Chief Change Officer - #287 Richard H. Carson: The 39-Step Playbook for Change That Doesn’t Collapse — Part One

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

Richard Carson’s career didn’t unfold by design—it unfolded by curiosity. From planning cities to fixing broken systems, he’s never been afraid to say, “This isn’t working—let’s figure out why.” In Part 1, he shares how a job he hated, a grocery store run, and one very weird time-tracking system helped shape his unconventional path to becoming a change consultant.Key Highlights of Our Interview:From Archaeology to Urban Planning“I thought I wanted to dig things up. Turns out, I just liked solving puzzles.” How he traded bones for blueprints.What They Say Isn’t the Real Problem“The issue they give you is rarely the one they have.” Why client work is part consulting, part detective work.The Grocery Store Test“If you can’t explain your plan in the produce aisle, it’s too complicated.” What small-town planning taught him about communication.The Micromanagement Disaster“They were tracking tasks every 15 minutes. People were losing their minds.” The worst system he ever saw—and why it failed.Becoming a Consultant by Accident“I hired consultants. They impressed me. So I quit and joined them.” When one audit changed his career._______________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Richard H. Carson  --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.10 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>130,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today's guest is Richard Carson, consultant, strategist, and a guide who once walked away from a government job to join the consultants he just hired. In this two-part series, we talk about what happens when organizations try to change but forget about people.

Wretched shares what most consultants get wrong, why empathy isn't optional, and how a terrible time tracking system inspired his now 39-step change model. It's practical, honest, and filled with stories you won't forget. Let's get started. Welcome Richard. Welcome to Chief Change Officer.

Welcome to our show. You have this book called Book of Change. Naturally, this show is perfect for you. Before we start digging into your book and your learnings, tell us something about yourself, your journey leading up to the book. I like to characterize my philosophy as corpidium or seize the day. And I say that because I have not, even though my background is in urban planning, I haven't planned my career

and taken a particular trajectory. I basically seized on opportunities, career opportunities, as they presented themselves. So my career is, I started out wanting to be an archaeologist. But once I realized it was really about digging in dirt, I moved on from that into architecture. Architecture led me into urban planning. Urban planning eventually led me into what is called community development,

which is an umbrella for engineering, plan review, urban planning, a variety of disciplines under one umbrella, and eventually into consulting. So every time something came along that I found interesting, I pursued it. And I've been very happy with that. I like what you said earlier. How even though you were an urban planner, you didn't exactly plan your own career path. It wasn't all mapped out. You just evolved along the way. Something

would happen and you would think, yeah, this feels right. So you would dive deeper and then something else would come up, maybe connected to what you already liked, and you would follow that too. These days, people throw away the word perfect a lot. But your path wasn't perfect, it was reeled, it unfolded step by step. That got me curious. When you say something interested you, what actually sparked that interest? Was it just a gut feeling?

Was it a hunger to learn something new? Or are you one of those people who's actually addicted to change? Urban planning is part of it is that I've always been interested in community. And organizations are basically a community of people. And so I've looked community at a scale, and I'll give you an example. I was the regional planning director for the Portland metro area of 1.5 million people. And in that genre, we created plans for land use, solid waste management, wastewater, open space, a variety of really large plans. That is like a maximum scale of community. And for a while I was an advisor to off and on

to three governors of Oregon in both land use, environment and economic developments. That's even a larger scale of community. But also the most enjoyment I ever had was I was the head against the planning director for a community of 25,000 people. And I really enjoyed that because I would walk into a grocery store and somebody would stop me and say, can you get a stop sign on the corner of X and Y?

And well, let me look into that. I can actually do something real. Later on, when they got into the consulting work, I started working with do something real. Then later on, when they got into the consulting work, I started working with organ, other organizations and really trying to solve their problems. And I could, how I got into that was one of my last jobs as a manager. I was, I took on an organization that had a lot of problems. And so I hired a consultant to do what is called a performance audit.

