Research, perspective, and provocation on what AI-driven change actually requires — and why most organisations are approaching it wrong.
From the forthcoming book
This book is for the HR director who was handed the AI implementation because nobody else wanted it. For the union president whose members are frightened and haven’t been asked. For the president who knows the timeline is a recipe for failure but doesn’t have the language to say so.
Nick Anderson & Dr. Ken Trzaska — Publishing Spring 2027
About the book →Latest — Not Without the People Series
A union president on the difference between informing employees and involving them — and why this effort earned trust when others hadn’t.
Tracie Zoller, President of LOSA at John A. Logan College, describes what made the Workforce Clarity Initiative different from every change effort that had come before it — and what other union leaders should know.
Read the article“The answer isn’t asking employees to trust the process. The answer is creating a process that gives them a reason to trust it.”
From the articles
The workforce isn’t the problem. The sequence is the problem.
Stop Calling It “Resistance”
Read the article
Trust in management is the only variable that significantly reduces change resistance. Not incentives. Not mandates. Trust.
Getting Turkeys Excited About Thanksgiving
Read the article
Training informs, but coaching transforms. Without it, people attend the workshop, nod enthusiastically, then return to doing exactly what they’ve always done.
The Hidden Cost of the Coaching Deficit
Read the article
Four questions. Four disciplines. An honest read of where you are — and what to focus on next.
Discipline 1 — Listening
Discipline 2 — Clarity
Discipline 3 — Patience
Discipline 4 — Focus
A union perspective on the Workforce Clarity Initiative — and what it takes to earn trust from people who have learned not to give it easily.
Tracie Zoller, President of LOSA at John A. Logan College, on the difference between informing employees and involving them, and why this effort was different from every one that had come before.
93% cite fear of the unknown. 90% cite insufficient communication. The second number is about you.
The silence doesn’t stay empty. Your workforce fills it with memory, and memory is written by the last leader who went quiet.
Stop. Start. Keep. The list people most need to hear is the one leaders most reliably forget.
Most change communication tells people what is ending and what is new. Nobody hands them the list of what is staying exactly as it was. That omission is doing quiet damage.
Speed and progress are not always the same thing. Change is rarely sustained by the people who announce it.
Stephanie Harner, AVP of Human Resources at John A. Logan College, on what HR is uniquely positioned to do — and why the long game is the only game worth playing.
Read →In Inherited Leadership, your people haven’t bought into the institution. They’ve bought into a person who just left.
Dr. Ken Trzaska on the trust architecture every inherited leader inherits — and what you must do first.
Read →Everyone names trust as the foundation of change. Almost nobody tells a leader how to read it.
Trust sensing — reading behavior rather than survey scores — is the most neglected skill in leadership. Here is what to look for.
Trust that was diminished through experience must be rebuilt through experience.
Dr. Kirk Overstreet, President of John A. Logan College, on what the leader who didn’t create the resistance is supposed to do about it.
The same methodology. Two organisations. One triumph, one wreckage.
Trust is the multiplier on every lever the recipe pulls. Where trust sits at zero, the lever moves air.
The destination is radical. The daily discipline is gradual.
The strategy was never the problem. The speed was. Go as fast as the trust allows. Then go build more trust.
Two major research houses are circling the same mechanism. Neither has named it yet.
HBI and Haywood are describing the same finding from different angles. Next week, it gets a name.
Definition, mechanism, and how it differs from change fatigue, cultural debt, and accumulated scepticism.
The resistance that arrives fully formed before the change is announced. Named, defined, and distinguished from what the field has been calling it.
The refusal is not the problem. The refusal is the data.
They tell leaders to unlearn the scripts. Nobody asks who wrote them.
The comments are not the afterword this week. They are the post.
Tell me about the time something got labelled resistance — and turned out, when someone opened it, to be something else entirely.
The gauge is not malfunctioning. It is reporting a condition that was already there.
96% of leaders expected productivity gains. 77% of employees reported more work. The instrument is functioning perfectly.
And why your change initiative failed.
The account was never funded. And people, unlike machines, remember exactly who has been making withdrawals.
In 58% of cases, human and AI together do worse than the stronger of the two working alone.
The tool made the team worse. A systematic review of 152 studies. And the reason has nothing to do with the software.
Two out of every three. Before a single change had been announced.
People are not refusing the map. There never was one. The fog was always the problem.
Harvard Business Review says bring everyone on board. Here’s the part they left out.
The what is the easy half. The how is where every technology rollout breaks — and has been breaking for thirty years.
They are refusing to fall. And you cannot fix that with a better argument.
Trust is the only variable that significantly reduces resistance. The other levers only work when the trust is already there.
Every organisation has a history of change. Most of it is failure. The people in the room remember.
The cynicism you meet when you announce something new is not resistance. It is memory. And it is scar tissue you are standing on.
A claim from one consultant is an opinion. This is not one consultant.
Six thousand comments. Nineteen sectors. The same failure described in almost the same words across forty countries.
The one variable that actually reduces resistance — and the only one that isn’t yours to give.
Trust in management was the only factor that significantly reduced resistance. One thing, doing more than everything else combined.
The convenient diagnosis that’s kept us stuck for twenty years.
Resistance isn’t the cause of failure. It’s a symptom. And the cause is largely upstream — manufactured by the leaders running the change.
Twenty years. Billions spent. A failure rate that refuses to move.
In 2003, 60–70% of change initiatives failed. In 2026, 60–70% still fail. The number has not moved. Here is why that matters.
On change, trust, and what fifty Tuesdays might be for.
The failure rate has been stubbornly consistent for two decades. This is the conversation about why — and what actually works instead.
When 77% of employees say AI has created more work, not less — that’s not resistance. That’s feedback.
After 30 years and 80 countries, the same pattern appears every time. The workforce isn’t the problem. The sequence is.
You’re asking people to enthusiastically embrace something they believe might eliminate their jobs. Good luck with that.
60% of change resistance originates from poor leadership — not from the people being asked to change. Here’s how to build the trust that actually moves people.
Reimagining Consulting for the AI Age
Gone are the days of static PowerPoint decks and one-size-fits-all solutions. Welcome to the era of Living Strategy, where your organisation’s future unfolds in real-time.
Why the Most Critical Success Factor Gets Only 1% of Our Attention
Coaching ranked dead last in priority surveys at just 1.0% — despite being universally acknowledged as essential to successful behaviour change. This isn’t an oversight. It’s a strategic blind spot.
Research shows the fear of job loss can be as damaging as actual job loss.
The difference between thriving and surviving organisations during disruption comes down to how leaders show up before, during and after the storm.
Making Work More Satisfying Through AI-Enabled Thinking
Trust is the only variable that significantly reduces change resistance. This finding transforms how we should approach AI adoption — from a technology rollout into an opportunity to reimagine satisfying work.
Read the full argument — and the methodology behind it.