Available October 15, 2026

Episode 037: Measuring What Change Feels Like – The Joyful Change Quotient and the Signals Leaders Miss (Part 1)

DURATION: 82 minutes
HOST: Kevin Novak
GUEST: Dr. Michelle Pipes, Creator of Joyful Change and Author of Stewarding Joyful Change

FORMAT: Guest Conversation, Part 1 of 2

SHOW: The Human Factor Podcast

OPENING NOTE

Kevin Novak: A quick note before we begin. My conversation with Dr. Michelle Pipes ran long and it earned every minute. So rather than cutting it down, I’ve split it into two episodes. This is part one. It covers where the established change models stop short. Why resistance is a readout rather than an obstacle. The six signals that decide how a change actually lands and what a leader owes people the moment they start measuring how change feels. Part two picks up from there. Here’s part one.

COLD OPEN

Kevin Novak: Picture the dashboard for a change initiative or transformation that’s well about halfway through. Milestones, most of them are green. Now picture the floor where people are actually working and where the change is actually landing. People are tired. Nobody is sure what the change means for their job. The managers have stopped asking questions because the answers never change anything. The dashboard measures the mechanics of the change. The human signals, well, they went dark, and no one has built a gauge for that. In 1984, two psychologists named Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman published a finding that every change or transformation leader should have taped to their monitor. People do not respond to a change. They respond to their appraisal of what the change means for them. And that appraisal is formed long before the formal communication plan ever reaches them. So if you’re only measuring the change, you’re measuring the wrong thing. You have to measure what it feels like to the people living inside of it. In the first episode of this season, I said I wasn’t sure that could be done as effectively as it needs to be. Well, today’s guest has spent years building the instrument and the methodology, and she’s bringing the word joy into rooms where that word would get a very skeptical reception.

INTRODUCTION

Kevin Novak: 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 three, the season all about practice. Season one was about seeing the human factor clearly. Season two was about what you do once you can see it. This season is about building it into how an organization works. So it becomes durable practice. One of the two threads that anchor this season is measurement. What you measure determines what you manage. And readiness, trust, and the gap between what people say they’re committed to and what their behavior actually reveals are still the things most organizations don’t measure at all. Today’s guest, well, she has built her work in exactly that spot. Dr. Michelle Pipes has spent more than two decades in organizational development, change management, and strategic communications. Much of that inside STEM, higher education, and corporate environments. What makes her perspective so unique on conventional change management is that it comes from inside the house. She has been Prosci certified since 2002. She consulted on the original foundational Prosci text. She is not dismissing the established models from a distance. She has spent 20 years working within them before concluding where they fell short. What she built in response is Joyful Change. At its center is the Joyful Change Quotient, which tracks six human signals that decide how a change actually lands. Meaning, safety, belonging, progress, recognition, and play. It reframes the friction leaders call resistance as diagnostic data about where those six conditions have broken down. She’s the author of Stewarding Joyful Change: The New Executive Soft Skill for a World That Won’t Stop Changing. And she’s extending the framework well past the enterprise. Three books for three different audiences, story form programs that teach children to process change at their own level, and a discipline she calls Personal Change Management, which lives in the individual alongside anything the organization builds collectively. Her teaching, her thinking, and her advice are exactly what this season is for. My aim is to give you the tools and approaches that you can put into practice. Michelle brings all three. Michelle, welcome to the Human Factor Podcast.

Dr. Michelle Pipes: Thank you very much, Kevin. I’m so excited to be here and can’t wait to delve into change.

SEGMENT 1: INSIDE THE HOUSE

Kevin Novak: And I’m so excited to have you. So, Michelle, I want to start with your vantage point. And it’s the thing that makes the rest of this conversation connect so strongly for anyone who’s struggling with change and transformation. You’ve been Prosci certified since 2002. You worked on the original foundational text. So you’ve taught the models, you’ve run them, and you’ve stood behind them in rooms where they were the only game in town. That gives you a view very few people have. So here’s why that matters to me. There’s a finding that ran through our whole second season, and it was structure usually beats intention. Organizations intend to change and transform, and their structures quietly outvote them. Executive surveys have been reporting high transformation failure rates for decades. The definitions, of course, vary. The patterns really don’t. And that is despite an enormous accumulated body of research, shared best practices, and communicated approaches. So let me start at the model level. What do the established models get right? Where did you conclude that they stopped short? And last thing, because I never ask easy questions. What convinced you that the missing piece was joy?

Dr. Michelle Pipes: Well, when I was working in higher education and just felt very much called after reading an article about the high failure rates of change. And knowing that in business no other arm, if you will, would be allowed to have failure rates that high. And so what really hit me is after watching companies and organizations go leaner and leaner and leaner, I know when I left higher education, I had absorbed four people’s full time jobs with zero additional pay. And so when you start to become so lean that you’re carving on your spine because there’s no meat left on the bones, and then you’re seeing these failure rates, I need to know why this is failing and what the research is showing. And so I have spent more than the last two years on sabbatical. And focusing purely on this question. And Joyful Change, the framework, is built on over 650 unique research citations. So what I did is I started out reading everything, everything from business articles to research papers to thought leaders, books, all kinds of stuff. And so what I was able to do is kind of like take a piece here that’s working, take a piece there that’s working. And I came up with a framework that can work as an overlay or as an end-to-end framework. And the joy that you’re talking about, if you talk to almost anyone going through change, joy is not going to be one of the words they use to describe it. However, how I mean joy is coherence through the process plus a positive emotion. Those two things together are what form the basis of joyful change. You know, it’s a 5D process, that you start, but I provide frameworks and models, methodologies for each phase. So that if all you can do is ask a new question and get more clarity, if you can implement or take away one barrier that returns energy to your team, that’s a step in the right direction. And the framework is built on small pilots. Doing your discover work and getting everyone in the room to make sure that the people who are closest to the impact kind of have a clearer line of sight to the executive stewards and everywhere in between, because a lot of decisions made by the leadership are so far removed from the actual impact that it is not reality. And so the people in the middle, the more layers you have, the more opportunity for variation, for interpretation, what I call polished reporting. So if something’s not working here and it will impact someone’s job here, when that word gets up here, I can guarantee you that it’s going to be green and everything’s fine and it’s a little hiccup. And the people impacted are like, I’m dying. These people do not even care. This is not working. And so getting them in the room, having those conversations and having it matter. If you bring me into a meeting where everything’s already been decided, I’m not going to give you additional information that might help because it doesn’t matter. But if you listen, if you put what I say into practice or into the plan, then I’m more open to receiving it because somebody like me or me has contributed to that outcome and you’re more likely to move with it because it mattered. And this is now a piece of you, if you will, because you’ve contributed to it.

