Pivoting to Technology Adoption

Your AI rollout will only be as healthy as the culture it lands in. Brett Schklar, CEO of GROW Powered and author of AI Without the BS, has talked with nearly 2,000 CEOs about AI. He explains why so much of the workforce is still afraid of it, why adoption starts with 1% wins instead of home runs, and why IT should not lead the charge.

TOPICS COVERED

(00:00) Welcome and Introduction
(00:24) Meet Brett Schklar, Author of AI Without the BS
(01:42) What Nearly 2,000 CEOs Taught Him About AI
(02:24) Why Most of the Workforce Is Still Afraid
(03:05) Get to First Base: 1% Better Every Week
(04:15) What Ignoring the Fear Costs
(06:43) Think in Tasks: Small, Medium, and Impossible
(09:33) Why Smaller Companies Can Move Faster
(10:51) AI Follows the Culture
(13:26) Does AI Erode Judgment?
(14:52) IQ, EQ, and Generation AI
(17:41) Who Should Own AI Adoption, and Why Not IT
(21:42) Show-and-Tell: The Use Cases That Spread
(23:15) Brett's Own Fear: Moving Too Fast
(26:14) The AI Echo Chamber
(30:17) One Thing to Leave With: 1% Every Week
(31:47) Where to Find Brett

FROM THE EPISODE
"If you have a bad culture and you put AI into it, and that culture has not been fixed, the AI is going to follow the culture." Brett Schklar

ABOUT THE GUEST
Brett Schklar is the CEO of GROW Powered and the founder of AI First Leadership, his speaking practice. He is the author of AI Without the BS: The CEO's Playbook for Actually Getting AI Right. He has talked with nearly 2,000 CEOs about AI, most of them leading mid-market companies, and has been a Vistage speaker since 2010. He previously built, scaled, and sold Market Creation Group, a Denver marketing agency, and co-chairs Denver AI.

ABOUT DONNA P. MITCHELL
Donna P. Mitchell is the founder of The Transformation Authority™ and CEO of Mitchell Universal Network, LLC. Forbes Business Council Member. Senior Executive Healthcare Think Tank Member. 49 years of enterprise transformation across five regulated industries and four transformation types, enabling 150,000+ professionals.

GET THE BOOK
Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap
pivotingtotechnologyadoption.com

CONNECT WITH BRETT SCHKLAR
Website: brettschklar.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bschklar

CONNECT WITH DONNA
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/donnapmitchell
YouTube: @TheTransformationAuthority
Website: pivotingportal.com
Company: mitchelluniversalnetwork.com

NEWSLETTER
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SPEAKING & ADVISORY
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LISTEN ANYWHERE YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS
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All episodes: pivotingtotechnologyadoptionpodcast.com

New episodes every Tuesday.
Forbes Business Council Member

Most AI efforts do not stall on the technology. They speed up a process nobody has looked at closely. Fractional CTO/CIO Tom Altman explains why AI takes a bad process and makes it finish quicker, why the trouble lives in the handoffs, and what leaders should tell their people about AI.

TOPICS COVERED

(00:00) Welcome and Introduction
(00:58) Meet Tom Altman, Fractional CTO/CIO
(01:55) What the C-Suite Misses Before Adding AI
(02:46) A Bad Process, Finished Quicker
(03:32) Why the Trouble Lives in the Handoffs
(04:30) Over-Reliance on AI and the Accounts Payable Match
(05:31) Lock Down ERP and CRM Before Building on Top
(06:23) Inside an AI Symposium: Training People to Think
(07:51) Goals, Context, and AI Drift
(08:57) Training the Whole Workforce on AI
(10:43) Vibe Coding and the Paper-Sketch Prototype
(12:46) The People Side: Fear, Jobs, and Telling the Truth
(15:28) New Jobs and AI on the Org Chart
(17:15) Solopreneurs and AI Agents
(17:56) When to Bring In a Fractional Technology Leader
(19:38) One Thing to Try This Week

ABOUT THE GUEST
Tom Altman is a fractional CIO and CTO at Altus CXO, where he helps companies adopt technology that actually sticks. He runs ClearXO, Altus CXO's one-week operational assessment that maps how a business really works across people, process, systems and data, before anyone buys software or switches on AI. He lives in Iowa, rides motorcycles, and has a weakness for Volkswagens.

