Chief Change Officer - #288 Richard H. Carson: The 39-Step Playbook for Change That Doesn’t Collapse — Part Two

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

Most change efforts fail because they forget one thing: people. In Part 2, Richard breaks down The Book of Change, his 39-step model for leading transformation without leaving common sense behind. We get into the difference between showing up with a framework vs. showing up ready to listen—and what AI might never understand about real leadership.Key Highlights of Our Interview:What Most Consultants Miss “They deliver a binder and disappear. That’s not help. That’s homework.” Why Richard built his own model.The 39-Step Framework“Every step fixes something I’ve seen go wrong.” It’s not bloated—it’s built from battle scars.Empathy as Strategy“You can’t shortcut human trust.” Why listening well matters more than leading fast.AI Won’t Solve Culture “You can’t automate belief. You can’t code buy-in.” Where technology hits its limit.Advice That Changed His Career“I don’t need your answer—I need you to hear me.” His wife’s one-liner that became a leadership principle._______________________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.12 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>140,000+ 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. So back to your model, as 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 steps, 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. And I won't go into that in detail, but that's the diagnostic 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 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. So when did you publish your book?

The reason I asked about the timing is, since the book came out, have you had a chance to apply your new model? Perhaps, have you received some of the recommendations from your clients? I'd love to hear how your new model played out in real life. Any results or experiences you can share? Published it in spring of 23. Okay. Oh, it's a little over a year old. I have used it in one example I gave that I gave you was the, the Southern California County government in which I applied all those steps in the process.

And it was really interesting in terms of, you know, what basically the Board of County Commissioners told me in terms of that people weren't put the performance levels right where they wanted them to be. And that they thought that staff had a bad attitude and it was numbered. The interesting thing I found out was from talking to the staff was the manager who ran the entire organization group was a micromanager and he was using a time-sharing, not time-sharing, time management software. And he was actually having people report their activities in 15-minute increments. So they were spending more time reporting what they were doing and doing it. It was, no, it was that's how bad it was.

And I, once I found that out, it was really hard to believe, but that was, and he was really enforcing that. So everybody was like, every 15 minutes, they were basically stopping, saying, I just did this and this way. And then basically they just cheered up half the time that they needed to do the actual task. It's given that it's the Christmas season, it's kind of like in the movie

Miracle on 34th Street. The guy who was a time management expert who was driving everybody crazy, that's exactly what happened coming out of the years. So kind of Henry Ford was, That's exactly what happened coming out of the years. So kind of Henry Ford was, I guess it was the Hawthorne experiment. That was it. They did a study and they found that people change their behavior by you watching them do their behavior. But yeah, there was a great deal of time and money and stock put into the idea that you could manage, if you could only manage

people's time better, then you would make more profit. Unfortunately, it got taken to an extreme where there was no, it is like a lot of today's philosophy where there's a lot more stock put in creativity, where you don't. Basic time management said, look, I don't want you to think, I just want you to do what I tell you to do over and over and over and over. And business has evolved a great deal since then, where people are given a lot more latitude to do things on their own that might actually be efficient. Have you received any feedback so far from your clients on the model?

I'm curious not just about what they say, but also your own reflections. After publishing the book and spending so much time developing everything, did anything surprise you once you started applying it? Any part of the model that worked differently than expected? Was something you've seen refined as you go? I think that the one thing that I am most focused on right now is artificial intelligence. That is a, it's such a huge game changer. When I was a boy, I used to read Kleinlein, Bradbury, Asimov

who talked about such things, but it was back then it was science fiction. It is such a sea change that it's almost unfathomable to determine what the changes will be in the workplace. There are some predictions by say the United Nations that unemployment could shoot to 80%. And certainly for a lot of service sector jobs that's already starting to happen and you go to McDonald's or Taco Bell or whatever you're already having to order from a kiosk or online. That's the one that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about reading, researching, because I think that's going to be the most significant change since COVID. COVID, if you think about what, you know, besides the fact that seven million people died in COVID,

died in COVID, it basically made Amazon. And now Amazon has the work, one of the world's largest fleet services in terms of delivery. It totally changed how people think instead of going to the store and buying something, you look at stores like Macy's are struggling because no one goes to the stores anymore. The malls are struggling because people one goes to the stores anymore. The malls are struggling because people don't go there. So what COVID did to the retail industry, I think new eye is something that I'm still trying

to get my head around in terms of what it's gonna do to organizations and how organizations will cope with that change. and how organizations will cope with that change. I'm not talking about macro trends like AI or climate change, but more specifically, such as feedback from others and your own takeaways from using the model in practice. So after you published your book and started applying your own model, I'm curious,

have your clients or the people you work with given you any feedback on it? That's one part. The other part is about your own reflection. When you actually applied the model in real cases, did anything shift for you? Maybe you gained new insights, or maybe it confirmed what you originally believed.

I haven't got a lot of, I haven't really got a lot of feedback from folks about the book. It wouldn't have me change much of it. Basically, before I wrote the book, I sat down and talked to a number of people who were consultants and academics, people who had written their own books and developed their own models and spent a lot of time trying to work through the process, you know, with them. It's like I even talked to the author of The Black Swan.

