"The danger in relationships is counting. Once you start keeping score, three things happen."

In Episode 8, Rick A. Morris shares a lesson from his personal development journey—the Three R's taught by coach Paul Martinelli—and connects it directly to why your change initiatives are failing.

The Three R's:

🔴 Resistance - Passive non-compliance. "I'll wait until this blows over."

🔴 Revenge - Active demonstration that the change doesn't work. Double-tracking. Slack complaints. Visible friction.

🔴 Resentment - Emotional withdrawal. "Leadership doesn't care. Nobody reads these reports anyway." Once here, the relationship is over.

The Core Truth: "People don't resist change. They resist being changed."

69% of the population is High S (DISC). They love routine. They will change—but not because you announced it, ran a 90-minute training, and disappeared.

Why Change Initiatives Really Fail:

• Change is done TO people, not WITH them
• Focus on the WHAT (tool, process) while ignoring the WHO
• No clarity on why the change matters
• No voice or input in how the change happens
• Broken trust from past failed initiatives
• Leaders disappear after the kickoff
• Training, change management, and PM are cut from budgets

The AI Change Warning: AI rollouts are more personal than any previous technology adoption. People feel automated out of relevance. Without managing the people side, even great AI tools will fail.

Rick's Clarity Tool Story: After years of project rescue work, Rick found that resentment toward a failed tool was nearly impossible to overcome—even when rebuilding from scratch. He had to transition his business from rescue to implementation because the resentment gap was too wide to cross.

Three AI-Powered Prompts Demonstrated Live:

🔹 Change Readiness Diagnostic - Diagnose where your team sits on the change spectrum and get a 30-day action plan. Claude's standout insight: "This is not a training problem or a tool problem. It is a trust problem with a workflow mismatch layered on top."

🔹 Resistance Root Cause Analyzer - Identify whether you're seeing passive, active, avoidance, or sabotage resistance—and surface the underlying fears driving it (incompetence, job security, workload, broken trust)

🔹 Co-Creation and Ownership Strategy - Design a strategy where people shape HOW the change happens, not just accept WHAT was decided. Claude's key reframe: "When they build it, it stops being yours."

The Metric Rick Loved: Number of times leadership references the new tool's data in informal settings. Not a usage metric—a trust metric.

Your Non-Negotiable Experiment: Run the Change Readiness Diagnostic on a current or recent change initiative. Take one action: invite co-creation or directly address a root cause of resistance. Notice: Does giving people a voice shift sentiment—even when the change itself is non-negotiable?

Episode Timestamps:

• [01] Paul Martinelli and the Three R's (personal development origin)
• [03] The Three R's in change management (resistance, revenge, resentment)
• [04] People don't resist change—they resist being changed (the 69% insight)
• [06] Why change initiatives fail (and why we always cut the wrong things)
• [08] AI change management is uniquely personal
• [10] The Clarity tool rescue story
• [13] Live Demo: Change Readiness Diagnostic
• [20] Live Demo: Resistance Root Cause Analyzer
• [23] Live Demo: Co-Creation and Ownership Strategy
• [27] Your weekly experiment

Resources: PMThatWorks.com | YouTube - AI Driven PM

Next Episode: Coaching First, PM Second—why facilitation is your most valuable skill in the AI era.

Subscribe if this changed how you think about change management.

Remember: Catch it at resistance. That's where change is still recoverable.