hundreds of feet beneath the surface. This is like a moonshot every time they do it. So building these big platforms that are gonna sustain years and years out in the sea, these are big projects. So for the purposes of the work that I do, I know they’re bringing me in there to support them in being successful in their careers and to successfully support the needs of the business. So that’s the frame that I use when I go in there. What I will say is that we’re at a space now where we’ve done what we can with if you think about major capital projects, you start with the kind of design phase. Where you kind of go, how do we solve this problem? How are we going to what does this design need to look like for this well, for this project, for this digital tool, whatever it is, there’s a front-end design part. You do that part and then you begin to scope it and then you put your team together, you put your detailed plan together and you execute that plan. And many people feel like the value doesn’t start until you begin executing that plan. Building that thing. Then you can start saying, hey, we did something. So the front end is not often appreciated, and for very good reasons, this business is risk averse. And part of the reason why they have regimented their processes the way that they have is to keep people from dying and pollutants from being released into the Into the environment. So they’re very resistant to good reason to changing a lot of the way they do their work. However, risk is not just health, safety, and environmental in this industry anymore. It’s also commercial risk. It’s also dry holes because it’s harder and harder to find where you need to drill or where you need to do projects or failure of projects is expensive. So it’s like how do we actually do better design? And I think I may have mentioned this before when in one of our previous conversations is we’ve been looking at leaning and creating efficiencies on this major capital projects process as well for the last 15 years. It’s like how can we make the handoffs from one part of the project to the other part of the project go better? How can we make those pieces go faster? How can we make execution go faster? How can we work our supply chain so we have everything that we need? All of those things. But not every part of this process is improved by efficiency measures. And a lot of what I’ve been seeing in recent years is people wanting to shortcut the front end of this process where you’re supposed to be looking at alternatives. How might we do this project? How might we solve this problem? What should this do? Maybe it should be very different from how we’ve ever done it in the past. But instead of actually engaging with that creative, all the different creative possibilities, all the new data that we have, all the new AI tools that we have that might inform us better, all of the different perspectives, it’s like let’s go get. These two folks that worked on that other project that had a lot in common with this one, bring them on and let’s just basically replicate that instead Of really spending a little bit of extra time at the front end. That’s where I feel like we’re missing the boat in that project, in that process.

Kevin Novak: W one thing, Tina, that I focus a lot on, obviously from a human factor basis, and I just did this in the season opener where and I’ll have some questions for you in a bit about measurement and those green lights where people know a measure needs to stop. Or people know something needs to stop and they’re the expert. They have that information. But on a human factor basis, they’re hesitant to call that question. They’re afraid of the criticism. They’re afraid of being the naysayer in the process. And sometimes there is a disconnect on that value. So was there ever a project? And recognizing what you’re dealing with are very complex projects. As you said, they’re risk-adverse. It’s very regimented on a process basis. So what have you ever experienced someone that actually stood up and stopped it? And they stood up, whether it’s mid-flight, and just said, you know what, the value isn’t coming. This isn’t just about the exercise. What have you seen happen internally to that person?

Tina Berger: Depends on the location and the type of stop you’re calling. So if you’re stopping at a safety an HSE, very supportive. I see leadership being very supportive to that. When it’s an investment decision, it’s different. And there’s a lot of reasons for that sometimes, but I’ll give you one example. Trying to decide so different business units submit proposals for money for them to do different work and some of that work might be exploration work. And so that’s very highly uncertain. So you put together an economic model and you say, we’re we have this much probability to find this much oil in this location. We need this much money. And what’s behind that is a lot of science and a lot of people who understand the subsurface and understand the challenges and kind of come to their leadership and say, we have these kinds of opportunities. This is how much budget we would need to work that and see what we can get out of it. And at some point, you might have a reservoir engineer or a scientist that goes. You’ve got that probability too high. Well, we need to bump up that probability higher, or we might not get the budget that we need to do it. So you have bias coming into the requests for certain decisions, financial investment decisions, because that leader wants to have money for his team or her team to do the work. So we hear a lot of frustration of those sorts of things where when you’re going after I want to be promoted. I’m trying to manage my own personal risk. I’m also trying To manage the risk of my team that I don’t want to be sent off to other places or home because it’s a talented team. And I do think there’s stuff here. And maybe there is. But they’ve just told you there’s less than a 40% chance and you’ve bumped it up to 60. And that’s what you’ve taken forward in the business plan, right? So I see that more frequently.

