Chief Change Officer
#288 Richard H. Carson: The 39-Step Playbook for Change That Doesn’t Collapse — Part Two
Thu, 10 Apr 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.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.15 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>150,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts and guests of this episode?
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 the guy 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. Richard 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 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?
Chapter 2: What is Richard H. Carson’s 39-step model for change?
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 take them through the process and
Chapter 3: How did Richard develop his diagnostic approach to organizational change?
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. It's a lot of statistical analysis, media, press information,
Anything that's written or data-driven, then you go out 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 through that in detail, but that's the diagnostic portion of the model.
Chapter 4: What are the key steps in implementing and maintaining organizational change?
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 I've used that diagnostic model Then you implement the change.
There's process mapping, re-engineering. 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, you maintain the model. And that's, like I said, you can do that through multi-year strategic plans and budgeting primarily.
But you also need a feedback loop that constantly goes back on an annual basis and kind of looks at the benchmarks that you set to see if you are achieving those and why not.
Chapter 5: How has Richard applied his change model in real organizations?
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. Oh, it's a little over a year old. I have used it in one example that I gave you was the Southern California County government, in which I applied all those steps in the process. And it was really interesting in terms of
Chapter 6: What lessons were learned from the micromanagement time tracking example?
You know what, basically the Board of County Commissioners told me in terms of that people weren't, the performance levels weren't where they wanted them to be. And that they thought that staff had a bad attitude and it was number at least. 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 had, 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 than doing it. No, it was, that's how bad it was. And 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 and 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 a 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 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, you got taken to an extreme where there was no, it isn't 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 again.
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?
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Chapter 7: What impact is artificial intelligence expected to have on organizational change?
I think that the one thing that I am most focused on right now is artificial intelligence. That is such a huge game changer. When I was a boy, I used to read Kleinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, who talked about such things, but back then it was science fiction. It is such a sea change that it's almost impossible 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 7 million people died in COVID, it basically made Amazon. And now Amazon has one of the world's largest fleet services in terms of delivery.
It totally changes how people think. Instead of going to the store and buying something, you look at stores like Macy's who are struggling. because no one goes to their 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.
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.
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Chapter 8: What feedback has Richard received about his book and model so far?
I haven't got a lot of feedback from folks about the book that 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 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.
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, might be a 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 to 39 and take everything I have there as gospel and try to synthesize and implement it. Like I'm 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 Well, what's going to happen next? And I just briefly touched on the Trump-Muslim 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, 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 prepare 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 how individual governments reacted to it differently. I think for my part, I thought it was frightening.
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, it 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.
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