Kevin Novak: So the interesting thing, Michelle, is over the guests so far this season the lack of a real reality that people are working in is a theme that’s coming up over and over again, where there is such a distinct difference between what the executives believe and what middle management believes and what’s actually happening in the lower level. And that alone is profound.

Dr. Michelle Pipes: It is, but if you start to think about the reason that change is different is because change has changed. We are kind of in the middle of a cultural shift, if you will. The change models that people are using today were created decades ago. Okay, when the internet was not ambient change. When you didn’t have the AI that’s changing faster than any human can keep up with. And so when you have this disconnect, if you will, leaders are used to saying, I want this. The managers are saying, I’ll take care of it. And they tell the end users, here’s what you need to do. And they do it. That is no longer the world that we live in. The world we live in now has fast, complex, layered change that never ends. It overlaps not only in our professional lives, but our personal lives. So you’re dealing with humans that have an invisible backpack, if you will. They may be carrying change from caregiving, from financial issues for you know, maybe they’re going to school, maybe they’re juggling two jobs, maybe, there’s a divorce or whatever it is. The person is dealing with personal change now. And when you come in, that’s just layered on top of the professional change. So let’s say you come in to my team and say, Hey, we want to, we’ve got this new AI initiative. And everybody goes, Are you kidding me? They’re already working on three changes. And you’re asking them to add one more thing in addition to their personal change capacity. And that’s the key there is the capacity in humans is finite. Everything else is infinite.

Kevin Novak: I write a lot about the limits of cognitive capacity. Michelle, one thing I want to get to here with you on this is you have been involved with that basis of the change management structure methodology. And one of the other themes coming across this season is how the industrial age mindset and definitions of leadership have a hold. On a society that is now very different. And I would suggest, in some regards, the change management methodologies that we have all used, they have value, right? But they are also not the complete picture. So was there a moment in that work when you first sensed the individual was missing from those models?

Dr. Michelle Pipes: Well, the way I have always done change is very personal, if you will. And I’ve always known that it is not really the process that’s changing, it’s the people utilizing the process. And so change literally has to go through the person and they have to either accept it, reject it, adapt to it, whatever, before they can move on to the process change. And in my research, it just showed over and over and over again we have a cultural change fatigue syndrome, I’ve termed it ambient change. It’s all around us, all of the things we’re dealing with. Every single social media post: change, change, change. Anything that you deal with in the community, with ads on TV, with everything at your work, change, change, change, change, change. So our brains can only process so many things before it just says, okay, I’m full. I cannot do another change. So a lot of people get up in the morning, guess what’s the first thing they do? Get out their phone. What’s going on? So they’re arriving at work already partially depleted. And so you have to learn to not only curate and prioritize what is coming into you, but you also have to regulate that at work, at home, because if it’s finite, there has to be a balance. And so what I was seeing, and I know you talked to Dr. Grant Van Ulbrich and he and I are working on this personal change management. But for me, with the organizational change management plus the personal change management, plus the joyful change, which I would say his framework and mine are in separate lanes, but very supportive, that’s what I term whole change management because you’re looking at the organization. You’re looking at the person, and what I like to say is person plus purpose plus profit in that order together. That is how I approach change. Because if you don’t consider the person, that’s who’s changing, that’s who has to be okay with the change. And they always have a choice, they can leave. So then you’ve got the purpose, meaning is so important. Why are we doing this? I don’t want to do something if there’s no meaning in it. And the meaning may just be you have to do this in order to keep your job. So then I’m thinking, okay, is this worth it to me or should I go elsewhere? And I think the average tenure for an employee right now is two years. When I was younger, I mean, I’ve stayed at my jobs like 10 years plus each. And so when you think about it, leadership right now learned probably what they know 10, 20 plus years ago. So with the internet changing and everything changing so fast, you’ve got to think that when leadership is coming along. You’ve got higher education, which they’ve probably been through, which is moving even slower in order to catch up, to educate, and then implement. And then as they grow, they get up into those leadership positions. Think about how delayed that is. Now, think about who is doing the change on the front lines. You’re talking a lot younger people, people who are used to moving fast, they grew up with technology, they’re savvy, but they also know that they’re not going to do what they’re told, which is what their parents went through, their grandparents went through, and that came from the industrial age. You get a job, you move up into that job, and you stay there, and then you get a gold watch and you’re out. That is no longer the world that we live in. And so when you consider we have five generations in the workforce right now and new ones coming in, you’ve got to deal with people who are over here with what’s going on here, here, here, and here. All of these people move different speeds, they have different loyalties to company. There’s not a lot of loyalty. Who do most of the younger people look out for? Number one. And so in order to deal with change now, you’re having to look at it’s not ever a one size fits all. Even if you do the same change over and over, you’re dealing either with different people, a different environment, different situation. Because even if you use the same people and go around and round and around, are those people the same here that they are here? Nope, because they’ve learned, they’ve networked, they’ve gained expertise. And like I say, change has a residue. What kind of residue? That’s a memory. So were past changes good, or did they say big change, big change, and nothing ever happened, so I’m not gonna listen anyhow? I was in an organization like that. It literally reorged every six months. It was either after a conference or after they read a book.

