Available October 1, 2026

Episode 035: The Missing Half of Change Management – Why Transformation Has a Model for Everything Except the Person Inside It

DURATION: 65 minutes
HOST: Kevin Novak
GUEST: Dr Grant Van Ulbrich, Creator of Scared So What and Founder of The PCM Company

FORMAT: Guest Conversation

SHOW: The Human Factor Podcast

COLD OPEN

Kevin Novak: Think about the last transformation that you were part of. Not the one you led, the one that happened to you. There was a plan for it, a process, a communications calendar, a training schedule, an adoption curve with your name somewhere on it. The organization had a model for every piece of that change. Except for you. Nobody handed you a way to work out what you felt about it. Nobody asked whether you agreed with it. The model assumed you would resist for a while and then well eventually accept. And the whole machine was built to wait you out. The change management field has spent decades building instruments for the organization. Today’s guest noticed what it skipped. There was no active working method for the person inside the change. So he built one. And he built it into something most leaders find frightening. The person’s right to say no. 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 3, the season all about practice. 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 building it into how an organization works, so that it lasts after the consultant leaves and the sponsor moves on. Two threads anchor the season the dynamic between artificial intelligence and human beings and measurement. Because what you measure determines what you manage. Today’s guest is aimed at the exact center of both. Grant Van Ulbrich got to this work by an unusual route. He started as an air traffic controller in the United States Navy, directing aircraft on the deck of the USS Carl Vinson. He moved into sales leadership in the San Francisco Bay Area. Then he spent more than 20 years in the cruise industry. He launched the first modern luxury retail travel sales centers at sea. An operation he reports at more than $700 million a year in revenue. And he founded the Royal Caribbean Group’s first Office of Diversity and Inclusion. Somewhere in the middle of leading sales transformation for a global organization, Grant went looking for a model that would help the person going through the change. He found that none existed. So he built one through his master’s research, and then as the first person from the travel industry to earn a doctorate in sales transformation, which I think is really cool. The model is called Scared So What. The first half maps what a person actually feels when change arrives. The second half turns that into a plan that they own. And it does something. No established model does. It treats rejecting the change as a legitimate outcome, not a stage to be managed, but a decision. Grant is the founder and CEO of the PCM company, which he describes as the world’s first personal change management company. He’s the author of Transforming Sales Management, Lead Sales Teams Through Change, and he’s building an AI evolution of the model which we’ll get to because it puts him at an interesting spot. Grant, welcome to the Human Factor Podcast.

INTRODUCTION

Grant Van Ulbrich: Thank you, Kevin. It’s great to be here with you today.

SEGMENT 1: THE MODEL THAT WASN’T THERE

Kevin Novak: So, Grant, I want to start with the moment you went looking and found nothing. You were leading sales transformation for a global organization. You had every tool the field offers, the process models, the adoption curves, the communication plan. And well, somewhere in there, you realize that none of it was built for the person that the change was actually happening to. And here’s why that gap surprises me. The individual side of change has been studied for a long time. In other fields. In 1983, two psychologists named James Prochaska and Carlos DiClemente published what became the stages of change model. They were studying people trying to quit smoking. They found that a person moves through stages from not even considering the change to weighing it to preparing to acting to holding on. And that you can’t skip someone ahead in those stages. You have to meet them where they are. So that model changed medicine. It never made it into the transformation playbook. Organizations kept the process model and left the person completely out of it. So tell me about that moment. What was happening around you and to you when you realized the field with a framework for everything had nothing for the individual?

Grant Van Ulbrich: Wow, what a setup. And thanks so much, Kevin. It was a shocking, very fearful moment, to be honest with you. And I write about it in my first book. What happened was I was in the cruise industry, 25 years in the cruise industry, and for the last 10 years, my role was to lead global sales transformation. Started out, it was, sales enablement. And I thought, well, what am I really enabling people to do? And when I spoke with the top leadership, they said, We want you to transform the business. In essence, we want to go farther beyond where we are today. I said, Well, how do I do that? And he said, Well, that’s what we’re hiring you to do at the very moment. And what we found out was there was a master’s program. The very first master’s program in sales transformation was actually here in London with Middlesex University and the Consalia Sales Business School. So I went into the program and we learned about the sales psychology and you know the science behind it and we built out the sales academy, which was great. But there was one module where I was really scared. You know, I was 45 at the time, and this my work was putting me in this master’s program at night on top of my day job. And if I didn’t succeed, I would naturally probably lose my job because that’s the whole purpose of it. So there was a lot of fear behind it. And what happened was we were learning about organizational change. They taught us, you know, the cross of the major models for organizational change management that we would be using, keyword we would be using on people To get them to transform, in essence, to get them to do what we wanted to do. And I it just sat wrong with me. I’d never been in academia. I was a military man, so I’m yes, ma’am, no ma’am, three bags full, do what you’re told. Always do your job and do it to your best of your abilities and don’t question, right? But in this moment I just thought, this is not real world. And as every other person in my cohort was pen to paper, just doing it, I thought, what am I missing? Grant, you better get the courage to ask the question. Raise your hand. Raise your hand. Ask. So I raised my hand to the professors and I said, listen, I’m not trying to be flip. I’m not being daft. I was the only American in the room, right? I said, very serious question. Can you accept change? Yes, you can. Can you reject change? Well, yes, you can. I said, then why is it that every one of these models ends in acceptance? And the room went silent. And it was about interpretation, right? So they had to look at them. They’re all over the wall. There’s over 30 different change management models over the past century, all the way back to Kurt Lewin’s. And I said they’re all assumed acceptance. And the language in them, the language is staff, strategy, employee, if the people are actually listed there, you know, it’s calling them corporate. It’s not about human life. It is about a corporate moment or movement. And the words are descriptive. They’re prescriptive. If I can accept change and if I can reject change, these models are not bespoke for me. And where is that model that allows me to be positive and accept change, neutral and negative to reject? What do I do? Where’s The what do I do? And they said, what you’re asking for truly doesn’t exist in what you’re asking. So they took a little bit and they came back and said, listen, if we put the power of the university behind you, do you think you could get your company? Could you get your company to participate in the research and you build a personal change management model exclusively for individuals that can help them to work? And so that Was my whole master’s program. And we did it. And it was terrifying, but I instantly had something and I was going back in, digging into psychology. How does the brain work? What do we think? There’s some hidden things in neuroscience that people aren’t quoting, They quote that the brain does this, but they also don’t quote the other half that says it will be unique in every individual. So we can’t assume that everybody automatically resists because they blinked differently or looked at us cross. Maybe it’s unprocessed change. That’s my hypothesis over the last 10 years. Some of it will be truly, I just don’t want it. And that’s fine. That’s conscious choice. But Some of it is I need time to think. So All of this was going forward. How do I base a model off of fear, stress, worry, anxiety, and assumption? And how do I get people to actually start making critical, reflective decisions based off of information? And more importantly, once they’ve decided how they felt. How can I get them the help they need to reflect it on what is it they could do right now with this change? And that’s where the Scared So What model came through. So getting through that fear of you’re gonna get fired if you don’t pass this, you better create something, you better do it right. But I just couldn’t live with myself to do what everybody else was doing. They were just accepting that this is the only way. And you have to think about that. How many of us in life, in business, do that every day?