The GAO government standards for his performance audit. So they came in and did a performance audit. And I got really interested in that to the point where I left my job. I went into, I went to work for these people because I loved it so much. It was so interesting. And I went back and got my doctorate work in organizational psychology

and eventually applied that to what I do now, which is organizational change management. So that's kind of the evolution of how I started out digging in the dirt and not liking it and moving on to helping organizations with their problems. And basically, it always starts with a problem. When I, somebody comes to me and basically says, look, we have a problem, X, Y, Z, and we want you to help us fix it. Maybe it's because I'm compulsive about fixing things. Maybe I shouldn't have been an engineer instead of an organizational change person.

Whenever somebody comes to you and says, we have this problem we want you to help us with. Chances are they're wrong. Chances are that isn't the actual problem. The problem, it's a symptom of something else. And they really don't know what that something else is. They just know that, I'll give an example, I just worked for a city government in Southern California. And they came to me and basically said, the city service and the business people, which are usually opposed, are all complaining about the same thing, about the performance of a particular agency.

And, well, they looked into it. It was really interesting, but you know, what they thought was the problem, it wasn't really it. Usually it's usually what I end up giving them a series of recommendations about how to approach the different issues, the different problems that like family that are resulting in these symptoms. Yeah, I agree with you on this. Totally.

A lot of times what happens is whether it's an elected board or a board of directors for company, they will tell you what the problem is. They'll say, here's the problem we want you to fix. And my first reaction is maybe. I'm not going to start from a position of this is the problem. I'm going to fix it. I'm going to start from the position of I'm going to start from the position of, I'm going to talk to people internally and externally and ask them what they think. In other words, I will start with the front counter line staff who,

you know, do the customer service and I'll start with at that level and say, what do you think works around here and And what do you think doesn't? And then can then take it to outside stakeholders, to managers, and Billy get the 360 degree look at what people are thinking about what works and what doesn't, and then it'll go back to the people who fired me and basically say, look, this is what I found out. Now you can deal with it or not. You want to deal with it, then I will give you some recommendations. By the way, when I talk about recommendations, I use internal I use internal staff to develop answers.

And that's because I want buy-in from them. I'll give an example of something that I was thinking about the other day. It has to do with Trump and Musk and their dodgingge or Department of Government Efficiency. This was done before by President Clinton and Al Gore. But the way they did it was they went in and they basically engaged the staff to help find solutions. And it was, by all accounts, very successful. Whereas Trump and Musk are basically coming in and threatening people, their jobs, and they're going to have a very hard time

getting those people to be part of the solution. There's going to be a great deal of resistance to them from day one, not because they deserve it, but because of just people are afraid. Change scares people and the first thing you have to do, at least what I do, is sit down with folks and say look if you do this, if you work on this, your life, your career, your work environment will be better, not worse. Yeah, of course, everyone has their own idea of what getting better means. And in the office environment, it's not just about change. There's politics, power dynamics, and other things that aren't even part of the equation when we talk about improving or evolving. Some people resist change not

because they don't understand it, but because change threatens the status quote. And for them, that's uncomfortable. The mantra usually to begin with is, but we've always done it this way. Why change it? What we've done it this way for a decade. Now you've written a book called The Book of Change. You also hold a doctoral degree in organizational change. So I imagine you've studied a wide range of change models.

Obviously, we don't have time to go through all of them here. You probably need a full course just to do that. But I'd love to get your quick take from your perspective and your studies. How have these models evolved over time? Has the way we think about change stayed more or less the same over the years? Or has it shifted drastically? Feel free to connect this with what you mentioned earlier about employees being part of the solution or what happens when there is resistance? Even impersonal change, has the approach to change itself changed? Let's start with a quick note about centuries. I won't go back a lot on this, but in Black Leonard BC, a Greek philosopher said, nothing endures but change.