ABOUT DONNA P. MITCHELL
Donna P. Mitchell is the founder of The Transformation Authority™ and CEO of Mitchell Universal Network, LLC. Forbes Business Council Member. Senior Executive Healthcare Think Tank Member. 49 years of enterprise transformation across five regulated industries and four transformation types, enabling 150,000+ professionals.

GET THE BOOK
Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap
pivotingtotechnologyadoption.com

CONNECT WITH TOM ALTMAN
Website: altuscxo.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tomaltman

CONNECT WITH DONNA
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/donnapmitchell
YouTube: @TheTransformationAuthority
Website: pivotingportal.com
Company: mitchelluniversalnetwork.com

NEWSLETTER
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SPEAKING & ADVISORY
pivotingportal.com/speaker

New episodes every Tuesday.
Forbes Business Council Member

Seventy percent of technology transformations fail — and it is not the technology. It is the human adoption gap. Rich Bornstein, founder of Bornstein Media and creator of The Clarity Framework, returns to the show to talk about the gap inside that gap: how leaders communicate change to their own workforce, and why most of them start in the wrong place.

TOPICS COVERED

(00:00) Why 70% of Transformations Fail

New episodes every Tuesday.

ABOUT THE GUEST:

CONNECT WITH RICH:

FROM THE EPISODE:

ABOUT DONNA P. MITCHELL:

GET THE BOOK:

NEWSLETTER:

SPEAKING & ADVISORY:

CONNECT WITH DONNA:

LISTEN ANYWHERE YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS:

Forbes Business Council Member

Seventy percent of technology transformations fail — and it is not the technology. It is the human adoption gap. In this solo author read, Donna P. Mitchell reads Chapter 5 of her book Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap — the chapter that closes Part One and makes the case that buy-in is not a nice-to-have. It is the whole game.

TOPICS COVERED

- The four readiness questions most organizations never ask

- Why understanding has to come before every other investment

- Why training is where organizations spend the most and get the least

- The progression from awareness to supervised practice to independent capability

- Why buy-in comes from engagement, not communication

- What changes when people help select the tools they will use

- Why skill gaps are a symptom, not a cause

(00:00) Buy-In Is the Whole Game

(00:57) The Four Readiness Questions

(02:17) Why Training Is Not Readiness

(02:52) Awareness, Practice, Capability

(03:35) Buy-In Comes From Engagement

(04:30) In the Room When the Decision Is Made

(05:04) The Gap Is in the Strategy

New episodes every Tuesday.

ENDNOTES — CHAPTER 5:

[13] EY (Ernst & Young), "AI Governance Survey," 2024. Finding that 70% of organizations lack well-defined governance models for AI implementation.

[14] World Economic Forum, "Future of Jobs Report," 2025. Finding that 63% of employers identify skill gaps as the biggest barrier to business transformation.

SOURCES:

Chapter text: Donna P. Mitchell, Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap, Chapter 5: What People Need. Mitchell Universal Network, LLC, 2026.

FROM THE CHAPTER:

"People don't need better technology. They need to be in the room when the decision is made."

ABOUT DONNA P. MITCHELL:

Founder of The Transformation Authority and CEO of Mitchell Universal Network, LLC. Forbes Business Council Member. Senior Executive Healthcare Think Tank Member. 49 years of enterprise transformation across five regulated industries and four transformation types, enabling 150,000+ professionals.

GET THE BOOK:

Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap

pttapodcast.com/book

NEWSLETTER:

The Transformation Brief

transformationbrief.beehiiv.com/subscribe

SPEAKING & ADVISORY:

pivotingportal.com/speaker

CONNECT WITH DONNA:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/donnapmitchell

YouTube: youtube.com/@TheTransformationAuthority

Website: pivotingportal.com

Forbes Business Council Member

Seventy percent of technology transformations fail — and it is not the technology. It is the human adoption gap. In this solo author read, Donna P. Mitchell reads Chapter 4 of her book Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap, and makes the case that every workaround in your organization is a message you are not reading.

TOPICS COVERED

(00:00) The Shadow System Nobody Authorized
(01:43) Every Organization Has One
(03:16) The Shadow Ledger
(03:39) Where the Dashboard and the Floor Disagree
(04:33) Attendance Is Not Capability
(05:03) The Quiet Kind of Sabotage
(06:33) Watch What People Do
(07:30) What to Ask This Week

New episodes every Tuesday.