Kevin Novak: I want to go a little further back with you. So you were on a carrier deck before any of this. And all of what you’ve done to me is incredibly interesting. So air traffic control is a job where the plan meets reality. Every 90 seconds, right? What did that teach you about the distance between the model and the person living inside of it?

Grant Van Ulbrich: You know, was interesting. We’re gonna go back years. People often ask me what did my Navy experience teach me? This was back in the nineties. I don’t know you’ve probably seen my TED talk. It’s the first time that I’ve ever spoken about my naval experience. Mostly getting out, which was I was to serve four years and I served three and a half years. And this was before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. So it Was still the purges. The witch hunts that we would call them. That’s real life. That’s what we’re talking about, human change. And this is mostly a lot of why this experience and personal experiences change us. And the Navy absolutely changed me in many ways. A lot of the perspectives it taught me how to grow up, very quickly, how to be self-reliant, how to be responsible, how to be respectful, how to follow orders, because if you don’t, there are consequences of your actions or inactions as well. There’s two sides of that coin. But my story was kind of interesting because I was also gay. You know, and was coming from time from the Bible Belt in Kansas to where, you know, who you are is not permissible. But the Most interesting thing was my Navy brothers, my shipmates, they didn’t care. It was the hierarchy, the leadership. It was them who cared. And there was also financial behind that as well, too, because right before the new president was going to come in and inject don’t ask, don’t tell. It was all of our reenlistments, our new deployments. So this was an opportunity to cleanse. I wasn’t the only one. There were hundreds of us escorted off the ship that day and that week. And it saved the government so much money because you just get rid of us. They don’t have to pay our reenlistment bonuses. But then what do you do? You’re instantly homeless. And then I had a lot of choices about how I could have looked at my naval experience, but I always choose to look back and say, th I’m thankful for it because it taught me so much. And that experience, how it ended, was just one part of three and a half years. But it started to formulate who I am. And I’m thankful for that because when I got into the masters that day, my human reality, my own vision of what happens within change, came in and said, you know what? You need to question this. Don’t just take everything. You know, we’re we’re taught that in the military. Assess orders. Assess directions, assess situations very quickly, make the right judgment. And I will always take that with me.

Kevin Novak: Well you know, context sometimes is everything and I appreciate you saying where you looked at the positive of a period that in many ways could have been flavored and remembered simply by the end.

Grant Van Ulbrich: Yeah. And for many that happens. Yeah.

Kevin Novak: people get stuck. And that’s part of Kübler-Ross and Bridges and so forth, even with the grief curve, is the recognition that some people get stuck. And I think, what’s interesting with what you put forward is and some of your commentary is that people don’t always move through a curve. And so in many regards, you didn’t. Right, you decided to in essence not complete the curve and come out with a negative acceptance. You reflected back on what was positive and what that experience taught you. And now you are in essence promoting what you learn to other people, which I think is really important.

Grant Van Ulbrich: And that took many years, Kevin. That took many years. There was lost there. Kübler-Ross actually is one of my most favorite methodologies and I respect her so much, enough so when I was doing the research to find out, even though she’s no longer living, how could I find her voice? And to find Ken Ross, her son, who’s the president of her foundation, To be able to speak with him, at length and share what she truly was trying to do. With her methodology. He actually told me. He said, Grant, her original work, there were thirteen stages in her models. And she was trying to facilitate a conversation between The living and the people who were exiting. That’s it. That was the sole purpose of her research is to find a conversation and then map that out where these people are living, right? And I asked him, I said, What do you think Scared So What does, my methodology? He goes, I think you’re doing just like my mom. You’re bridging the gap and you’re trying to facilitate an internal conversation for the individual. And that humbled me. It was just wow.

SEGMENT 2: THE RIGHT TO SAY NO

Kevin Novak: Well but and you hit on what I want to ask you about next. And it is that there is that gap and it’s something worse in some regards as the gap and you found in that a set of assumptions. And from my background work so your critique and that is fairly precise. The change curve most leaders know was built for grief and borrowed completely for change and including bridges. I have adopted it. I use it all the time. I use it with clients. The dominant frameworks are predictive and very linear, They assume individuals will eventually arrive at acceptance. And nobody asks at any point whether they actually consent. So your Your model breaks with that. And yeah well and it actually in prep, right, and

Grant Van Ulbrich: But they should go together. That’s the story I’m really trying to get. Yeah.