SEGMENT 3: DISCOVERY, NOT VALIDATION

Kevin Novak: So in the to get back to the front end, so you have said that it should be a discipline of discovery rather than validation. And most leaders would tell you they already do some discovery. And most of Them, of course, are doing something else completely, but they completely don’t see it. So Ronald Heifetz distinguished between technical problems and adaptive challenges. And I probably bring this up too much, but I think it is something that people continue to struggle with. Where a technical problem has a known answer and the job is to apply it. An adaptive challenge requires the people involved learn while they act. And often give something up. And you mentioned this earlier. The linear planning treats every challenge as technical because tactical problems can be scoped, they can be scheduled and budgeted. Digital transformation is rarely technical in that sense. And a plan assumes it is or will mislead the very people who trust it most. So a useful companion to Heifetz is David Snowden and Mary Boone. And they wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2007 that leaders first have to recognize which kind of environment that they’re in. And this gets to my earlier point, sometimes they just don’t see it. And in a stable, ordered environment, cause and effect are knowable in advance. A good plan really does work. Those greens are real, but in a complex one, cause and effect are only visible in hindsight, where the right move is to probe, see what happens, and then respond. So the danger, of course, is using the first kind of thinking in the second kind of environment. And you can do that with a very professional-looking Gantt chart, nice plan that covers all the bases. So what does the validation version of planning look like in the rooms that you’ve sat in? And what would discovery have looked like instead?

Tina Berger: So a validation in an example like w I was talking about earlier there’s a problem that’s being presented. How do we do more of the interventions like the one that worked over there in places, how do we find out where that would work better and do more of the that kind of work? Let’s just say that. Then the answer would be let’s get those guys that worked on that and bring them in and have them run the same process in all of these other similar types of wells, for example. Instead of let’s see what they let’s see, let’s bring them in and understand all the factors. Let’s bring in some people from different types of environments, let’s bring in what we can find from for industry best practices, let’s actually have some creative innovative sessions where we iterate possibilities. There’s a way we keep talking about cross-functional collaboration that doesn’t happen. And partly I would lean on my earlier point about listening, is because we’re out of the habit of really listening deeply for possibilities because there’s so much pressure to actually start something, to do something, and to report on that thing. So you’ve gotta actually take time to breathe together to understand what the best process or the best projects or the best way forward is. Instead of saying, let’s replicate that thing. That’s the action we’re gonna take. We’re just gonna replicate. That’s that’s a contrast that I would say. And now because we have AI and we have more data, being able to bring people that have different perspectives can actually jump you into of much higher level of value than you would have had just by replicating something that’s working someplace else. That shows you that there’s possibility for improvement. It doesn’t tell you that’s the best one.

SEGMENT 4: MORE RIGOR, NOT LESS

Kevin Novak: So if a plan can change whenever new information arrives, accountability really dissolves in some regards. And nobody can be held to anything because the target, in essence, has moved and the adaptation becomes an alibi to many. So you argue the opposite. Staying responsive in your words to reality takes more rigor and discipline, not less. And it produces so much better decision making. So Talk us through that perspective.

