Your best employees are blocking your transformation, and they don't even realize it.

In this episode, Kevin Novak reveals why the phrase "we've always done it this way" isn't stubbornness but grief, and why your most experienced people often struggle most with change.

Discover why 70% of transformations fail despite perfect technical implementation, the neurological reason changing feels physically wrong (try the arm-folding exercise), and the specific stages your team is experiencing right now whether you acknowledge them or not.

Kevin shares the exact moment a 30-year quality control inspector went from resisting AI to championing it, and introduces the R3 formula that helped Netflix, IBM, and Marvel successfully reinvent themselves.

If your transformation initiative is meeting resistance, this episode explains what's really happening in your employees' brains and what to do about it tomorrow.

Explore more at the Human Factor Podcast and the Human Factor Method Website or Subscribe to the Ideas and Innovations Newsletter on Substack.

Key Takeaways

• Resistance to change is actually grief: your team isn't being difficult, they're mourning their professional identity
• The arm-folding test reveals why decades of expertise creates neural superhighways that physically resist new methods
• Organizations that skip "ending rituals" create "psychological ghosts" where old processes haunt new systems through shadow workflows
• The "neutral zone" where productivity drops is actually where your best innovations will emerge if you don't rush through it
• Cognitive bridging (connecting old expertise to new requirements) is the key to getting buy-in from veteran employees
• The quality control inspector's breakthrough: "AI does pattern recognition too, just faster" reframed identity instead of destroying it
• Legacy celebrations that document past wins help teams let go without feeling their contributions were meaningless
• Depression during change looks like acceptance but it's actually exhaustion: leaders who mistake this lose their best people
• The R3 formula (Recognition, Reflection, Reframing) is how Netflix went from DVDs to streaming without losing their core capability
• Tomorrow's action: identify what you're defending simply because you created it, not because it still serves the mission