Kevin Novak: Talking with you before, I mean it stopped me to think because the decision organizationally for a person is okay, well I quit. And that there is a finality with that. There’s like only one option with that. But that doesn’t have to be the case. So The D in Scared is indeed decision. And the decision, it’s a real one. It’s favorable, it’s unfavorable, or it’s undecided. There are actually some options there. So rejection is legitimate outcome. Anyone who has listened to this show for a while knows I keep coming back to bridges, which I just mentioned. And change is the event, transition is what happens inside the person, and it starts with an ending. So bridges, describe that interior journey better than anyone. What he didn’t do is hand the person an instrument for it, a way to use it.

Grant Van Ulbrich: Yeah. And I love Bridges methodology because it does, but your the key word was perfect what you said. It describes. It’s just descriptive.

Kevin Novak: there’s research behind why that matters, Grant. In 1966, a psychologist named Jack Brehm described what he called psychological reactance. When people feel a freedom being taken away, they push back to get it back. Not because they object to the thing itself, but because they object to being told they have no choice. And that’s a lot of what organizations call resistance, is reactance. Where the plan removed the choice and the person is fighting for choice, not against the change. And so another researcher, Sandy Piderit, writing in the Academy of Management Review in 2000, argued that most of what we label resistance is actually ambivalence. People believe one thing, they feel another, and act in a third way. So they’re not conflicted and they’re not really opposed, which is exactly the C in your model, championing or conflicted. I wrote about a version of this in a newsletter issue called the permissions paradox, where I outed myself related to how I am leveraging AI and talking through that. So make the case for agency. What changes in an organization the day its people learn they are allowed to decide?

Grant Van Ulbrich: Hmm, that’s powerful. So opening the door, what happens when an organization, understands that the person can have the capability? I’ve actually been having this brought up a couple of times when I go to meet a client, a new client, Especially like chief human resource officers, et cetera. And someone actually told me once, they laughed and they said, well, what happens if the people actually can think for themselves? I said, Well, that’s a great place to be. Congratulations. You’re not having to do all of the work for everyone else, which is typical. You have to think about that for a moment. That’s typical about Change management today, where does it sit? It typically sits in with human resources and or change managers. But in Large global organizations, you don’t have enough to expand the capability throughout the Entire organization. So what do we want? We actually want critical thinkers. We want People to be able to process how they’re feeling. We want people to not be labeled as resistant, and transactional leadership puts you in that position anyways. Because transactional leadership’s all about a foundation of telling people what to do. You’re not giving anybody the time to actually process it. So I absolutely agree, but you look at resistance to change scale, you look at the different theories, you look at neuroscience as well too. The human brain is designed. I get it. It’s completely designed to do that. But the part that we actually leave out is neuroscience will also quote, and I shared this with you earlier, every human being is different and unique. So therefore you cannot assume. The science is actually telling you, don’t assume everyone’s the same. And we leave that out. We leave that out a lot because it’s vague. It’s not certainty for us. And that’s the part we need to actually challenge. What I call it is unprocessed change. Are you giving people time to think? There’s a brilliant author, Nancy Kline. She wrote a book called A Time to Think. And it’s just phenomenal, giving people that space. Just because you perceive that the change situation is clear in your head doesn’t mean that you’ve even provided them the time, let alone questioned their understanding. You know, that’s the part a transformational leader would do. At the core Of transformational leader is co-creation, ideation, or coaching. They’ll be asking questions.

Kevin Novak: So Grant, why do you think then, and I see this time and time again, why do you think leaders find that so frightening? And in my experience, the fear isn’t that people will say no. It’s that the leadership actually has to hear it and do something about it.

Grant Van Ulbrich: Well, exactly. Yeah, it could create other responses. Maybe I don’t have time pressures, time constraints, project, scope of projects, finance, budgetary. Especially if I’m a leader of a department and I know I’ve got two real critical thinkers over there, and I have five minutes to get this out and I have XYZ projects to do, I’m being personally judged on that by my boss or my supervisor. The last thing I want to do is put it in front of them and let them go crazy with ideation. So it’s about control. Sense of control. But a lot of times what you see is that fear of letting go because I’m personally responsible for this. I just need you guys to execute really quickly. And there’s also a lot of misunderstanding or lack of unconscious knowledge of what was happening to me. My employees may want to participate, but you know what? I was just berated by the supervisor above me. And I was told I have to get this done in two seconds, you know. I’m not carrying that I’m not unloading that baggage of how this Was delivered to me. Just get it done. So the core of that to answer your question is fear. Fear of loss, fear of letting go, fear of losing control. And that’s a mistake. We’ve been taught that way. I’ll give you a perfect example. I was doing a cohort for a police force here in London, and I was teaching my certification program about personal change management. And at the very beginning, every one of them sat front had their arms all crossed like this. I mean hardcore police, And it was mostly all men, and f the chief was a female. And the one officer looked over and he said, I don’t understand why we’re here. This is too fluffy. This is too psychology. Here we go. We’re police officers. And I looked at him and I said, I started to say, but his chief actually burned it in. She goes, I know the answer. You’re here because I told you to be here. And I looked at her, it was a knee-jerk reaction. So quickly I went, That’s kind of the wrong answer, but stick with me for a second. And the rest of the police officers were like, Ooh, you just told the chief off. And I’m like, forgive me, but please for a second. I asked the gentleman, I said, What is your role? And he said so proudly, I’m the assessor. I assess all of the new candidates. They gotta get through me. And I said, Wow, did your face change? There’s a lot of pride in that facial expression there, isn’t there? And he goes, Well, it’s gotta be done right. And I said, Reflect back with me. And I did this in front of his peers, because they know him. He’s been there forty years. And I wasn’t trying to be mean. I just wanted him to see his own behavior. And I said, reflect back to your assessor. And before I could say anything else, I hated him. And I go, Well, why is that? And they all laughed because they all pretty much real knew. And he said, he was just so mean and controlling. And I went, Well, congratulations, you’ve become him. And his face just went, and they all laughed. And the chief went, Yep, that’s right. And I said, if you stick with me through this day, if you be open a little bit, you might learn something about yourself. And I kid you not, Kevin. At the end of the day, he didn’t get out of his chair. All his peers left. His chief thanked me, said that was really powerful. Let’s keep going and left. And then he came up to me and he said, and he was a big guy. He was like six foot five. Just, I mean, towering over me, 40 year veteran. And a scowly face just looked at me, he goes, I owe you an apology. I went, What for? And he goes, We’re police. We were never told that we could feel. And we’ve never been taught to feel. That’s weakness. We don’t have time to be weak. And I said, I appreciate that. Coming from the military, I can understand a little bit, right? I have high respect for you. I said, but you’re a human being. Your feelings have consequences. And he goes, I get it. And I’ve never Seen it. And it’s those moments of why I’m championing personal change management. We’ve got to start supporting the individual. They have the ability to think. If you can learn ethics, which we do every year, if you can learn leadership, which we do every year, finance, risk management, expense management, procurement, why do we do all of these things in business around the world every year to mitigate risk, right? But change, we leave that up to two people in HR.

