You Either Manage Change or It Manages You: Richard H. Carson on how change actually works

The Coordination Tax is a podcast by In Parallel about what actually breaks down when teams stop sharing the same reality. In this episode, host Kristian Luoma sits down with Richard H. Carson, PhD — a 40-year veteran of county governments in Oregon and Clark County, regional planning agencies, nonprofits, and the state of Oregon, who holds a doctorate in change management and is the author of the book at bookofchange.com. His argument is that every organization employs someone to clean up after disasters, almost none employs someone to see change coming, and that this one asymmetry explains why organizations lurch between crises instead of adapting. The conversation runs from a lesson about listening he learned from his own wife, through why the major change models since 1947 rarely work, the board that was itself the problem, and the case for a change manager alongside the risk manager, to working across cultures and what to do when change is managing you.