Kevin Novak: Yeah, we’ve been in client situations where we have seen the people completely check out because they are change weary. There is no cognitive capacity left, and there’s no trust because they have watched things fail, despite being, this is going to be great, and let’s rally behind it, and they’re exhausted.

Dr. Michelle Pipes: Well, if you think about change now, I’ve got these books coming out. And when I wrote the framework, it was over 500,000 pages. And I had to break those into different books for executive steward, which is your leadership. Then you’ve got your designers of fit, the practitioners, and then you’ve got your navigators, the people who are navigating change. And then you’ve got the managers, which are kind of threaded in throughout. They’re the translation layer. So they’re taking what leadership says and translating it for your front-end workers. But also they’re taking what they learn here, the reality, and they should be taking that truth back up to leadership so that the decisions that are being made are being made on reality and truth. Now, if leadership does not make the environment safe, psychologically safe to tell the truth. Do you think that truth is going to get through? No. And I believe that’s why so much change is failing because we’ve gotten so lean. And then when you layer on top of that, that you’re asking your people to do more and more. Without additional resources, without subtracting anything, they just keep piling it on and on because remember, they’re really far away. And so it sounds easy, like, my gosh, I’m gonna do this new AI thing, and this is gonna be so great for our business. And then the people here are like, You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m already doing workarounds and overtime and I’m killing myself. And now you want me to add on? What are you taking away? Nothing. We’re just gonna add to this. And I believe our culture has hit saturation. The capacity for cognitive ability has really hit saturation. And we have to learn how to free up that space.

Kevin Novak: I’ll equate this to the industrial age mindset, right? It was majorly let’s produce the cogs on the production line. And most of the jobs today are thinking jobs. They’re still a tangible output, whether it be complete the sales report or answer these emails, answer the phone, so forth. But somewhere along the line we have trained leaders to not be empathetic, to not recognize the human factor because people are still viewed as cogs. And you mentioned a lot how we have changed and transitioned to not just a different work environment, but a different way the society even operates and how we interrelate. What do you think? Why do you think that gap exists?

Dr. Michelle Pipes: What I created was what I call a shared carry architecture where executive stewards have their role. It is distinctly different from the designers of fit. They are supposed to protect the conditions, designers design actually the fit, and then the navigators implement and get work in the lived reality. So what you have to think about now is at home I’m an executive steward. Let’s just say I’m saying, here’s the change and it’s gonna happen. So in my job, I may be more of, let’s say, a designer of fit. I’m actually thinking I’ve got a million one pieces. How are we gonna connect and do all the things and talk all the people and all that stuff? But let’s say I’m a mom of kids at elementary, middle, and high school. I’m a navigator. Pickup lanes change, their online classes change. If I have banking or whatever, the financial stuff will change. And so within our culture now, it’s not just the change team doing change. It’s literally every person. My goal is to educate and help people navigate change throughout those roles because they can go on all day, different roles, different phases. But learn how to navigate change whenever it comes to you, however, it comes to you, you can identify this is what it is, this is how I handle it, this is what other people should be doing, this is what I should be doing. And one of the things I’m working on now, actually this afternoon I’m sending my second book to the publisher are children’s books. I created three different frameworks for elementary, middle, and high school. Because growing up, I mean, I wasn’t taught how to deal with change. I was an accidental change manager and most of us are, because you don’t grow up going, I want to be a change manager. Who was going to the Prosci training? Somebody said, Hey, I gotta go to this conference. My boss says, You want to go? I said, A week at a dude ranch in Colorado, you bet. And that’s kind of what started it. But now we’re expecting adults to know how to deal with constant change. And most of them were not taught. So what are they raising? Tiny humans. They don’t know, they don’t know how to teach. And so what I’m doing is giving them a shared language, shared phases, so that if you get a new babysitter, or you’re now moving from a single class to moving classrooms, or you get a new sibling, or you’re going through your first heartbreak, all of these are changes. So I’m trying to teach. Change intergenerationally, if you will, so that by the time they become adults they don’t have to grasp and go, my god, I’m overloaded, I cannot take anymore. And that’s what you’re seeing now, because people were not taught, and the frameworks that are there don’t really work for the person, if you will. Because let’s just say, okay, I’m a widow. That was a huge, huge change. One minute I’m holding my husband’s hand. The next minute he’s gone. My whole future is gone. My half my family was gone. I had to learn how to change my entire life. Who I was. I wasn’t a wife anymore. I was a widow. And you want to know what I thought of, you know, the little widow chicken on Foghorn Leghorn. That’s who I pictured myself as. And I had to learn how to work through that change. And let me tell you, it wasn’t joyful. I still chose to be positive. What can I learn? How can I take what I’ve learned, turn around and help the next widow who calls me and says, how did you get through this? And I would say sometimes it was a day at a time, sometimes it was an hour at a time, and sometimes it was a breath at a time. And so when you’re learning how to go through change and you’ve gone through a lifetime of almost every change imaginable, then you start thinking, okay, what did I do? What was consistent? What was repeatable? What would apply through different situations? And then you start pulling on your research and you come up with something that is simple, applicable anywhere. But yet that walks you through the process. And I will tell you one thing about joyful change. One of my favorite phases, and I’ll give you the five, it’s discover, design, do, delight, and diffuse. And diffuse is something being in academia, you write white papers and you diffuse your research and let other people read about it so that they can learn. And so it was so important for me to build that into this framework so that if when people and organizations are going through change, at the end they take what is repeatable, what is travelable, if you will, or carryable, and then they diffuse that out. So it’s like what we’re doing today. So I’m telling you about changes in my life. You’re learning how I got through. I’ve diffused that to you. Now that’s changed you because you now have more knowledge. And so the next change you go through, you’re going what I call collective wisdom. That elevates the collective wisdom of the individuals, of the organizations, and that ripples out into our culture. I chose to focus on training organizations first. And why did I do that? Because if you want to change the culture, you have to start with concentrated individuals. This is a buy-in. This is huge for ROI. Imagine getting back the trillions of dollars that have been wasted in change. So if you’re training your people how to go through change, what phase they’re in, what they’re supposed to do, what everybody else is supposed to do, the shared language that makes it easier. So you go through the joy circle, which is the five D’s, you diffuse that out. And where are you diffusing that? You’re diffusing it to other teams, other people, like professionals. Then to your family, to your friends, and they’re like, Well, I could use that in this situation, or my gosh, that would have really helped. Hey, can I get that for my job? And so when you diffuse that information, you go round and round and round, and that creates a spiral funnel, which I call the joy coil, that you never start change at zero again. And that’s where change management, I believe, has come back to. You start at zero each time. You get through a change and you’re like, okay, we start back at zero. So they continually start back at zero. And people are so exhausted because they don’t see the progress. They don’t see the value. They don’t see the benefit. They don’t see the growth. I mean, think of professional development. You go through one change. You could really have a lot of knowledge here about. I mean, even your own organization. Who were your early adopters? That is like gold. Where were the hiccups that you know the next change that comes along? That’s gonna be something that needs to be considered early. Again, gold. So you’re learning all these things and you’re putting it together. You have to decide, is it worth traveling or is it something that is local? And so we have fixed things. Let’s say you’re handed a mandate that this change federal guidelines has to go in. Well, working through with joyful change, you have the things that are fixed and you have the things that can flex. So your local implementation may do it a little bit differently, let’s say in the Midwest, where we say y’all, versus some high tech financial, organization on the Coast where they hold their pinky up when they drink hot tea. And so there’s just differences there, and we have to stop approaching change as this change fits every box. One change will never fit more than one box. Different people are involved, different, locations are involved, different history. You may have managers that get it. They may have been trained in joyful change. So when you say, hey, this is coming down the pike, they’re like, awesome, let’s do it. Da-da-da-da-da. And then you may have people go, I’ve never even heard of that, and I don’t feel joyful. And that sounds like cupcakes. Let me tell you, and I put it in the books, joy is not change with a glitter cannon. It is making the choice to go through change, look for the positive, remain positive yourself. And as you’re doing that and your focus changes from like, my God, not something else, to okay, here’s the capacity that I have. You’re asking me to do X. Here is what I have on my plate. That needs to be prioritized, and something needs to be removed, or this is not going to happen. And you have to start telling the truth.