And that's what the change is. He constant. It's hard for people to get their head around that, especially when you go in and try to work with them, because like I said, their attitude is, you've always done it this way. I think the recent history of change management starts in 1947 with Kurt Lewin, who created the first change management model.

He did a lot of other things. He came up with the force field analysis, action research, but change management, he came up with a three phase model, which was freeze, moderate, and then refreeze. Almost every model, including mine, almost every model since 1947 has followed that. Those basic three phases one way or another, sometimes it's five, sometimes it's seven, but they all basically say, you go in and shake it up, you reform it. Then you maintain it. And you may do that several times, but so since 1947, there's Ross came up with the kind of stages of grief model, which was actually a change

management model. Edward Deming came up with a more statistically based model, mainly for the Japanese. He couldn't sell it to the American auto industry here until the Japanese picked it up and made a success out of it. And then all of a sudden the American automakers were interested in the Deming method. Carter later came along with one, Crossfire had the AdCorp. They're basically all the same. The two, so I came up with, I looked at maybe over 100 models. I came up with 22 from about, from Kurt Lewin to about 2016. I really haven't found much since then.

What I really looked at was trying to take it the next step. So what I've done, even though it's very generalized, three to five steps, I came up with the same three phases, a little bit different name, but they're basically the same. Then I took those into 10 steps and then I took those into 39 separate actions. Each with each action has a lot of detail about exactly what you can do to accomplish that particular action. So I took my own experience as a manager of organizations, as a consultant working with organizations, and as an academic who learned about these different models

and applied all of that to this particular model that we're talking about. So let me try to recap and you tell me if I got it right. You are saying that in modern history, starting from the 20th century, a lot of the current models still trace back to Kurt Lewin's work, the classic three-step model. And since then, most of the newer models basically follow a similar structure, three, maybe five stages, moving from where you are now to where you want to be, with some kind of transition or shift happening in between. So would it be fair to say that even with all the new frameworks, the core idea hasn't

changed all that much since Kurt Lewin? Yes. For the most part, even though a lot of these models were developed earlier, there wasn't a lot of interest until the book In Search of Excellence came out. That really made a big difference. That was the beginning of people, mainly in the business arena, looking at it and saying, maybe there's a better way to do this. And almost a decade later, In Search of Excellence, down to more into reinventing government, which was another book that was the one that both Clinton and Gore picked up on in terms of implementing what that was about. So the whole idea of I think the word reinventing

is really key there. The whole idea of changing your organization and the fact that you, given what happens externally and internally, that forces change, and for it again means you just can't ignore it. You shouldn't ignore it. It's like you said, change for the sake of change is ridiculous. But understanding the forces internally and externally and how to deal with all

of a sudden became very, I guess, popular. So stakeholder, basically managing the stakeholder perspective, the involvement there that needs that concern, is that what you mean? Yeah, exactly. You have developed a new model. What's the name of it? It's People Sustained Organizational Change Management.

And I use the word people very until on purpose because organizations consist of people and it's people that are the problem, people that are the solution. And the only way you're going to sustain change is to create that mindset in the people who work in the organization. I'll give you really an example. Before, before I wrote the book, I, when I was implementing change in my organization, truth, I did two things that really helped. Consultants will give you a set of recommendations. They'll give it something in a binder and here you go. And a lot of people will just put that on a shelf.

go and a lot of people will just put that on a shelf. So the trick is to be successful is how do you maintain that? So two things you can do. Well, number one is to develop a multi-year strategic plan that dedicates accountability resources to affect the change. The other thing I did was I created a position of change manager. Now you go into organizations and you are going to find a lot of titles of change manager. In this particular person, this woman, basically, I gave her the authority to walk around the organization and say to individual managers, okay, you were given this task to be done on this date with

these resources, how are you doing? And she would keep on, they had to meet those, meet those benchmarks. And so the strategic plan implemented and there was a person making it happen. It can't really be the manager because the managers has other things to worry about, but you need somebody whose job is to change manager. Having a multi-year strategic plan with resources