So for that part, I was very comfortable with kind of the model, the way it is. In terms of working with it, I really haven't found anything that I would really change at this point. I think the model is, was designed so it is one comprehensive, but you can use it in pieces, parts, stages. You don't have to take all 39 steps parts, stages, you don't have to take all 39 steps to go through what you need in terms of change management. Your particular issue or situation may only deal with a more narrow focus in terms of say human resource issue, might be a production issue. So it allows you to take that, those kind of bites and apply those to your situation. I don't really expect that everybody is going to start with step one at 39 and take everything

I have there as gospel and try to, synthesized and implemented. Like I made about a year and a half into the book's publication. I haven't really come up with any major changes. I'm really thinking about what's going to happen next. And I just briefly touched on the Trump-Muzz situation. That'll be very interesting. That'll be a grand exercise in change management. But there's a lot of external factors, like COVID was in the past, like I said,

EI in the future. Those are the things I'm looking towards in terms of how to deal with those issues. So COVID as a disease might be behind us, but how we handle health crisis that's not in the past, we never know what might happen in the future. And the way we prepared or respond still really matters. Yeah, I totally agree. COVID was a wake-up call. We could face something much, much worse.

I remember the early days of COVID before they had that vaccine. And it was truly scary. had back a vaccine and it was truly scary how individual governments reacted to it differently. For my part, I thought it was frightening and it certainly will probably happen again, especially given that the world is, transportation wise, is so global now that you look at what happened originally with HIV, with AIDS, was fairly limited because the transportation was not what it is under COVID. And if it happens, something's going to happen again and hopefully we learned our lesson. You've studied so many change models and you are an expert in this space. But outside of your professional work, how have you applied those ideas in your own life? Or maybe help someone close to you, such as a friend, a family member, a colleague, navigate change using what you know from organizational models?

I think that would be a great way to conclude this interview to show that you don't just study change, you live it. Like I said at the very beginning, in terms of my own philosophy, here's a carpe diem, was always to go with change, and not have a plan fixed in my mind. And when a change occurred that I considered to be an opportunity, then I went with that. And I didn't really follow some kind of long-term plan that I wanted, this is what I want to be when I grow up.

So I think that's part of it. I think the other thing is, it's very important is to learn from your mistakes. I think that John F. Kennedy basically said that after the Bay of Pigs was the important thing is to learn from your mistakes and to take that to heart. We all make mistakes and especially when it comes to working experiences, whether it's something that that happens to you or somebody else is to really learn from that and not not have the attitude that we've always done it this way because things, I think you've

become a better person when you really look at your own life, your own experiences and make changes for the good. And I've done that. I think part of it is that I moved from working in a business or public sector and a working environment as a manager and deciding to go into consulting after 30 years and to go back to college and do doctorate work. I know when I went to work, the organization I was in, I went to them and said, look, I'm

really interested in this. I'm going to go back to college and get my doctorate studies in this. And basically he said, no, you're not going to do that. So I said, okay, I quit. And I went into consulting with this company and learned from them through performance on it's a form of organizational change management. So that's true. But that's my personal evolution in terms of making changes, embracing changes.

Honestly, I've met a lot of people, for instance, in the education technology space, where I was very active before COVID. I've spoken to many entrepreneurs who created new ventures and solutions, especially those focused on helping companies train and upskill their staff. So I asked them, okay, you are building these tools, you are the champion of learning and development. But what about your own team? How do you invest in your own people? Most of the time, they either didn't expect the question or they said something like this. the question or they said something like this. Oh, good point.

We haven't really done much internally yet. We've been focused on the product and on serving clients. That's where I start to see the gap. You talk the talk, selling solutions for upskilling, but you are not walking the walk inside your own organization. That kind of discrepancy always tells me something important about the founder or the culture. I think one thing that's really important in a manager, in a change management process process is to have empathy.

A lot of managers don't have empathy. They're very clinical about the business approach. Since organizations consist of people, I've always found it really is important to listen to what people are telling you on a day-to-day basis as a consultant, as a manager, or even as a colleague is to actually listen to what people are saying. A lot of times people don't listen. They talk over you.

They talk at you, but they're not listening and they're not processing what you're saying. So I think that's a really important attribute in any manager or in any process is to have empathy for the people involved in. Empathy isn't just for managers. It is a basic human skill. But honestly, we are wired to be self-centered. So even if a leader has a good degree of empathy, showing it in decisions is tough. Why? Because incentives drive behavior.

I studied accounting and economics. I believe that. Right now, leaders and CEOs are paid based on numbers, such as revenue, growth rate, stock price. Not how people feel. If empathy, culture, or staff wellbeing were tied to the bonus, you would see a big shift.

But until then, there's a gap between what we say matters and what actually drives action. I agree that people don't get paid by some measurement of their empathy, but if you're really wanting to be successful as a manager, you need to listen to other people's opinions besides your own. And a lot of people, let's just say some managers basically come from a position of I'm the manager, I'm the boss.

I know everything and you're going. But if you want to surround yourself with a bunch of yes, men and women, that's fine, but you're not going to learn anything. You're going to believe that you know everything. And so I love a little empathy is really the ability to listen because you might learn something that will save your job. My most difficult times have been dealing with engineers or economists in terms of how they think.

They're not exactly outside of the box people for the most part. And I had a job once where I had put together a report and I hired five economists. They almost drove me crazy because there was no empathy at all. Certain jobs come with certain skill sets, let's put it that way. Empathy is a must. Make a habit of actually listening to what people tell you. Advice I heard God was from my wife who at one point said, look, I don't want your advice, I want you to listen to me. And that's the end for our two-part series.

If you thought change was about tools and templates, Richard just flipped that. It's about trust, timing, and knowing when to stop talking. If you are in the business of moving people, not just systems, his advice is worth returning to. If you like what you heard, don't forget to 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.