ENDNOTES — CHAPTER 4:
[12] Allen Martinez, Episode 103, Pivoting to Technology Adoption podcast, 2026. Shadow Ledger concept: hidden liabilities accumulating in organizations with ungoverned AI deployment. Martinez is founder of Noble Digital and creator of the BXAI-OS framework.

SOURCES:
Chapter text: Donna P. Mitchell, Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap, Chapter 4: What People Do. Mitchell Universal Network, LLC, 2026.
Closing quote verified against the Episode 103 audio at 00:11:14.

FROM THE CHAPTER:
“Shadow systems are not laziness. They are not resistance. They are feedback.”

ABOUT DONNA P. MITCHELL:
Founder of The Transformation Authority and CEO of Mitchell Universal Network, LLC. Forbes Business Council Member. Senior Executive Healthcare Think Tank Member. 49 years of enterprise transformation across five regulated industries and four transformation types, enabling 150,000+ professionals.

GET THE BOOK:
Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap
pttapodcast.com/book

NEWSLETTER:
The Transformation Brief
transformationbrief.beehiiv.com/subscribe

SPEAKING & ADVISORY:
pivotingportal.com/speaker

CONNECT WITH DONNA:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/donnapmitchell
YouTube: youtube.com/@TheTransformationAuthority
Website: pivotingportal.com

Forbes Business Council Member

Steve Hall, Chief AI Officer at ISG, argues the question executives keep asking is the wrong one. Not what AI can do — what privileges you should allow it. He walks through the autonomous enterprise, what his market data shows about who is capturing AI's value, and the one word he says determines whether adoption happens at all.

TOPICS COVERED:

- Why 2025 changed the question from what AI can do to where you should let it act

- The autonomous enterprise — and what earning autonomy actually requires

- Measuring AI trust at the individual level, not the organizational one

- Token maxing and why board conversations moved from productivity to outcomes

- What the ISG Index shows about hyperscalers versus the firms doing the work

- The one-word answer to what improves workforce adoption

- Why the C-suite sets vision but work units decide the outcome

- The EU AI Act, guardrails, and the overregulation risk

(0:00) Welcome and Introduction

(2:23) November 2022 and the Cambrian Era

(4:46) Panic, FOMO, and Why You Are Not Behind

(5:56) The Autonomous Enterprise: What Privileges Should You Allow?

(7:40) Measuring AI Trust at the Individual Level

(9:07) What the Boardroom Mindset Has to Become

(10:48) Token Maxing and the Shift to Outcomes

(11:56) Work Gets Done at the Execution Level

(12:44) Learn, Unlearn, Relearn

(13:18) Inside the ISG Index

(15:45) What the AI Economic and Sentiment Indexes Revealed

(18:34) What Actually Improves Workforce Adoption

(19:34) The One-Word Answer: Trust

(20:23) AI-Centered, Not AI-First

(22:56) Who Owns Adoption in the C-Suite

(25:45) From the Boardroom to the Break Room

(27:58) Governance, the EU AI Act, and Overregulation

(30:44) Jobs Do Not Collapse. Roles Change.

(32:14) Where to Find Steve and the ISG Index

ABOUT THE GUEST:

Steven Hall is Chief AI Officer at ISG (Information Services Group), a globally recognised technology market authority who works with enterprise leaders to turn AI into measurable business value. With more than 20 years advising enterprise technology leaders and nearly a decade leading ISG's EMEA business, he helps organisations move beyond pilots and proofs of concept to adoption that changes how work gets done. Each quarter he is the voice of the ISG Index, the firm's long-running read on the health of the technology sector.

ABOUT DONNA P. MITCHELL:

Founder of The Transformation Authority and CEO of Mitchell Universal Network, LLC. Forbes Business Council Member. Senior Executive Healthcare Think Tank Member. 49 years of enterprise transformation across 5 regulated industries and 4 transformation types, enabling 150,000+ professionals.

GET THE BOOK:

Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap

amazon.com/dp/B0GP3CWH2H

CONNECT WITH STEVEN:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/steven-hall-b427223

ISG: isg-one.com

CONNECT WITH DONNA:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/donnapmitchell

YouTube: @TheTransformationAuthority

Website: pivotingportal.com

NEWSLETTER:

The Transformation Brief

transformationbrief.beehiiv.com/subscribe

SPEAKING & ADVISORY:

pivotingportal.com/speaker

New episodes every Tuesday.