SEGMENT 2: RESISTANCE AS A READOUT

Kevin Novak: So, Michelle, I want to dive into what you’re hitting on because people need information, right? And I have argued, both on the show and through writing, that resistance is information. It’s really not obstruction. And your framework takes that a step further. And so friction during a rollout isn’t employees pushing back, it’s really a readout. And evidence that safety, meaning, or clarity has broken down somewhere specific. So that lines up where I open the show today in the opening. And it’s on Lazarus and Folkman. And here’s the piece of their model that matters most for this, at least to me. People make two appraisals almost instantly. First, is this a threat to me? Second, do I have what I need to actually cope with it? And this is speaking to a lot of what you framed out in the joyful, not necessarily being pleasant, so to speak. And those two answers are formed in the first few days, right? We’re taught now to make the decision now, don’t process too much. And it’s usually from hallway conversations and the boss’s body language and the long, long town hall that just took place to kick everything off. By the time the communication plan arrives, it’s arguing with a conclusion that’s likely already been reached. So walk me through what the reframe changes in practice. So it’s Monday morning, a leader has stopped hearing resistance and started reading signals, which is what we would all love them to do. What do they actually do differently using your framework?

Dr. Michelle Pipes: Well, for me, again, I love what you’re saying because resistance is information. There is a reason that people are pushing back. We have to delve into the reason. Is it fear of loss of identity? This is not going to be my job anymore. It’s not going to work for me. Yeah. Am I even going to have a job? And I will back it up a little bit more than what you said. It doesn’t take a few days. The second that I hear a change, that is it. You go into survival mode. Okay. So the minute you hear it, you make a decision. My gosh, you know, because they’re thinking, I gotta get out my resume because my job’s gone. And somebody else may go, my gosh, this is so exciting. I’ve just been waiting for this. This is awesome. And so you have these different perspectives, you have these different identities, if you will. And one of the joyful checkpoints that you know is belonging. And it’s not fitting in. Fitting in is just like, how do I change myself to, you know, make sure that I’m good in that situation. Belonging is I feel like I’m there, I feel like I can be truthful and be myself and not always have to not be authentic. And I think people get tired because if you think about that. If you go into a situation, let’s just say a boardroom, and you’re coming in, and you know automatically I have to mute who I am, I have to make up stories and polish reporting. You’re spending a whole lot of energy, if you will, instead of innovating, instead of being excited, instead of you know, like going the extra mile, you’re thinking about how am I going to survive this. And that’s where this has come to because I have seen so many organizations that go so lean. The stockholders are like going, more money, more money, more money. And the managers they’re cutting, they’re looking short term. Like, how do I make the fourth quarter number so I get my big bonus? If you think about this, what is rewarded in an organization? Is what’s going to change or be supported. So if you say sales are what’s important instead of customer service, what do you think people are going to focus on? They’re going to focus on sales because that’s where the money is. But if you say that your raise is dependent upon customer service ratings, sales, your ability to change with the environment. Guess what that changes? It changes the whole environment. And I think you can tell just by looking at me that I get excited. And I’m like, my God, this is so, because I see the other side and I see what it does to people. And then when I see the people who are like naturally joyful, that are changing, those are what I call your unicorns, your people in an organization that everybody goes to, that make things happen, they’re gonna take care of it. But guess what we’re doing to those people? We are overusing them, and that adaptation tax, it comes due. And so when you rely on change to have these heroics and that like a single person managing or pushing or cheerleading or whatever it is, guess what happens when that person goes away? You’re not building a capable organization. You are depending on one person. And anybody in business knows that’s not a fail safe. You know, that person’s eventually going to die one day, hopefully not at their desk, hopefully after they retire. But you have to consider the organization needs to be trained because everyone is now carrying change. It’s not a team, it’s not leadership saying get it done and then it’s done. Everybody has their part to play. And joyful change works in tandem, if you will. They each have, well, all three of them, but mainly the top two, the practitioners and the executive stewards, they have things that they should be doing at the same time. They basically, if you will, serve one another and protect the whole entire environment. Navigators have an obligation to not only implement but to give truthful information that comes back. And so when you have this organizational education, have you ever heard about flow in athletics? You know, when everything’s going fine, bam bam, bam bam. I always think of the Harlem Globetrotters. You know, I’m thinking, my gosh, no, I didn’t even see that coming and that’s so cool. Well you have that in organizations too, where everybody knows their part, everybody knows what comes next, everybody is contributing. And that’s a shared carry architecture where everybody has a part. Now, if the manager stopped translating, what does that do to the rest of the roles? And so leadership is breaking down. And my books call for a change in leadership, that it is no longer the town hall, we’re gonna change. AI is so great. Here’s a branded mug. Peace out, and they’re out the back door before you know the applause stops. And so you have to understand too that we have quietly I would say muted a lot of people. Think about change. Some of the people who are your heroes, if you will, are maybe some of your neurodivergent people who