Not Without the People:
Change in the Age of AI

By Nick Anderson and Dr. Ken Trzaska. For the people doing the hard work. Not the people announcing it.

Not Without
the People

Change in the Age of AI

Nick Anderson
&
Dr. Ken Trzaska

Q1 2027

About the Book

For the people doing the hard work. Not the people announcing it.

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.

And for the person at the bottom of the organisational chart whose job is being discussed in rooms she hasn’t been invited into.

Not Without the People, co-authored by Nick Anderson and Dr. Ken Trzaska, is a practitioner’s guide to AI implementation built on thirty years of fieldwork, a primary evidence base of more than 1,800 leaders, and a live case study — documented with the full participation of Kirk Overstreet, President of John A. Logan College — still in progress at the time of writing.

Written for the people doing the hard work. Not the people announcing it.

Publishing Spring 2027.

The Four Disciplines

Listening. Clarity. Patience. Focus.

The four disciplines are not sequential phases — they are concurrent practices that together create the conditions for sustained adoption.

Listening

Being present to what is said, what is not said, and what fear prevents from being said. Not surveying. Attending.

Clarity

Making expectations explicit, in writing, with specificity. The AlEx™ process is the operational expression of this discipline.

Patience

Resisting the urgency to declare victory. Sustaining the conditions for adoption long after the platform goes live.

Focus

Keeping the people — not the platform — at the centre of every decision throughout implementation.

The Authors

Written by practitioners, not by theorists.

Nick Anderson

Founder of The Crispian Advantage. Thirty years of practitioner consulting across 19 sectors and 80 countries. Lead author of Focusing Change to Win (2014). Architect of the AlEx™ process and the Workforce Clarity Initiative at John A. Logan College.

Dr. Ken Trzaska

President, Lewis & Clark Community College, Illinois. A leader who has navigated workforce transformation, AI implementation, and institutional change from the inside. Co-author of Not Without the People.

Not Without the People:Change in the Age of AI