SEGMENT 3: LIVING THE MODEL

Kevin Novak: Yes. Always. So because AI is so much part of every conversation, wanna put forward a situational for you. And what I’m after here is talking through the letters of your model because I think they’re very important. And part of what we’re talking about is personal change is personal management change. So a person is in the middle of an AI rollout. And I think you’ll align with this that I’m talking to the reactance, I’m talking to the perception of resistance. So they’ve just learned their role is changing. And scared maps, what happens next? So there’s the surprise, there’s championing or conflicted, there’s action, receptive or rejective. Explore decision. Then so what turns it into a plan, a strategy with options and in essence a way forward where there’s some hope and the actions allow some taking of ownership. So your phrase for the outcome is that ownership replaces resistance. And here’s the research I want next to that. So Shaul Oreg and the Journal of Applied Psychology in two thousand three built a measure of how individuals differ in their disposition towards change. Some people seek routine, some react emotionally, and we’re hitting, you just hit on some of these. Some think very short term. Some hold on to things that were to a point of fault. And his point was that resistance isn’t one thing, it’s a profile. And it differs And it differs person to person, which means a single communications plan lands differently on every desk it reaches. So walk me through the model as a person would actually live it and take me through That AI rollout from, in essence, the first communication.

Grant Van Ulbrich: Well, I love that, you know, and I agree exactly with the research that you’ve talked about. The reason Scared So What is uniquely different is it’s two models in one, number one, and it’s an active methodology. So it doesn’t describe what someone’s going to feel. It actually is think of it like a coaching mechanism. It’s A personal coaching model. It’s designed for you to ask yourself the question, how do I or what could I? Okay. Critical, reflective, action based thinking. So it’s very different from OCM, which is describing or prescribing. It’s even further very different from wellness, which is after the fact, which is reactive. So this is Brand new pathway in the middle. The first model is scared. What I want you to do is to process your feelings. You have them. I don’t care who you are, whether you want to be agnostic to them or not admit to them, you still have them. If you’re alive and moving. And so you ask yourself, just as you said, the if you go around the wheel, the center of it is you and your change. You’re thinking about it. Am I surprised by this? Think. Am I? Did I have any knowledge of this? Was any of this Any discussion? Or is this just completely out of the blue? Right? Am I conflicted by this or do I champion it? This is where the model becomes fluid and uniquely perspective to the individual. I could like this. My friend over there could hate it. This you see where I’m going? So It has to have choice, conscientious choice, but they’ve got to th think about it. So how am I feeling towards this? Conflict or champion? What actions could I do to gain information? Instead of sitting here in fear, worry, stress, and anxiety and making an assumption I don’t want people to do that. We shouldn’t be living in assumptions. We should be living based off of information, especially With AI. Sitting right in front of you could actually use it to get some information really fast, Really quickly, right? But I want you to think and bring in information and there’s a reason why. If you are focusing on what could I do and seeking, you’re no longer sitting here in fear, stress, worry, anxiety, and assumption. Your management capability is going up. Your sense of control and awareness is going up. So there’s there’s psychology behind it’s not deflecting your mind. It’s actually saying, go here versus here, right? Find out what you could do versus sit and stress over it. Okay. Two different directions. And once you’ve done that, then you go through and say, Well, now that I have some information, how do I feel? Am I more receptive to this? Or do I think that this is just not for me? Think of how many people say, I’m just gonna quit. Right? They Can reject. And you can. This is where this is very important, right? Make the right decision, not of an assumption. And before you make a decision, could you explore any other options? The E. This Is another action. I’m doing this intentionally because you have processed your feelings. And I want you to second guess and say, is there anything else you should consider before you make a decision? Again, the goal is to make an information based decision, not an assumption. And it can happen quickly, Kevin. That’s the whole point. And then, as you’ve rightfully said, the end point. I want you to make an informed decision. But people think, well, that’s easy. No, it’s easy for you because you’ve already decided. And this is where we get this wrong as leadership. You’ve you’ve decided. And now you’re communicating at people. They still need to think, right? And This is just the first half, their feelings. Can I make a favorable decision? I like this. Great. So what? What are you gonna do? Are you gonna guess? Or are you actually gonna think of a plan for yourself? I don’t like this. I’m making an unfavorable decision. More importantly, so what? And then what we often see is people are stuck in indecision. And the brilliance about our technology is now we can see it. You know that they’re stuck in assumption. With our quiz now, we can actually see that and it Makes it tangible, something we can see so you can coach people on it. That’s processing your feelings was scared. But you’re not done. So what? What is your plan? Again, Active model. What is my strategy? The S another word for strategy is P, plan, right? What Options should I include? Do I see a way forward? Yes or no? This is where I want you to stop. We always have enough time to do things over and over again, but we never have enough time to do it right the first time. It’s about you. Do it right The first time. Take the time to think. Then you get into psychology, reflect your reflection. Do I have hope or do I know how my plan is going to work? And like that police officer, I remember once he also said, he goes, I don’t need all this hopeful stuff. And I asked him, I said, Do you ever hope to promote to chief inspector? Yes, absolutely. I go, Congratulations, you’re a human being. You have hope. It’s not rocket science, but it is psychology. The more hope you have, the more energy you will put forth to actually making that come to fruition. The less hope you have, you’re going to be stuck in uncertainty or you’re just going to reject it. It’s just the way your mind works. But if you can answer positively, then move forward and say, A, what actions do I need to take? How do I actually make this change work? And the T is the most important part. How do I take ownership? Which is what consequently, every leader wants. They want their employees to take ownership. They just don’t know how to communicate to or help them to get there. So the T is about taking ownership. What is it I have to do to actually execute so the change works in my favor the way I want, right? And what I tell people, I said the most important element of taking ownership is to reward yourself. Because the minute you reward yourself, the next major change that comes through, you’ve added this to your cognitive skill sets. This worked for me. So now you’re not in a place of going, my God, here’s this big change. There’s nothing I can do. No, there is something you can do now. You can think Scared So What? And you can actually think how what do I feel? What decision can I make? And what’s my plan? Yeah, that worked last time. Here we go.