Forbes Business Council Member

70% of technology transformations fail. Not because of the technology, but because of the gap between what leaders deploy and what people actually do with it.

In this compilation, host Donna P. Mitchell puts a year of the show's strongest answers side by side. Five leaders from five industries — consulting, behavioral science, mission-driven transformation, insurance and health, and product innovation — answer the same question in two rounds: what do organizations get wrong about technology adoption, and what does it actually cost them?

They share almost no vocabulary. They arrived at the same place independently.

It was never the technology. It was the gap.

TOPICS COVERED:

- Why adoption gaps are leadership gaps and experience gaps in disguise

- The difference between sending a message and creating meaning

- Why human-centered discovery has to come before the platform decision

- What executives miss when they fund technology before defining the problem

- Why employees make emotional decisions, not rational ones

- The dignity question nobody is asking about AI and workforce replacement

- Three specific failure signals inside a stalled project

- Why the phrase "it's a tech project" predicts failure

TIMESTAMPS:

(0:00) Cold Open

(0:18) Round One — What They Get Wrong

(0:54) Bryant Richardson: Adoption gaps are leadership gaps in disguise

(1:39) Will Leach: Messaging is not the same thing as meaning

(2:55) Dusty Gulleson: Why you never start with the technology

(3:53) Rohit C. Nambiar: Technology is overglorified, change is underspoken

(4:33) Noel Sobelman: Solve the customer problem before you buy the tool

(5:49) Round Two — What It Really Costs

(6:36) Will Leach: Employees make emotional decisions, not rational ones

(8:16) Dusty Gulleson: The dignity question in replacing people with AI

(9:22) Rohit C. Nambiar: The moment it becomes "a tech project"

(10:00) Noel Sobelman: Fall in love with the problem, not the solution

(10:40) Close

IN THE GUESTS' WORDS:

"Adoption gaps are really leadership gaps and experience gaps in disguise." — Bryant Richardson. "Messaging is not the same thing as meaning." — Will Leach. "Adoption only happens when you have people being heard, understood." — Dusty Gulleson. "Technology is over-glorified in transformation, and change is not spoken enough." — Rohit C. Nambiar. "Fall in love with the problem, not the solution." — Noel Sobelman.

ABOUT THE GUESTS:

Bryant Richardson — Founder and President, Real Blue Sky LLC (EP113)

Will Leach — Founder and CEO, Mindstate Group; author, Marketing to Mindstates (EP117)

Dusty Gulleson — CEO, Tectonic (EP118)

Rohit C. Nambiar — Co-Founder and COO, SabaiHealth; former Group CEO, Tune Protect; author, The Simplicity Trap (EP120)

Noel Sobelman — Partner, Accel Management Group; author, Innovation Portfolio Management (EP123)

ABOUT DONNA P. MITCHELL:

Founder of The Transformation Authority™ and CEO of Mitchell Universal Network, LLC. Forbes Business Council Member and Senior Executive Healthcare Think Tank Member. 49 years across five regulated industries — telecommunications, aviation, airline management, healthcare and pharmaceutical, and emerging technologies — enabling 150,000+ professionals. Author of Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap and host of the IAB-certified podcast of the same name, 120+ episodes reaching 64 countries.

WORK WITH DONNA:

Keynotes, workshops, and executive education on the people side of technology adoption.

The Adoption Assessment — a 90-minute strategic diagnostic that locates exactly where adoption stalls between deployment and durable use.

Executive PR — earned media distribution and AI indexing for executives.

Start here: pivotingportal.com

New episodes every Tuesday.

Forbes Business Council Member.

70% of technology transformations fail. Not because of the technology, but because of the gap between what leaders buy and how people actually feel about using it.

In this episode there is no guest. Host Donna P. Mitchell reads Chapter 3 of her book, Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap — on the emotional climate every organization carries into every deployment, and what it costs when no one accounts for it.

A director's cynicism doesn't stay in the director's office. A physician's skepticism becomes the ward's culture. And an organization that has absorbed enough unacknowledged change stops being able to absorb any more — not because the people are weak, but because the process never engaged their humanity.

It was never the technology. It was the gap.