have seen these patterns. They may be some of the quiet people that are not like vocal, see me, see me, see me. Or they may not be closest to leadership. And I don’t know whether you’ve ever been to this is so great, let’s celebrate the outcome on the day of the launch. And who gets the accolades? Is it the people who have been doing the invisible labor? So here comes change number two, three, forty-seven, whatever. Are they gonna go above and beyond because they feel seen, because they feel heard, because what they do matters? You’re gonna see less and less and less of less. And so joyful change looks at delight, which is deciding kind of what goes on, you know, what really mattered, who really mattered, who impacted this? You know, was this change built off of one person, or can this be applied to other situations? But making sure that we recognize fairly. And so many times I’ve gone through things. And I’m sitting there going, hmm, you can tell these people were never intimately involved in the process. They have absolutely no idea went on. And the people who actually did the work are never mentioned. And you know, my favorite, great work team. That is the laziest thing that you can say. But let’s say that, you know, not everybody likes to be recognized in the same way. That’s something else that you should know about your people. A nice handwritten note, or I had an article a friend posted the other day, and she was leaving after 20 years, and she got an AI-generated note after 20 years. So you think about when you’ve done something and your boss has come to me or come to you and said, Hey, Kevin, my gosh, that thing you did, whatever it was, was so impactful. It saved us 40 hours of rework. You know, I bet you saved us $10,000 right there. I really appreciate you bringing that to our attention. Now, are you likely to bring up another issue that you see is headed for a slow train wreck? Yes, because that person has made it safe to do so. They’ve recognized your contribution, if you will, and you feel seen and heard and that it mattered. Because if you think about change, it usually involves different people and it’s kind of built like this because you’ve got different types of change going on. You may have a branding change, you may have an AI change, you may have a location that they’re just setting up from bringing on board. And so the same person may be dealing with multiple changes where they’re in different phases of the change. They’re dealing with different people up and down, you know, upstream and downstream. And so the more of that we ask of them, the less capacity they have to start another change. Now at the end of that change, you know how when you blow up a balloon and you let the air out and it just sputters at the end? That’s how I see a lot of change then. Okay, yep, on to the next one or whatever. They need to know that it matters. You need to recognize that this was not easy. First of all, and I’m not asking for you to make my job easier. I’m asking you to recognize that this was hard, that we all worked together and collaborated on this, that here is the outcome and what it’s changed. Because when you do that, you’re educating your people on here’s what we were presented with, here’s what we did to make that happen. Now, here’s the outcome and what difference that’s going to make. Now, if I understand all those things, and so does everybody else, they’re going to approach the second change differently. They’re going to say, hey, I need to educate, I need to be visible, I need to remove barriers, I need to make sure that the authority can be made at the level of impact. So if something is impacting here and there’s three or four levels, guess what? If this person is traveling, if they’re on vacation, if they’re out sick, then that bunches up, then they’re going back and forth here. So much communications, and I would say needless meetings. I am not a big meetings person. And I have an acronym that I use in meetings, and it’s KMN. Do you know what that means? Kill me now. I’m like done with this meeting. But think about how many meetings, how many emails, how much work would be saved if people were able to tell the truth, if people were able to hear the truth. If people were able to respond to the truth, decisions would be made that were informed by reality. Communications are more clear. So when clarity breaks down, nobody is able to move quickly because everyone’s unsure of where they’re going and how they’re getting there. That’s why clarity is so important. So if I know exactly what we’re doing and something comes at me, I can make a decision. Now it could be wrong. That decision could be wrong, but we’re able to move and find out. And what did we just do? We learned something. So look at these decisions and like early failures. That’s why they call it the messy middle. This is where you learn. This is where networks and tech and all of these imperfect things, including humans, come together. And so we’re having to put a puzzle together with very few pieces that we know where they go, and we may only be a piece of it. And we’re like thinking, okay, how do we fit into this? And the picture that they have, the picture that they see, the picture that’s being planned for and translated. Isn’t always the same picture. That’s why clarity is so important. So if you understand where we’re going, you also can see this isn’t gonna work. You’re wanting to do an implementation and it’s relying on a work center or data center in another country and that week is their biggest holiday. Not gonna happen. So you’ve got people looking downrange, if you will, to avert these changes because when that’s brought up, that’s like, my gosh, thank you so much for thinking of that. That goes back up here. Okay, we need to move that back a month or move it forward two weeks. And so that’s the piece that is missing is this flow in between because the messages get polished or they get impersonal. The humanity has been sucked out of communications. And I’m sorry. I want to be treated like a human because I am. I am not AI. I do have opinions. I do have ideas. I do want this organization to succeed because otherwise I don’t have a paycheck. So tell me how to do that, tell me how to do it better. Tell me how I can get excited about this change. Tell me how I can do change better at home so that I’m dealing with less here and I’m able to focus more here. That’s what it does.