Kevin Novak: yes. So I want to hit on this from scaling it up. And what happens differently in an organization where hundreds of people do this for themselves rather than waiting for the communication plan to make them feel better?

Grant Van Ulbrich: Yeah. Well, I can share with you. The part that we’re doing here at the PCM company is we have a couple of aspects. The first is on the change. How do we make an organization actually change ready? But what we do is we go in and the first thing is to certify, to transfer the knowledge into the organization so that leadership can be able to facilitate the conversation. This is critical. If you think about all of the adoption pain points across the world with global technology adoption and the failure, Brian Harkin wrote in his book, The Galapagos Theory, it’s up to 2.3 trillion is the cost of failed digital technology initiatives from change. And it’s not the technology. It’s because we’re telling people what we see they have to do. And what we want to do is when you have like a Salesforce system or a new CRM system or AI coming into an organization and the leadership saying, I want adoption to be here, and you’re not equipping the people, here’s what happens: the workforce goes and starts to touch the new, whatever, shiny new object, gets confused really quickly, gets scared, doesn’t work the way they think it is. Some people are getting it, and that puts more pressure and more fear on the ones who can’t get it. And then they go to ask a question to their supervisor, and here’s where it breaks. The supervisor says, I don’t know. You need to speak to IT. Trust broken. Instantly. Immediately. And That’s where the resistance comes through to say, You’ve just given me permission. You’re my boss. You’re my you’re that senior vice president. You’re that vice president. You’re the one that’s supposed to know. You love your title so much. We know how much you get paid. We know all the awards and accolades that you get. But you just told me you don’t know. But yet I’m supposed to be the one to carry all the weight for the company. Trust broken. Whereas if you go in and you teach the supervisory leadership the points, the knowledge, what is it? What are we trying to do? What is this about? And how do I support my team’s growth? Then they have the knowledge to facilitate the conversation. That’s the first thing we do. That’s only step one. You talk about scale, the enablement piece is our technology. So we’ve put Scared So What into app technology so that people could A learn what is personal change management for themselves for the first time, most likely, So the first step is to learn what is personal change management, but then they have two tools, SCARED, that can take a quiz anytime. And it instead of it locking and staying in fear and assumption, it now is visual, tangible. Something they can hold. Now I can actually see where my point is. And then I can build my own So What plan. But we didn’t just stop there. With my customer Royal Mail here in the UK, they said, you’ve got the app technology. Can we actually see change live as it’s happening? So we built the dashboard. Anonymous. I took it so much further as the owner of the company, I said, I don’t want to be able to see it. Just lock it. So What we did with our dashboard was you now can see change live across the entire organization. You don’t have to wait two, three, five, six weeks for a survey to Tell you what everybody else has moved on. You can actually see it. And since the leadership has the knowledge, the team members are educating slash equipping themselves and empowering themselves of what they can do with it. You can See what they’ve felt, you can see plans they’ve created, you can see change ownership, and you can see completions as well based off the smart objectives. And here’s something I always ask my C suite leaders And I’m not gonna put you on the spot because I know you know the answer. So we’re just gonna give you a pass. But the first question I ask them is, you’re all C suite. You have board. You know, you’re assigned to transform this business. Who can tell me the difference between change and transformation? The whole crowd just go and someone gets brave. Someone gets brave and you’re like, you just feel for them really quickly. And then they’ll naturally give you to change. And it’s really they’re quite similar, but transformation is something we do every day. And I’m like, Good for you. Wow, that must be exhausting. And here’s the answer to change means you have a choice to go back. It’s simple. To transform means you only have one direction of energy to go forward, and that’s forward. You can’t go back. You will not go back. And think of it like this. Think of it like this before you I go-I see that thought. Think of a little caterpillar. Yeah, it’s okay. Think of a little bitty caterpillar. Cute little thing. They come in all different shapes and sizes. A caterpillar does not change to become a better caterpillar. It goes into a cocoon, completely melts itself down and rebuilds from everything back up. When it comes out, it cannot go back. It has transformed into a butterfly or a moth or whatever, something completely different. But if you understand that very simple visual, because sometimes we need visual, it can’t go back. Then what we’ve been doing with change management for all these years is exactly that.

Kevin Novak: I did this, I did a session at a conference two a month or so ago, I think it was at this point. And my topic was transformation theater. And what I did intentionally try to do is define things as you just did. Because many organizations, and I’ve seen this time and time again, where there are 15 different change initiatives. They classify that as transformation, and eight of those fall off and retract back to what was, and the train just keeps moving on. And the right. Well, exactly. Well,

Grant Van Ulbrich: Change. Yeah. Yeah. We didn’t really mean that, you know. How much did that how much the how much does that cost?