Tina Berger: So like the first piece is you’re picking the right project at the beginning. So you basically naturally de-risking your project at the very beginning. If you’re bringing in your suppliers, you’re bringing in your experts, you’re taking a view, you’re looking outside and saying, Hey, where do these kinds of projects typically fail? You’re looking at all of the data that’s available to you, and then you’re screening from there. So you’re now taking a good so you reduce some of the risk. You look at your organizational impacts, you look at the cost, you’re actually scoping the right projects from the beginning. So that’s actually already a better plan. And then when you start executing, when you run into the surprises and you always have them. Like we’ve been running these kinds of projects, same kind of execution plans at least for 30 years. And there’s always a surprise, even though we’ve got all of these integrated ways of looking at the data. So no, you don’t just go, hey, too bad, you know, we’re just gonna have to wait and keep all these people or figure out how to get them back when we need them. You go, let’s engage again. We’re not changing anything until we have to. We’re still holding on what the commitment was until we have to change it, because I have yet to see a major capital project deliver on time and on budget. I haven’t seen one do that. I’ve seen one say that they did that, but the But the scope increased and the budget increased so then they could say they hit the so yeah. Call it done.

Kevin Novak: Right, exactly, right. They forget that and call success at the end, yes.

Tina Berger: And you know, most of them have resulted in large increases in revenue production. So that was how they managed that. But the thing is I think that when you have a better way of intervening and solving hard problems together, hard complex problems together, because you have learned how to do that. You’ve learned how to listen, you’ve learned how to engage, you’ve learned how to bring people together and look at the data all together. There have been these programs and I have a an article on one of them called Decision Space that I started interacting with and being really excited about more than 15 years ago. And it was allowing co-visualization of data by people across wells, across reservoir engineering, people that don’t typically interact to look at all of their data together, sit in the same room and go, here’s what I’m seeing, what are you seeing? Here’s what I’m seeing, what are you seeing? And I have yet to see them do that. ‘Cause they’re still acting like it’s just it’s just a process. I l I use it to look at my stuff, then I throw it over the fence to you. So we don’t have we don’t we don’t know how to do that ’cause we’re still we think every meeting is a competition of ideas.

Kevin Novak: Yes, always. And that is always such a challenge. So I Tina, I wanna bounce this off of you. And there’s a researcher, Gary Klein, who calls some of what you mentioned in many ways, and this is starting at the beginning of the process, a premortem. So before the project starts, the team imagines it’s a year later and the project has actually failed. And I mentioned earlier people simply have challenges predicting the future or coming up with a concept. So each person writes down why. And Klein’s research found that people are far better explaining a failure that has already happened than predicting one that actually might. So you hand them the failure and let them explain it. And that gives you a written list of the ways the plan could miss the purpose before anyone has a reason to defend the plan. And so that takes us straight into the season’s measurement thread. I open Season 3 with an episode on what I call the measurement ratchet. Where organizations add measures easily and almost never retire one. And a researcher named V.F. Ridgway warned way back in 1956 that whatever you measure with precision, people will optimize, whether or not it’s a point at all. So scope, Schedule, and budget are precise. Where readiness, the trust, the collaboration you spoke to it’s just so disconnected sometimes and so much harder and people believe the purpose Isn’t there. So what would you put on a project’s dashboard that isn’t there today? And then what would you take off knowing that dynamic plays out?

Tina Berger: So what I would do for measurement now is I would design projects to in such a way that there is integrated value increment. There are integrated value increments so that certain working elements of the project are all delivered potentially together or at least something that’s easily definable. I’ve seen dashboards used so badly over the past So I’m trying to think of how you could use one that couldn’t be gamed and I’m not sure about that. There’s some qualitative things. One of the things that we did do for value realization, and I put a whole framework together in the last assignment that I had, was along with but it wasn’t on a dashboard, but there were factors. So along with developing the actual doing the typical stuff for a digital project, like requirements from the user, kickoffs with the team, delivery of certain kinds of compliance documents for IT. You also had to engage with business leaders of the adopting business unit. So it was like taking adoption and pulling it apart into its pieces that would actually accelerate the adoption of or the success of the business. You know, what are all the things that need to be in place to your point That are not the technical yes or no’s but if you don’t do them, you’re guaranteed to not really be able to launch this when you think you can, or to deliver value when you think you can, and to stop calling value delivery of a completed working digital tool, because that isn’t value. That’s just delivery of a tool. So, how do you in incorporate into your metrics the things that will enable the adoption to happen. So it’s meet meetings with leadership teams, it’s user testing with folks from the business, it’s advanced training for certain elements of it’s data loading for certain business units where you’re gonna have to have it ready. So it’s all taking all of those lessons learned and incorporating the increments of those into your milestones. Because you can’t always do incremental value delivery, but You can do incremental change management delivery.