and a change manager really makes a big difference. you plan with resources and a change manager really makes a big difference. Yeah, I was just about to ask you about your model. You mentioned that it's built on Kurt Lewin's three-step change framework. I'm curious, how is your model different from his or even from the other models out there? Give us an overview. How does your model work? What makes it similar to the classics and what makes it stand out? It's similar in that the three phases are to initiate an organizational assessment, to implement organizational change,

and you're ready to maintain that change. So that's basically the same as Kurt Lewin's model. The detail on it is one of the things that's really trying to emphasize that he didn't touch on is the human aspect, you have to really have engaged people in the process. And I go into a lot of detail from the very beginning to the very end about how you use human resources.

It isn't, you need to obviously have buy-in from the leadership, but you have to have a process by which you engage the entire organization and everybody in it. Give them a role in making the process successful. And a lot of times what will happen is that a consultant comes in, makes recommendations, the leadership basically goes to the managers and says, this is it, do it. And no one has had any input.

And they're basically clueless in terms of what happens. A lot of times what happens is it won't work because the consultant didn't dig down in the organization to find out what the real problem was, or even if you knew what the problem was, how do you successfully implement it? I'm very concerned about a lot of consultants, okay, are basically selling a product over and over and over to different organizations. And they go in basically with a mindset that, okay, this is it. This is what you're going to do.

This is what I'm going to tell you. I've Xeroxed. I, this is actually I'd say funny, but actually a sad somebody actually gave a report to an organization and they just basically Xeroxed, changed the name, but forgot and mystical. So the organization is reading this recommendation, all of a sudden this other company name starts showing up. It's just like, how embarrassing is that? And not only undercut their credibility, but every exercise has to be unique.

And it has to basically be very sensitive to the people in the organization. And you really, it's important to really listen. And that's why we, the initial phases of the model are sitting down with managers, line staff, stakeholders, if you were at a corporation, the consumers, as well as suppliers. So really sitting down with those people and listening to what they're saying before you come to any conclusion at all. So back to your model,

mentioned is people sustained. So while it includes the classic three stages, you've also built in several other steps and actions. What are they? Can you walk us through those? How do they come together in your model? I'll go through the 10 steps basically. First step, number one is first steps, problem identification, scoping out the problem. Second is there's a kickoff that explains the program, the process, everybody in the organization. So you don't just send out an email, you sit down with each of the organization's working groups and answer their questions, take them through the process and get their buy-in, get them to understand

that change can be difficult, but they will be part of the process and will have input all through the process. Then there's data collection and assessment. This is probably the most boring part because you end up reading a lot of annual reports, a lot of statistical analysis, media, press information, anything that's written or data driven. Then you go on to the stakeholders and meet with the individual stakeholders, whether they're vendors, consumers, whatever, however they touch the organization, you get that feedback, then you go next into the actual organization change.

I won't go through that in detail, but that's the diagnostic portion of the model. portion of the model. And what I ended up doing was I ended up using diagnostic model by the National Institute of Health, which was a medical diagnosis process. And what I found was that organizations and people are remarkably the same in terms of their ailments and symptoms and how you can diagnose them because organizations are made up of people. And so that more I've used that diagnostic model. Then you implement the change, there's process mapping, reengineering, then you lock in change. There's a number of ways to lock the change in from executive leadership coaching to staff training, TQM, things like that.

And then finally is to, you maintain the model. And that's, like I said, you can do that through multi-year strategic plans and budgeting primarily, which also need a feedback loop that constantly goes back on annual basis and kind of looks at the benchmarks that you set to see if you are achieving those and why not. Why not? That's it for today. We've heard how Richard stumbled into consulting, survived a time-tracking nightmare, and started seeing patterns in all the wrong problems. But next, we get into the real playbook, the book of change.

Why 39 steps might not be too many and a human stuff consultants usually skip. See you in part two. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top rated reviews, check out our website and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.