Kevin Novak: And time again. So, as 2040, we’ve been in 40 plus organizations over the last 12 years. In addition to former day jobs and different organizations. And personally or professionally, I’ve always been responsible for these large transformation initiatives. And because of what’s come before, you see people literally sitting there with their arms crossed. I can weave this out, man. This is gonna go away. I’m just gonna go back and I’ll just right now continue to do what I’ve always done.

Grant Van Ulbrich: Yeah. And people don’t think about ROI. There’s your productivity, there’s your engagement, there’s your performance, there’s your speed to market. I can dollar calculate all of that for Yeah.

Kevin Novak: And I think leadership exa exactly. No. It’s it’s mental alignment in this because it’s just time and time again, it’s such it’s not an omission as much as I think what you hit on. There’s a learning that we have. And we stay in that learning, we stay in those stereotypes, and we don’t allow ourselves to recognize in many ways the consequences of actions as a leader and the dismissal or the complete lack of looking at what that is doing to the people and what that is doing to the organizational culture. Individual, group, department, I mean, you can look at that. In so many ways where you’re just getting those hands or those arms crossed time and time again. And that is not always resistance. It’s one beaten down enough to say, this isn’t gonna happen. I’m already way stressed out. There’s only so much cognitive bandwidth as well that the teams have. But Grant, one thing I really want to explore with you because it’s your model in that regard it’s fascinating to me. So give me a case anonymized where someone went through the model and came out at rejective, and where it turned out to be the right answer for them as well as the organization.

Grant Van Ulbrich: I can give you a very good example. We were doing in early days with global logistics, who was doing technology integration. And people were going through this and finding out, some people were saying this isn’t for me, some people are saying this is for me. But the good thing is that we wanted to find out could they go through the reflective process and could they actually make an information-based decision for themselves? For this technology initiative that we did, we were told if we could have a 25% adoption rate within the first three months, we would consider that we’re on the right pathway. And I said, okay, it’s fine. Let’s go ahead and get in and teach them. And by the way, Accenture was who I was competing with. Accenture was on was there with us. So sorry, Accenture, love you to death. KPMG, all of you guys. But there’s a different way. There’s there’s that. But I Also I also will say organizational change management that they are doing mixed with project change management is necessary. I want to be on the record for that. I am not here bashing OCM or project management in any way, shape, or form. We need it. It’s just been missing something, It’s missing the individual. And in this case, to ask you what you said, we went through, taught people, we transferred the knowledge, taught people how to think about personal change for themselves, gave them the methodology. And this was pre-app. This is before I had the app. So they were just literally pen to paper looking at visuals, thinking through themselves. And we actually were able to calculate through a questionnaire almost a 70% adoption rate, Which was phenomenal. The goal was Twenty-five. We got it up to them because people were able to process the fear they were in. And To answer your question specifically, several candidates came and said, I’ve actually, and I had to question them myself. I said, Did you walk me through your Scared wheel? Walk me through your so what? And they told me very eloquently how this is not for them. But they’ve identified that maybe this over here was better suited for them. And we were able to go to the supervisors and say, hey, do you have a need over here? Well, yes, we do. And rather than losing people and losing out on an and increasing to attrition, we were able to right place the people into the places that they could do better in. That’s the power of what this can do. You don’t have to lose your speed to market. You don’t have to lose your knowledge, your IP, your engagement. You just have to be able to enact people and listen to them. So those were some really good examples. And it was a large organization we did. It was just a few, but I thought powerful, nobody quit. And we didn’t lose anybody. And we actually had to reassign people, that’s pretty good. Because they actually would be more productive over there.

Kevin Novak: I and I so align with everything that you said, particularly around the change management methodologies, right? In that they serve their purpose and they’re needed. I think people don’t have the knowledge, they don’t have the skills, and they don’t have the alternative way to think about it. And yet models are

Grant Van Ulbrich: it and it’s not their fault, Kevin. It’s it’s really not, you know, and It’s not to there’s no one to blame, even OCM. You know, we built over OCM and project based management over a hundred years. And congratulations. But we can’t negate the research from Bain, McKinsey, Gartner that it the failure rates are just growing. They’re growing.

Kevin Novak: Yes. Agree. I’ve so I I actually stopped including those because I thought I was getting repetitive across the newsletter, the podcast, and working with clients, that I’m just like, it’s a lot. Seventy Percent, eighty percent. And when you look at different segments of different industries, you’re seeing those numbers actually higher. And it’s scary.

Grant Van Ulbrich: Yeah. And I think we’re immune to it because nobody’s known what to do. And that’s okay. That’s okay. We don’t teach this in school. Like OCM, it had a day where it started, and That’s where personal change management is at its infancy. But we’ve got a good friend, Dr. Michelle Pipes, which you know very well. Yes,

Kevin Novak: Yes. And she’ll be on the show in a few weeks.

Grant Van Ulbrich: Good. I love her to death. We’re we’ve actually partnered together. Her joyful change really sits in personal change management as well. There are practitioners who realize there has to be something else. And that’s where this field is starting to develop. So much so that Michelle and I are starting the Institute of Personal Change Management as well to formulate the governing body behind this. We’re not just Bob and Becky down the street who thought this would be good commercial play. This is how do we actually truly change the world and make it different. We’ve got to start with people,

SEGMENT 4: MEASURING THE PERSON WITHOUT MAKING THEM PERFORM

Kevin Novak: Grant, I want to dive in and talk about your platforms. So everything that you started talking about earlier related to the mechanisms in the app and so forth. And one of the threads for this season is about measurement. And so you describe the model’s promise is making personal change visible, measurable, And actionable. And the platform, Scared So What Pro. So for the first time, a leadership team could see where its people actually sit across your whole organization. Between whether they’re championing, they’re rejective, so forth. So the show has an obsession with measurement. I do, because I believe you gotta measure what matters. And there are so many other things that organizations and people do. So Donald Campbell put the worry in one sentence in 1979. The more any measure is used to make decisions, the more it will be corrupted. And the more it will corrupt the thing it was meant to measure. And I did this whole episode about Theodore Porter and why we measure and how that fills in different gaps of our own insecurities and so forth. Anyway, the moment a scared state becomes something a manager watches, there’s pressure that’s put on the person, the report, the state the manager wants, right? I think that’s a normal reaction. So getting practical, what does measuring the personal side of change actually involve? And what do aggregated scared states tell a leadership team that an engagement survey can?