SEGMENT 5: THE PLAN-VERSUS-PURPOSE CONFUSION IN AI

Kevin Novak: So I want to take this to a topic that is for better or worse in every conversation today. And so organizations are investing in AI at a scale most of them have never invested in anything. And when the value fails to show up, the you the explanation is usually one of two things. The technology isn’t ready or the people won’t use it, right? It’s that, well, people are won’t use the system, they won’t, so it’s nothing new. Your experience points to somewhere else. And it’s really to how the decisions were made. Where do you see the plan versus purpose confusion playing out in AI investment right now?

Tina Berger: It’s very leader specific. There’s not nearly enough attention from leaders on where could we really move the needle with AI and data? Because we’re rapidly approaching a post-application, post-dashboard type of time where when you enable your enterprise data, you’re going to be able to interrogate it using tools like ChatGPT or Claude. But help me figure out you’re basically talking to or typing in, hell, I need to do a root cause analysis for the production decline in X in XYZ well. And And that’s what you’re that’s what you’re up to. So your job as a leader becomes understanding which levers to where you can maximize the use of AI on, and you’ve got to enable that data. And that’s a totally different way of thinking. Then give me a prototype of a digital solution. It’s like you know, so They’re not I haven’t seen anybody at the C suite level getting close to really understanding and doing that. I haven’t.

Kevin Novak: No. Right. I have not either. Yeah.

Tina Berger: But that’s where they need to go, in my opinion. And it needs to be the biggest problems that we have, put the smartest. People in the room, the people if the people about that particular thing, bring in some.

Kevin Novak: Well, and I got I gotta be back just to have an episode just about that thing because so yeah, I wanna build off something that when we last talked, you said people don’t like to let go of things without having the next thing to grasp onto. And Some research here, two of my favorites actually. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed why in 1979. That losses loom larger than gains. Giving up something you already have hurts more than gaining something of equal value that feels good. So when an organization asks people to let go of how they’ve always worked, and it really builds off this dashboard thing, and they offer a promise in exchange, the arithmetic is already against it. And this is something that I align with. So Denise Rousseau’s work on the psychological contract. Gets at the organizational side, where the psychological contract is the unwritten set of promises about what effort buys. And then AI transformation tends to rewrite that contract completely unilaterally, where the tool arrives before the new promise does. And people are asked then to release the old handhold without nothing in reach. So, what does that mean for leaders setting the pace and sequence of AI adoption?

Tina Berger: I think business case like really guiding teams and spinning up teams to or a team to really help align the capabilities that AI enables with the business case because the data will not be ready for whatever data business case you have in a way that really drives enough value. It’s not it looks simple because we use ChatGPT, just like search looks simple because we use Google. And this is what I think messes up the expectations of our leadership is that they think their data is as available as public data is and it isn’t.

SEGMENT 6: INVEST LIKE A MOTHER

Kevin Novak: Yes. Absolutely. So in some ways the plan versus purpose problem is about to get a lot more complex and expensive. Which brings me to your book. And it’s more relevant here than the title might suggest. Invest Like a Mother argues that care, responsibility, and long-term thinking are powerful guides for allocating capital. I think that’s also a fair description of what’s missing and how organizations fund and govern change and transformation. So a parent doesn’t fund a child’s education on a quarterly return basis, right? And you’ve publicly questioned whether year-over-year earnings growth should remain the single measure of corporate success. And that’s a brave thing to say out loud after 20 years and 30 years advising capital-intensive organizations. So, how much of the book’s argument is really about how institutions decide, and not only about how people invest?