SEGMENT 3: SIX SIGNALS

Kevin Novak: So, Michelle, I want to jump into the instrument itself. And I also want to show here how well researched the work that you have done and put forward is. Six signals: meaning, safety, belonging, progress, recognition, and play. And when I first read through the six, what struck me was how much research sits underneath each of them, as you mentioned in the beginning. So most executives will never read that research, but it’s there and it’s part of why I bring it up in this podcast over and over again. And the research that you did is deep. So before I ask you how the instrument works, I want to spend a minute on the ground that it stands on, because I think it earns the six a level of credibility that the word joy on its own sometimes may not get, because you know, we all have our biases, and in communication we are taught to believe a word means one thing or another. So taking safety first, one of my favorites, and I got to see Amy live in action a few weeks ago. Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety goes back to her research on hospital teams in the nineteen nineties. She expected the best teams to make the fewest errors, and she found completely the opposite. The teams that reported more errors were the better teams, as you just hit on. They were the ones safe enough through psychological safety to actually admit them. And safety, it turns out, isn’t the absence of problems. It’s the freedom to actually surface them. And progress, of course, has its own body of evidence. Steven Kramer and the progress principle track nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from people doing knowledge work, which is pretty much a lot of what everybody does today. And when they look for the single strongest driver of a person’s inner working life, it wasn’t recognition and it wasn’t incentives. It was making progress and meaningful work, small visible forward motion, right? Which means progress and meaning are already tied together in the research before anyone has even put them on a dashboard. Then there’s belonging. And in my own research, in 1995, Baumeister and Leary made the case that belonging isn’t a nice to have. It is a fundamental human motivation on the same level as the needs we never think to question. And I’ve written about this even years ago. Take it away and people don’t simply feel left out. Their thinking and their health suffers, right? The cross to the home and the work that you mentioned earlier. And running underneath all of it is the work of Deci and Ryan. Their self-determination theory says real motivation depends on three conditions: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. So look at your six signals against those three, and the overlap for me is really hard to miss because I’m equally a research geek. So that’s what I see when I look at the joyful change quotient. Decades of research where we have known this stuff. And we have failed to ingest it. And you turned it into something an executive team can actually read on a Tuesday. And that brings me to one of my practical questions. So, how does an executive team read those six signals in real time, especially mid-flight, when the strategic roadmap changes underneath a change or transformation that’s completely already in motion?

Dr. Michelle Pipes: Okay, so I call them the six joyful change checkpoints. So you’re always, as you’re going through the process, going, you know, do we have meaning? Does everybody understand why we’re doing this? Safety is not just psychological safety. And actually it came out of a conversation, which is strange, about oil derricks out in the ocean. And if that person, the worker that’s looking at the little red dot does not feel safe to bring that up. And they just kind of like, I’m not gonna bring it up. And it gets worse and worse and worse. And by the time they surface that, then it’s so expensive to fix it. It’s dangerous. It could kill you. You know, the thing could blow. And so when I started looking at safety, I looked at, okay, we need to be able to be able to speak, but we also need to be looking for how is this going to either harm us, harm someone else, harm the organization, because you’re looking at something down range and you’re thinking like, my God, I should know you thought it, I’ve thought it, and we didn’t feel safe to go, hey, you know, well, actually I do say it. It’s not always welcome. But when it happened the way Michelle said it did, you know what? I told you so. But the belonging part is so important. And it’s important for a couple of reasons. So anybody that works in an organization should feel welcome, wanted, respected, heard, seen. But if you are closed down to that, turn that around. Your clients, your customers, what you create is not going to be something that’s going to resonate with others because someone like them was not part of the process. And a lot of times you can tell that. You can tell if something is purely sequential, instead of sequential one way and random, which would be like a story the other way. So let’s say we have some information to impart. You flash up your PowerPoint that’s got, the graph that’s doing all the numbers, blah blah blah. And I’m like, okay, what does that mean to me? And then they stop and say, Brenda came to us and brought up this issue that was going on with a change, and we really applaud her for touching this because it saved us $100,000 and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, now the graph makes sense to me. And so it’s not just letting everybody in, depending on where they live, where they’re from, what they look like, what they believe. It’s making sure that those voices, I would call them on the fringe, are heard. Because a lot of times they’re seeing things that you don’t because they have a different perspective. And then progress, again, it’s proven if there is an inch of progress then I can see the meaning and then that creates the motion and momentum to go a little bit farther, like this can work. That’s what they need throughout the process. So if you go from here and don’t show progress to here the reason people get tired of doing this especially in longer change initiatives, it’s because they see no progress. And when you see no progress, you’re like, this is never gonna end, and I’m gonna die here. And that’s let’s just say mentally, you had brought this up. The stories that we tell each other are not usually positive ones. And so, yes, if you are not, I would say, ethically guiding the story. Then the story can be iterative, if you will. Play is the one that I usually get the most pushback from, and there’s so much research. You have to think about play in a little bit different context. And the reason that I have so many new definitions is because the old words no longer apply. And so if you go into, let’s say, a training center, I used to run a training center, IT training center, and you sit down and Mr. Monotone gets up at the lecture and here we go. I want you to click on this. Click. You will see this. Click. Then you will do that. Click. 47 clicks later. Here’s what you will do. And you’re like, my god. Break time, break time. But when you get in there and say, Okay, I want to tell you about somebody. I want to tell you about Gerald. Now, Gerald may be totally made up, that’s how stories go. Or he may be real. Now Gerald had this problem. You know, maybe it’s a healthcare problem where Gerald had an acute issue that he was in the emergency room four times a month. And Gerald brought up that every time that he came in. You know, he’s having a heart attack, or he’s in AFib or whatever, and you’re sitting there asking him, Well, can I have your insurance card? Can we do this? I’m thinking, I was just here. You have this information. And so looking at Gerald as an example, we’re implementing a new program that if the patient has been in our institution within the last six months, that all we have to do is say, has anything changed in your information? Do you know how much time that would save nurses, intake people, patients? Yeah, a lot. This incision that I just got two weeks ago is number 58 for me. I have been asked every stinking time. Can I see your card? Can I see your license? Put all of your information on paper. Then we’re going to approve it when it gets into the computer. And then we’re gonna spit out a little card. Is this card correct? Every time you get medication, and you’re just like, my gosh, you’re killing me with all this. And so by giving them stories, they see how the work is meaningful to the stories. So now those are interlocked. When I’m working on this, what am I thinking about? I’m thinking about Gerald. Poor old Gerald, you know. He has to be in an emergency room four times a month. That stinks. That’s expensive. How can we make that better?

