#KatieTalks with Howard Krais: Why Change Fails — And What Leaders Still Get Wrong

About this episode

Katie Bennett-Stenton discusses with Howard Krais the reasons behind the failure of organizational change efforts and the misconceptions leaders have about the human aspect of change.

Most organisations don’t fail at change because the strategy is wrong. They fail because they underestimate the human reality of it. In this first episode of a two-part conversation, Katie Bennett-Stenton speaks with Howard Krais — a globally experienced leader in organisational change and communication — about why so many transformation efforts fall short, and what leaders continue to misunderstand. Katie first met Howard at the IABC World Conference in Vancouver, where his perspective on change as a human experience to lead, not a process to manage stood out immediately. This episode focuses on the diagnosis — where organisations go wrong, and why. They explore: Why people don’t resist change — they resist how change is done to them. The disconnect between leadership logic and employee emotion — and why messages are felt before they’re understood. What happens when change is communicated as a fait accompli. Why up to 70% of change efforts fail — and the commercial cost of getting it wrong. The uncomfortable truth about internal communications today: high activity, low strategic impact. Howard also introduces a critical shift: using AI to remove transactional work, freeing…

People in this episode

Host: Katie Bennett-Stenton

Guest: Howard Krais

Topics covered

• organizational change
• leadership
• communication
• employee engagement
• transformation efforts
• internal communications
• AI in communication

Keywords

• change management
• human experience
• leadership logic
• employee emotion
• internal communications
• AI
• transformation
• communication strategy
• change resistance
• organizational failure

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: IABC, NatWest, EY, GSK

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