TOPICS COVERED:

- Why the emotional climate of an organization determines adoption

- How a director's attitude flows downward through every layer

- What cascade looks like in a hospital, a practice, and a congregation

- Why you can read a culture in the first thirty seconds

- The psychological cost of asking people to adopt a tool they believe will replace them

- Why FAQ documents and mandatory webinars don't build trust

- Change scar tissue — and why it is not change fatigue

TIMESTAMPS:

(0:00) Cold Open

(0:20) Welcome and Chapter 3 introduction

(0:35) Transformation doesn't fail in the server room

(1:13) Why attitude cascades through every layer

(1:43) Cascade in the hospital, the practice, and the congregation

(2:11) You can read a culture in the first thirty seconds

(2:40) The emotional reality organizations refuse to engage

(3:15) Asking people to master the tool they fear

(3:39) Why FAQs and webinars don't build trust

(4:01) Change scar tissue is not change fatigue

(4:59) What people feel determines whether they adopt

(5:06) Close

IN DONNA'S WORDS:

"Culture isn't decided in the boardroom. It's observed from the break room." On what organizations mistake for fatigue: "That's not change fatigue. That's change scar tissue, the accumulated emotional residue of deployments where no one acknowledged what people were feeling."

ABOUT DONNA P. MITCHELL:

Founder of The Transformation Authority and CEO of Mitchell Universal Network, LLC. Forbes Business Council Member and Senior Executive Healthcare Think Tank Member. 49 years across five regulated industries — telecommunications, aviation, airline management, healthcare and pharmaceutical, and emerging technologies — enabling 150,000+ professionals. Author of Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap and host of the IAB-certified podcast of the same name, 120+ episodes reaching 64 countries.

WORK WITH DONNA — THE ADOPTION ASSESSMENT:

pivotingportal.com/advisory

New episodes every Tuesday.

Forbes Business Council Member.

70% of technology transformations fail. Not because of the technology, but because of the gap between what leaders buy and how people actually use it.

In this episode, host Donna P. Mitchell turns the lens to the builder's side. Instead of a product leader on the people side of adoption, she sits down with Maulik Bhatt, Tech Lead for Amazon Quick at AWS, who builds the core infrastructure behind Amazon's enterprise generative-AI assistant. He speaks the engineering; Donna translates it into what leaders and frontline teams actually live.

Together they unpack why enterprises buy subscriptions before they have a use case, how AI earns trust in healthcare through human-in-the-loop and a 99% confidence bar, and how to tell a system problem from a people problem.

It was never the technology. It was the gap.

TOPICS COVERED:

- Why enterprises buy AI subscriptions before they have a use case

- How NIST, IEEE, and White House standards actually get made

- Why healthcare and finance adopt AI slowly, and should

- The human-in-the-loop model and the 99% accuracy threshold

- How to tell a system problem from a technical problem from a people problem

- Why "just buying subscriptions won't help"

TIMESTAMPS:

(0:00) Cold Open

(0:28) Turning the lens to the builder

(1:19) Inside Amazon Quick and the generative AI platform

(2:39) How NIST, IEEE, and the White House shape AI standards

(5:05) Why enterprises arrive without a use case

(7:36) AI in healthcare: accuracy and the 99% threshold

(12:44) Human-in-the-loop: why healthcare adopts slowly

(14:00) The C-suite mistake: buying subscriptions isn't adoption

(19:06) System problem, technical problem, or people problem?

(25:29) Security and governance built into every release

(28:02) What keeps builders up at night: outages and resilience

(33:06) Embrace the technology: AI as companion, not enemy

(35:10) Close

IN THE GUEST'S WORDS:

"Understand your organization's use case. Just buying subscriptions won't help." On healthcare and trust: "In healthcare it will only give the final decision if it's confident about 99 percent. Otherwise it works with the medical staff."

ABOUT THE GUEST:

Maulik Bhatt is Tech Lead for the Conversation Agentic Service on Amazon Quick at AWS, where he builds the core infrastructure behind Amazon's enterprise generative-AI assistant. With nearly a decade in large-scale cloud systems, he serves on the IEEE-USA AI Policy Committee and the NIST Agentic AI Subcommittee, helping shape national AI governance frameworks.

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/maulik-bhatt

ABOUT DONNA P. MITCHELL:

Founder of The Transformation Authority and CEO of Mitchell Universal Network, LLC. Forbes Business Council Member and Senior Executive Healthcare Think Tank Member. 49 years across five regulated industries — telecommunications, aviation, airline management, healthcare and pharmaceutical, and emerging technologies — enabling 150,000+ professionals. Author of Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap and host of the IAB-certified podcast of the same name, 120+ episodes reaching 64 countries.