Kevin Novak: Yes, because we’ve seen that be very effective to the point where we have even had these staff hang up posters of the Geralds so that they kept that thought process in mind and wanted to work quickly on this because you know they’re back to all that we look at from a change perspective. Is process, process, process. And we don’t see often that we can get so caught up in that process to the point the rigidity does not let us see anything else. And we forget about Gerald. We do that as survival. This is what we know to do. This is what we have been told to do. And then slowly there’s that disconnect to the customer, the experience, the story of truly what they’re there to do.

Dr. Michelle Pipes: I will say one thing. When my nephew was born, he was born in AFib. It was like 222 beats a minute, straight out. Went to NICU. My sister could not see him because she had a C section and you can’t move for so long. So we’re trying to go back and forth and figure out what’s going on. And one of the nurses was incredibly rude, would not tell us anything. And I pulled her aside and I said, Listen, lady. I know this is a Tuesday for you. This is life changing for us. What is wrong with his heart? And she said, I’m so sorry. She said, This is a Tuesday for me. And she said, I forget. You know why they forget? Because they’re taught sequential. This is what you do. Here’s how your response goes. Here is your script. Here is this. This is survival. What has surviving done to us? It’s taking the humanity out of the uniqueness, the thing that makes you special. What I try to do is always set the example. One person can change a whole room. That’s the power. It is influencing people to win, win, win. If they’re happier, if they have a better day, their responses are going to be more positive. They’re going to look at things from a different perspective. They’re going to see hope. They’re going to see possibility. That gets them excited, which elevates the energy level. And when you get that kind of environment, when you walk into an organization that has that, you feel it. It’s something that you don’t hide. It’s putting the humanity back into work. It’s saying that I need more resources in order to do what you’re asking me to do. I can no longer, I no longer have the capacity to do this. You’re asking me impossible. We’ve reached that point. And leadership has to take on more of a protect-the-conditions role. Because it’s the conditions around change that either allow the people to find success through it or that fail. And success may not look like it originally did, because change means change. And it doesn’t ever happen perfectly like you think it will. It can still come out here and be meaningful, but we have to be focused on the right things. We have to bring up the truth as it’s happening. We have to be able to respond to that truth in an efficient and effective manner. We have to know what we’re doing up here, know what we’re doing here, know how the plan affects people in the middle, and we have to support others through the process. To say, you know what, I see you, I appreciate you. You really made that change happen. And everybody that’s gonna use that new upgraded hardware that makes their computers go faster, or they can, whatever, they don’t know. But I see you. And because of that, I want to say I appreciate what you did. I may not know exactly all the googly gop in the tech. And I don’t have to, but I see your effort. And that makes them feel it was worth it. And again, it doesn’t have to be a lot. Sometimes it’s just a kind word.

SEGMENT 4: MEASURING CONDITIONS, AND WHAT YOU OWE PEOPLE WHEN YOU DO

Kevin Novak: So Michelle, to me that equates as a practice. And I wanna talk a bit with you about how you measure that. And just on a personal level to those things that you were talking about. I practice those things to recognize humanity. Sitting down at a restaurant when the waiter or waitress introduces themselves and my wife and I both say hi, so and so. And the outcome of that is always more attentive service and better service, at least what we walk away with. And make the point, those small efforts in a grocery store when you’re checking out to engage, and so forth. So from a measurement perspective, because this season is trying to focus in on one of my favorite phrases, you measure what you manage, but also measuring what matters. Most transformation dashboards measure mechanics, all that we’ve been talking about, the milestones, the budget, the adoption counts. And yours measures the conditions. And to me, listening to your very inspirational talk it’s a practice and something to embrace. And that’s a different kind of measurement. And so I opened this season with an episode on what I called the measurement ratchet. And it was the way organizations add a measure, but almost never retire one. So I want to give you a chance to speak to something a listener may be wondering about. With so many dials already on the board and people having that cognitive depletion, what makes these six different? And what happens inside an organization when leadership tracks project milestones while the human signals go completely dark? And what does it look like when an executive team genuinely instruments both?