Grant Van Ulbrich: Yeah. And it’s a good point. Which is the reason why what we’ve built so far is very high level. Very high level. And the people that are able to see it is the executive leadership. We don’t want a system today that goes out to every line manager and to every department and every structure and every region. What we wanted was if you’ve got change management teams at this the C suite level that are driving major key change initiatives. We wanted those people in the home space to be able to see very quickly what is the population reaction to it? What are they feeling? Is there a certain section of the population that is a engaging? So We see engagement. We see engagement over time and over spectrum and across the organization. We then see scared quizzes. Are people actually processing? In essence, are they going against assumption and actually taking the opportunity? To learn what they actually feel about it. That’s powerful because We can see if the population’s actually taking hold and using the systems that we provide. And then what are the outcomes? We can see the quantifiable numbers of a segment of the population that’s positive outcomes versus negative outcomes. So we can see that as well. Then we shift it and correlate it over to we can also see indecision, by the way, all three elements. And then the leadership can also see completions. How many plans have actually turned into completion? And so You use that as a high level and you’re Intentionally keeping the line management out of being able to see that detail. This is for the core heart of your C suite to be able to see, hmm, let’s have immediate insight into the thing we just launched.

Kevin Novak: So I did a whole episode last season on structured silence, and your instrument asked people to disclose fear in some regards, right? So the finding as I did research for that episode and the subsequent newsletter. The was when people don’t speak up, it’s rarely a failure of courage. It’s a reasonable read of what organizations reward and punish. So Jennifer Kish-Gephart and her colleagues put the mechanism in a 2009 review of Fear at Work. So fear doesn’t just make people quiet, it makes them quiet in ways that look like agreement. People decide, right?

Grant Van Ulbrich: It can paralyze people. Yeah.

Kevin Novak: Often without thinking about it. And that speaking up isn’t worth the risk. And they perform the answer that feels safe to them. So an instrument like yours walks straight into the structural silence. It asks for one thing the structure has taught people to keep to themselves. How do you keep an instrument that asks people to say they’re conflicted or rejected from becoming one more thing they perform for their employer?

Grant Van Ulbrich: Yeah, truth and truth of the matter, transparency. One hundred percent transparency at the beginning. But the first thing we have to do is actually let them see it and touch it. They need to see the dashboard. They need to see for themselves that their boss, their supervisor, even the all the way at the top in HR, can’t see who said what, which is very unique. In our system, we actually give it to them and let them see it so they can see that they are a user. And they can see that. You can tell if I’ve actually done something. Okay, that’s important. That’s the engagement side. But you can’t see my scared quizzes. You can’t see my So What plans. You actually can’t see anything. So it’s completely locked off. The only thing that you can do as a company is delete me, delete my profile, or put me on vacation mode. That’s it. And I built that intentionally, or because we would not have trust. So When you take the system and put it in the hands of employees and let them see it, touch it, and feel it, then they’re like, okay, maybe I could use this. And now that it’s coming into one-on-ones, the manager’s talking about it, the managers sharing theirs, they have the courage to share their own as well.

SEGMENT 5: WHEN THE CHANGE IS AI

Kevin Novak: So I want to return to AI in some respects, but I want to get to your experience around diversity and inclusion. So you built the diversity and inclusion office in an industry that has never had one. Is there anything from that work about belonging that carries over to what people are feeling about AI right now? And you touched on this earlier, but I just want you to talk about it a little bit.

Grant Van Ulbrich: There’s a lot of lessons that came out of setting up the first office of diversity inclusion in the cruise industry. Most of it was just the big aha moment. We thought we were truly diverse, but we didn’t know what it meant. You know, diversity of thought, diversity of being, diversity of identity, diversity of expression. And I think it’s all about the unconscious unknowns. Unconscious bias is probably the biggest learning that comes across with diversity and inclusion. And if you marry that into AI, I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned recently from people who do AI, I’ve met quite a few technology companies to where we’re working with them and there’s AI technologists who actually build the structures, programmers, writers, coders, all of that. It’s the lack of discussion that everything they build comes from human bias. It’s AI is 100% bias. Absolutely biased because the information came from humans. So it’s recognizing that even in our technology, you can have bias against individuals. And the very information that comes from it could ostracize individual people or cause a personal change scenario. And I think diversity and inclusion has taught me that within the AI field and with technology fields, we have to remember who are we serving? Are we serving the AI or are we serving the human population?

SEGMENT 6: THE REFLECTION

Kevin Novak: I want to go to the question that I ask every guest towards the end. And with you, I want to frame it around the ships because I see an interesting correlation here. You’ve led change at sea, where the organization is a closed system and nobody goes home at night, and you build a diversity inclusion office in an industry that never had one, which is personal change work at an institutional scale. Then the doctorate, then the model, and all of it. What is one assumption you most wish leaders would stop making about the people they asked to change?

