Organizations continue to invest millions in change initiatives with failure rates estimated at 70%. The main reason for this dismal record is that most popular change management frameworks make the same mistake: turning emergence into prescription and optimizing plans for getting management approval rather than for maximizing learning.

In this session you will:

1. Learn about the foundational misunderstanding that has distorted modern change management, including Kotter’s 8 steps and the ADKAR framework: a failure to understand the “action research” approach of Kurt Lewin (the “grandfather of change management”).
2. See concrete examples contrasting top-down implementation vs. emergent, learning-based approaches to change management
3. Find out how to redirect your change management activities toward learning instead of control
4. Identify what you can stop doing and how to redirect that energy toward a change management process that actually works

About the Speaker

Cristin Hernandez is an operations leader specializing in human-centric organizational change. She has over 15 years of experience in tech, including work in customer support, implementation, product management, and operations. That broad experience, together with her study of agile and change management frameworks, have given her a clear-eyed view of why ambitious transformations so often fail. Cristin is currently at Penn State, researching the gap between what the science of change management says and what the industry buys and sells.