Dr. Michelle Pipes: Well, look at traditionally adoption rates, operational results. I’m also looking at understanding. Can they tell the truth? Do they have capacity? Do they feel included? Whether the change was sustainable or not. And you have to think of the things that I’m measuring are the things that actually make what traditional change measures possible. So if you’re not free to tell the truth and you don’t have the capacity to do the work, you don’t feel included, there is no progress, you think change is going to be positive or negative. It’s going to be negative. And so a lot of what I’m talking about is more of a change in your presence, in your mindset. It’s a mindset shift. But the thing is, it’s not just for work, it’s for life. So I’m changing this in lives because I want lives to change. That’s what matters to me. I want organizations to do great as well, and this works for that. But the people I see who struggle, the people who don’t know what’s going on a lot, you know, what’s happening, I don’t even know what’s going on, or they don’t feel like they matter, you know, having that change. And I say that even if you’re one person in an organization, you can start joyful change. And when the research shows when they see the difference, that’s the motivation for I can do this. I could be more positive. I could say good morning. I’ll take you one up on the waitress thing. So, what I always do and what our family always does is if we get great service, we ask our waiter to have the manager step out at the end of our meal in front of them and their manager, we tell them how we felt, what they did. That it made a difference that we would be back and we leave them a nice tip. Because I want what they did to be repeated. And I want the manager to say, these are the things and the people that are really making a difference in your business. Because what do they mostly hear? The bad stuff. And so when you go through joyful change, it is, I would say, like a personal monitoring, if you will, but then with the team, say, hey, you know, does everybody know what’s going on? Can everybody explain to me? So one of the activities might be I come into a meeting, everybody gets a blank sheet of paper and a pen. I want you in two sentences to explain the change initiative that we’re working on. If they can’t do that, they don’t understand the meaning. So then where are we? You know, how does progress feel? Does it feel we’re just okay? Is it not going anywhere? Is it going this way? It’s as simple as that. It’s monitoring like what’s going on. If you send out a survey and you look at the information that you get back, and you’re like, okay, people don’t feel safe to bring things up. How are we going to change that? And that may start at the top. And it should start at the top where it should be safe to tell the truth because the decisions they’re making is based on what they hear from here. So it’s not just like a form, you know, we gotta check this box, check this box, check this box. You know, was everybody motivated? Yes, they’re motivated because it’s a box. How do you know? How do you know whether they’re motivated or not? What does motivation even mean? Well, that’s one of the things that what does it mean to you? What does it mean in this change? What does success look like? If six months out this fails, what would have caused it? My gosh, there’s a question for us. Well, person goes right there, it’s not gonna, you know, whatever. My gosh, you’ve learned something. And to me, I think that’s what it is. We have to continue to learn. And so many studies have showed that when you stop learning, when you stop playing, you shut down the creativity, you stop the innovation, you don’t feel free to explore what’s going on because you’re gonna get thumped on the head if you’re not perfect the first time you use AI. Well, you’re not gonna be. That’s why they call it learning. So when you build these things into the process and don’t just go, well, I have an AI initiative. Let’s implement it tomorrow. We can all work overnight. What’s this wheat crap? You’re going out to eat at some fancy restaurant. That’s what I’m talking about. Is there has to be a time where we discover and bring people in that are going to be implemented. We design change based on what we found out. Then we make little pilots and little experiments so that we can adjust as we go because a lot of change has the plan here, or let’s just say up here. And when it gets here, it fails because they haven’t tried it, they haven’t tested it, they haven’t implemented in a real situation. And so change breaks here. And whose fault is it when the change breaks? Is it these people? No, it’s these people. And so when you’ve got shared carry, you’ve got the people here who are protecting the conditions, and they’re saying, Yes, I want this change. The designers of fit are saying, okay, here’s how we can do the change. We’ve talked to everybody. Managers are going back and forth. The navigators have been educated. They’ve been trained. They understand what they’re doing. And so we’re making little adjustments. So to me, launch is not the end, it is the beginning. Okay. We’re gonna learn from this, we’re gonna take this into the next change that we have. We may do a handoff, but you know what? Somebody’s gotta be an owner of that. It’s not everybody because if it’s everybody, who is it? It’s nobody. And so a lot of times you have this big change. Excitement, everybody wants to be on it and rah rah rah and there’s a banner and blah. And what happens when the change is launched? Look at six months down the line. Six months down the line, those executive stewards should know what the outcome was, what the benefit was, what the costs were, how it’s making life better or not, because all of that is information. All of that information helps them make better decisions for the next change. Because this change that we just went through, the best thing that may happen to it is that we don’t continue with it. That’s again another choice, but it’s a choice made on reality and not polished reporting.

CLOSING

Kevin Novak: That’s where I want to pause the conversation with Michelle. Because the next part deserves its own room. It’s that powerful. So here’s what we’ve covered so far. Michelle spent 20 years inside the established change models before concluding where they stopped short. She reframed resistance as a readout, evidence that safety, meaning, or clarity has broken down somewhere specific. She walked us through the six signals: meaning, safety, belonging, progress, recognition, and play. And she made the case that measuring conditions, not just the mechanics, changes how a leader actually behaves, along with the responsibility that comes with asking people how change feels. In part two, we take the framework to the change I think will test it most. What happens to those six signals when the new colleague is not a person? Then we get to the part of Michelle’s work I believe is most overdue: change accumulation, and the personal discipline she calls personal change management. And we close with the question I ask every guest, framed around the nine-year-olds she’s teaching to navigate change before most executives learn how. If you found today’s episode valuable, subscribe to the Human Factor Podcast, so part two is waiting for you. Leave a rating and a comment and share this episode with your leadership team, especially with whoever owns the Transformation Dashboard. Subscribe to the Ideas and Innovations 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 PART 1. Part 2 arrives October 22, 2026.