People-Centric Change: The End of Linear Thinking | Professor Julie Hodges

That famous statistic, that 70% of organisational transformations fail, turns out to have no evidence behind it whatsoever. So says Professor Julie Hodges, and she should know. As Professor of Organisational Change at Durham University Business School, and with 20 years of commercial experience at PwC and Royal Bank of Scotland, Julie is one of the world's leading authorities on how organisations change, and why it so often goes wrong.

In this episode, Mark Blackwell and Julie explore why the tidy, linear models of change that most organisations still rely on are no longer fit for purpose, and what a more honest, people-centred approach actually looks like in practice.

In this episode:

• Why the "70% failure" statistic is a myth, and what we should be asking instead
• The difference between incremental and transformational change, and why it matters
• Why change is messy, emotional and rarely linear, and why that is actually normal
• The critical role of sense-making and why people resist change for good reasons
• Co-creation versus design by committee: how to involve people without losing momentum
• The evolving role of HR in leading organisational change
• How AI is raising the stakes for change management, and what leaders should do about it
• The skills managers need most: empathy, courage, agility and digital fluency

Julie's books mentioned in this episode:

• People-Centric Change
• Managing and Leading People Through Change (3rd edition)

Both are grounded in empirical research and written with practical application firmly in mind.

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