How Leaders Overcome Resistance To Disruptive Technology | Matt Quinn

How Leaders Overcome Resistance To Disruptive Technology | Matt Quinn

July 22, 2026 · 45 min

About this episode

Matt Quinn discusses how leaders can effectively manage resistance to disruptive technology using the ADKAR framework.

Change management often fails for one simple reason: nobody diagnosed why people are actually resisting before throwing more training and communication at the problem. Matt Quinn, SVP of Sales and Go to Market at IFS Industrial Intelligence, joins the show to unpack how leaders diffuse resistance to disruptive technology, using the ADKAR framework (awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement) as a lens for figuring out where a change effort is actually stalling. The conversation covers why leadership style has to shift depending on how competent someone is at a specific task, not their general reputation, and why pairing a vision led leader with a detail oriented "bad cop" tends to make change stick where either style alone would not. The episode also digs into a part of the AI conversation that gets less airtime: the 70 percent of the global workforce who do not sit at a desk. Quinn talks about what it takes to bring AI into industrial settings like production lines and field service, where the disruption looks very different from the desk based AI tools most tech media covers. He and Ben also talk about reward structures, the risk of mandating change without addressing…

People in this episode

Host: Ben Pearce

Guest: Matt Quinn

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Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: IFS Industrial Intelligence, Oracle, Micros

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