Tina Berger: The book is very compassionate to people who are leading organizations right now and to people who are investing. So it doesn’t give you a you must do this or you’re not doing it right sort of thing, but it does widen the lens because the way that I see all of the connections here, I’ll give you an example. There’s people that are investing as fast as they can in their 401k so they can escape working at the company that is providing it right now. Because the pressures On production, even if we look at the word investment, what it means everywhere else in life, like I’m invested in the development of my community, I’m invested in my child’s development. I’m invested in my friendships. But when we talk about being invested in the stock market, that’s not what we mean. We’re not heartwise invested in what we’re doing. And when I started, there was a lot more of that. When I started my work, it’s really a different, it’s a very different feeling walking into a corporate environment now than it was 30 years ago, even 20 years ago, even 15 years ago. The urgency, the amount of time they spend talking about reducing cost versus meaningful work or doing something cool together, reducing cost or increasing revenues. You didn’t used to hear that. It used to be kind of like that’s not how we talk to people. That’s all that’s all that the conversation is about. It’s like creating the red thread between what your work is and either reduce cost or increase revenue to the company. So I am putting a big question mark on that. I am saying, what is driving this? What is the reason for forcing growth to be the reason why all of our businesses exist? Are they still serving us? Are they still serving something good in the world? I think we should be asking questions about what the intent is of our investments, beyond just the money game. And so I say this with compassion, like I said, because I support this, I’ve spent my career in these organizations. I feel like we should back up again and look at our system and go, is it driving the right behaviors, the right decisions, the right what we want. What W the right investments for ourselves and the generations that are coming. And I feel like we might be dropping the ball on that a little bit. So I at this stage of my career I can’t not put it out there as kind of, it might seem like it’s at odds with my work, but I can’t not talk about it because I don’t want to see people hurting like they are.

SEGMENT 7: THE REFLECTION

Kevin Novak: Yeah, I think we’ve we have found ourselves in a very challenging situation. So this takes us to the question that I ask every guest at the end. And with you, I want to frame it around your memoir Coming Around because it’s a personal version of everything that we’ve been talking about. And the memoir describes discovering that success by the standard measure. Felt hollow and that resonated with me. I thought a lot about that since we first talked about it. And it’s that a life can run on scope, on schedule, and on budget and still miss its purpose. And organizations have exactly that experience at the end of a compliant project. Everyone did what they said they’d do. And nobody feels the way that they expected to feel at the end. So what did the personal version of that discovery teach you about the institutional one?

Tina Berger: So I was one of those people and I am a person who has the profile of somebody who would be very successful in a corporate space because I am a verbal thinker, I am a linear thinker, I am a fast verbal processor, and so I was consistently rewarded for that during my school Experiences and during my early experiences in my career, and I moved quickly into a leadership role. And then I kind of got there, and a lot of things in my personal life were falling apart, and I was like, and then that leadership role didn’t feel like I thought it was gonna feel, and I felt kind of what’s what am I doing with my life here? And I had several experiences which are documented in a book that kind of brought me back to the ground and I was and what I realized is that I wasn’t listening to what my life was telling me anymore. I wasn’t engaged enough to get the feedback from around myself to understand what motivated me. What I cared deeply about versus what looked like and felt like success, what the goals that I had set for myself were. And so that book talks about my remembering that whole aspect of myself that listens well, that connects well, that relates well, and what that does is in a bigger context we’re asking a very specific thing. How can I maximize my return? How can I maximize shareholder value in the context of a corporation? But it doesn’t start with a need anywhere. It doesn’t say what’s inspiring for us to do as an organization, what serves the planet for us to do as an organization, what serves our employees to do as an organization. It’s a very limited view. And so I’d say that the parallel is backing up and widening the lens on how we measure our own success and ask if it’s enough for us And hold that question. You know, we’ve got to listen. That’s kind of where we started.