WORK WITH DONNA — THE ADOPTION ASSESSMENT:

pivotingportal.com/advisory

New episodes every Tuesday.

Forbes Business Council Member.

Two realities exist inside every transformation. One lives in the boardroom — strategic, funded, on track, with a dashboard full of green check marks. The other lives on the ground floor, where the people who use the technology every day already know it isn't working the way the dashboard says.

In this solo episode, Donna P. Mitchell reads and teaches from Chapter Two of her book, Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap — "What People Know." She unpacks why frontline intelligence flows upward slowly and filtered, why "resistance" is almost always something else, and why psychological safety — not more mandatory training — is what lets the truth surface.

Drawing on a career that began at the Bell System in 1977, Donna makes the case that the adoption gap is now higher-stakes than ever: in the AI era, ignoring what people know no longer just wastes money — it ships defective products and puts patient safety at risk.

It was never the technology. It was the gap.

TOPICS COVERED:

- Why every transformation creates two realities — the dashboard and the break room

- Why frontline intelligence arrives slowly and filtered

- Why "resistance" is usually exclusion in disguise

- Psychological safety as the number-one driver of high-performing teams

- Why AI raises the stakes — from wasted money to defective products and patient safety

- The through-line from the 1977 Bell System to the 2026 AI era

GET THE BOOK:

Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap

amazon.com/dp/B0GP3CWH2H

ADVISORY & THE ADOPTION ASSESSMENT:

pivotingportal.com/advisory

CONNECT WITH DONNA:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/donnapmitchell

Website: pivotingportal.com

NEWSLETTER — The Transformation Brief:

transformationbrief.beehiiv.com/subscribe

New episodes every Tuesday.

ABOUT DONNA P. MITCHELL:

Founder of The Transformation Authority™ and CEO of Mitchell Universal Network, LLC. Forbes Business Council Member and Senior Executive Healthcare Think Tank Member. 49 years across five regulated industries — telecommunications, aviation, airline management, healthcare and pharmaceutical, and emerging technologies — enabling 150,000+ professionals. Author of Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap and host of the IAB-certified podcast of the same name, 120+ episodes reaching 64 countries.

TRANSCRIPT:

(0:00) Donna P. Mitchell: Good afternoon and good evening. Welcome to Pivoting to Technology Adoption. This is Donna P. Mitchell. Today I'm going to do an excerpt from my book, Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap — Chapter Two, "What People Know." This is about the gap between the dashboard and the break room, and why it costs millions, careers, and safety if you ignore it.

(0:29) Donna P. Mitchell: You can have two realities in the same building. Every technological transformation creates two realities. The first lives in the boardroom — strategic, well-funded, and on track. The dashboard shows green check marks. The second reality lives on the ground floor. The people who actually use the technology every day know it isn't working the way the dashboard suggests. Those two realities coexist for months or years, because frontline intelligence flows upward slowly, and it arrives filtered.

(1:09) Donna P. Mitchell: The frontline always knows first. I dedicated this book to the frontline, because most of the time nobody asks them and they're ignored — and they're the most important value to any organization or company. In every industry, the people closest to the work knew what was broken before the data confirmed it. Call center agents, sales reps, coordinators, nurses, engineers, even physicians. 99% of organizations start with systems — the platform, the process, the tech stack — and invest in everything except what the people on the ground know. That is why they fail.

(2:32) Donna P. Mitchell: Frontline workers don't resist change. They resist being ignored. I'll say it again. Frontline workers don't resist change. They resist being ignored. Call it resistance, and you blame the worker — the fix is more mandatory training. See it as exclusion, and you fix the process — the fix is better design.

(3:36) Donna P. Mitchell: Why does it stay hidden? Psychological safety. On teams without it, people stay silent — they've learned that speaking up carries risk and changes nothing. On teams with it, the truth flows upward. Trust and psychological safety are the number-one driver of high-performing teams.

(4:59) Donna P. Mitchell: And now the stakes are higher. When a call center agent, a software engineer, or a clinician is ignored in the AI era, the cost is no longer just money — it's defective products, careers, and patient safety.

(5:43) Donna P. Mitchell: The same gap I first saw at the Bell System in 1977 is still here in 2026. It was never the technology. It was the gap.

(6:29) Donna P. Mitchell: Mind the gap — what people know. Thank you for listening.