Grant Van Ulbrich: that’s a good question. But something that always comes to mind, especially when you’re marrying leadership and change, is would you just stop assuming they see it the way you see it? I teach this in my certification class. I bring up perception. And in my class, I’m giving it away, in my class, I give I put up pictures. Here’s a picture of a scenario. Here’s a here’s a boy sitting on a pitch field. Here’s a lady in a hospital, here’s a guy at work, you know. Tell me what you see. And every time they get it wrong. Every time. And you know why? And I tell them why. I said, because you’re missing the context. And usually we always look at things and we see the negative. We always see the human default. We see the negative in everything. And especially if you’re asking a question like that in a group scenario, it gets really quick. It g it just negative really quickly. And then at the end, I tell them the context. What you don’t see is the story, what’s behind what you see, right? And this is where leadership gets change wrong so many times. Just because you got it. Or maybe you didn’t even believe it yourself. And I’m gonna expose this. I had a gentleman, a learning and development manager who was all on board with the pilot and said, I love the Scared So What model. I just know that I’m gonna be all favorable, etc. And I said, Great. I hope so because you’re leading this change. And he came and I said, Have you taken a quiz by it? Have you used it? I said, Take a quiz, see how feel. And came back and his face was just red. And he was like it says that I don’t like it. And I go, it didn’t say that. You said that. So you told me that you were all ready to lead this as a lying leader. And you told me that you were all on board with this technology rollout. And you took a quiz and it said that you’re not. Let’s talk about that. And I unpacked it and he had so much fear. And the reason why he showed up saying it was favorable is because that’s what his boss expected of him. And so nobody wants to be looked on as, ooh, I don’t get it or I don’t understand it. And that’s the perception piece. And I think you know, that would be the most critical element between leadership and employees is to stop the assumption that everybody sees it the way you see it. That’s where personal change management lives. Help them to see what they see so they can process it so that they can get on board and make the right decision for themselves and the company. But it’s infancy. It’s literally that it’s infancy. And I hope that my legacy will say, You know what, there is another way. We should stop assuming that everybody automatically gets it because most people don’t.

Kevin Novak: So my last question, Grant. Imagine every transformation plan had to answer one question before it could be approved. So what happens to the person? What would transformation look like if that were the rule?

Grant Van Ulbrich: Hmm. I think you actually it’s funny you say that because I think about this. I’ve created what I believe is the governance layer to de-risk change, and I’m calling it PCM assurance. So it’s the assurance, do we have the assurance that this organization is even capable of changing? Right, and going forward? And that’s the question I would want whoever’s in charge to be able to answer. ‘Cause right now we’re shoving everything down the change manager’s throat. And that’s not fair. It’s not right. And it’s not fair. Yeah.

Kevin Novak: Yes. No, it’s not fair. It’s not I did a whole piece last year about change management burnout. Because I was seeing That time and time again of all that responsibility being put to an individual or a small team. And it is, yes.

Grant Van Ulbrich: It’s a failed assumption. You you can never prove that correct. And but that is a conscious leadership choice that’s being made, that is saying, well, we have change management teams or HR. That’s the end all be all where everything. It’s not. If you want transformation to succeed, like that caterpillar to butterfly, you actually need to do something with your entire employee population. They’re the ones that are gonna make it happen or not. So I think it would be that question would be do we have the capability of transforming? When you do have PCM in some way, shape, or fashion, my model, someone else’s model, whatever, but if when you have a methodology injected in. And you have a technology that supports the capability so it goes organization wide, Then you can say you have PCM assurance. You have s you’ve done something You Have that governance layer that says, wait a minute, we can see if the entire organization, 100, 200, 500,000 people have done ethics. We should be able to see if the same population. Has change of capability and awareness and measure that every single year. That’s how we’re going to de-risk, you know, continuing to at least stop the flow. Is it gonna save every change and transformation initiative? No. Will you still have some people that will go through the motions? Yes, because that’s human nature. But it’s better than doing nothing, which is where we are today.

CLOSING

Kevin Novak: So Grant, thank you for being on the Human Factor Podcast. This is more than the conversation that I hoped we have. It was just awesome. So before we wrap, is there anything that you want to leave the audience with? And where can people find you, the model, the book, and so forth?

Grant Van Ulbrich: I would. I’d like to give your listeners a free gift, if I can. And this is not a pitch. This is uniquely from my heart. I’ve created my first generation app absolutely for free. There is no ads, there’s no emails, there’s no spam. It’s just there. I believe so passionately that every human being should be able to learn this for themselves, that my first generation app is free and will as long as I’m alive, it will be free. And keep going. So go look it up on the Apple or the Android store. It’s called Scared So What. You can download it for yourself and start to learn. If you want to follow along, find me on LinkedIn. I’ve got my own website called drgrant.com, or you can find us on our company website, thepcmcompany.com as well. Too. Come with us. And if you’re a practitioner, if you’re an HR in change and leadership, we’ve just created the personal change management LinkedIn group. Just two weeks ago, Dr. Michelle and I created it and today I just looked this morning, there was two hundred and thirty members already. So it’s a movement, right? Small, but It’s changed people who recognize we should be doing something different. So those would be some ways to stay in touch and put it in your hands.

Kevin Novak: Awesome. And I’ll make sure all that information is on the episode page as well as in the show notes. Grant, again, thank you so much, man.

Grant Van Ulbrich: Thanks Kevin, I really enjoyed it.

Kevin Novak: I want to close by connecting what Grant has shared to the arc of the season. We open Season 3, asking what organizations count, who decided, and whether anyone still has the standing to stop. Grant has given us the version of that question that lives inside one person. Who decided that you would accept this change? And when did anyone ask? Bridges told us the transitions happen inside the person, not on the project plan. Prochaska and DiClemente showed us 40 years ago that you can’t skip a person ahead. Brehm showed us that people fight hardest for a choice that’s been taken from them. Piderit told us that most resistance. Is really ambivalence. Campbell warned us what happens to any measure the moment it’s used to judge. The field left all of that on the shelf. Grant took it down and built something a person can actually use on Tuesday. The changes happening to them. If your organization has a transformation underway right now, there is a model for every part of it except for the people. The question is whether you’ve asked them what they decided. 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 writes the communication plan. Subscribe to the Ideas and Innovations newsletter at 2040digital.com or on substack at 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.

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