Kevin Novak: So my definitely. And yeah, my last question, when you think about the leaders that you advise, what’s the one thing that you hope they would stop measuring themselves by?

Tina Berger: I don’t think the measures are bad. I think that’s where I would say I just think they’re insufficient. What I would hope that they would do is really tune into their own broader knowing and advocate for what they know should be happening instead. There was a downturn in the oil and gas market. The price of oil fluctuates and it’s a cyclical market. And most of the oil and gas majors kept their dividends. So that’s the dividends is what they pay out in cash To their shareholders. They kept their dividends the same and laid off their workforce at a level that worked for what they needed to hit in their earnings. Except for Occidental. Occidental had a CEO that said, we’re gonna reduce the dividend and keep our people because we know that this is gonna change. And I can’t tell you what that meant to me.

Kevin Novak: That was future-looking. I mean, that was not being reactive.

Tina Berger: That was a holistic and also it’s counter to how anybody else did it and what any like it was that’s very brave to do when it means you’re gonna stand out in a different way from your peers. And it meant so much to the people who worked there. But also to the people who worked in other places who saw it. It was like it showed an alternative. And I think the more we can do to show alternative possibilities, it goes back to that picture, that thing you were talking about earlier. People don’t let go of what they know until they see alternatives. And if you can be one or show one, that’s so important, even if it’s a small way. Even if it’s a small change.

Kevin Novak: So Tina, before we wrap, is there anything that you would want to leave the audience with and where people can find you, the book, as well as the memoir? And I think each one of those two books can be so incredibly helpful for people.

Tina Berger: Thank you. They can find it on tinaberger.com. So that’s my consulting website. But there’s also investlikeamother.net if you want to go directly to the book website. What I would leave people with is that big change does not happen. This comes from a book called Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown. And we always think that large change happens with large intervention. But small things make a big difference. Making small investments in your community with intention and care and attention, those things all add up and they change the larger systems. Deciding not deciding to reduce dividends rather than reduce staff. That’s not a small thing, but it’s one thing in a thousand decisions that leaders have to make. But it makes a huge difference and it sets in motion different possibilities for people that come after you. So that’s one of the ways that I retain hope and keep myself motivated. But if that’s useful then I’ll share that.

Kevin Novak: It very much is. So Tina, thank you so much for being on the Human Factor Podcast.

Tina Berger: Thank you very much for having me, Kevin. I’m grateful to be here.

CLOSING

Kevin Novak: I want to close by connecting what Tina has shared to where this season is going. We open Season 3 asking what organizations count, who decided, and whether anyone still has the standing to stop. Tina has given us the sharpest version of that question. A project can hit every number it was given and still miss the reason it existed in the first place. Orr and Brown showed us that the documented work and the real work are two very different things. Vaughan showed us that a process can work exactly as designed and still deliver a catastrophe. Heifetz and Snowden and Boone showed us why a plan built for a stable world misleads people in a complex one. And Kahneman and Tversky and Rousseau explained why people won’t let go of the old handhold. Until the new one is in reach. And Tina, she has spent thirty years inside the discipline, first writing it down, then watching it followed faithfully to the wrong destination. Her conclusion is not less rigor. It’s a different object for it. Not the plan, but the purpose. If your organization has a transformation reporting in green right now, the question Tina would ask is simple. Green against what? And who in the room still remembers? If you found today’s episode valuable, subscribe to the Human Factor Podcast wherever you watch or listen. Leave a rating and a comment and share this episode with your leadership team, especially with whoever signs off on the status report. Subscribe to the Ideas and Innovation newsletter at 2040digital.com or on Substack for weekly frameworks and research on why change succeeds or fails. And connect with me on LinkedIn, where I post regularly about the psychology of transformation. Until next time, remember, it is never the technology, the market conditions, or the strategy that makes change and transformation successful. It’s the people. And the more deeply you understand the human factor, the more likely your transformation is to succeed. This is the Human Factor Podcast. I’m Kevin Novak. Thank you for watching or listening.

END OF EPISODE