303: Don’t Change People with Patrick Seaton

https://youtu.be/70wPvPbdvwg Patrick Seaton, President and Owner of Innovative Management Tools and creator of the Change OS™ Framework, helps leaders and organizations proactively navigate change with clarity and structure. Drawing on decades as a corporate manager facing growth, chaos, and constant change, Patrick built tools to give leaders a roadmap for facilitating change instead of simply reacting to it. We explore Patrick’s journey from survival-mode middle manager to building 28 frameworks for change facilitation, culminating in Change OS™. Patrick explains why traditional “change management” became a messy junk drawer of tactics, and how the Change OS™ Framework reframes it into seven clear steps. In this conversation he walks us through four of them—Change Management, Change Preparation, Change Enablement, and Change Readiness—showing how proactive preparation of people, skills, and motivation creates far better outcomes than simply “dealing with it.” Patrick also shares why people don’t actually resist change—they resist being changed—how to create internal champions who spread buy-in, and why slowing down up front helps organizations go faster later. --- Don't Change People with Patrick Seaton Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Patrick Seaton, the president and owner of Innovative Management Tools and the creator of Change OS. Patrick, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Steve. It's great to be here. Well, I'm into different OS's, Summit OS, Strategy OS, all that stuff. And when I saw that you created Change OS, I was super excited and interested. as to what this is. So, we're going to get into it, but let me first ask you, what is your personal “Why” and how are you manifesting it in your business? My personal “Why” really starts back many years ago, even decades, when I was in corporate as a middle manager. And we had lots of growth, lots of change, lots of chaos, and nobody was really helping us. And so, I started my company to create tools to help facilitate change. And it became really my “Why,” because too many people within a company are struggling with how do we drive the change, navigate the changes. And that became my passion to say, you know what, I want to help people, give them a roadmap, if you will, and tools that they need so that they can do what they do best,Share on X which is their job, and not worry about how am I going to get the change. So it started off as survival, turned into 28 frameworks, and then turned into the Change OS. So it's had a lot of history. Yeah, that's fascinating. Let me ask you a stupid question. Why is change management even a thing? Why is it important? Well, change management itself is the term that came out 70 years ago. And unfortunately, over those 70 years, everything and anything that has to do with change, we've kind of thrown into the same bucket as change management. And that was the impetus for creating the Change OS because that drawer, that junk drawer called change management, has gotten way too messy and unorganized. So change management is a piece of the Change OS, but thinking about it from a level up, it's important for us to go into changes with some sort of roadmap, blueprint, steps, because there are many people involved.Share on X Everyone has different responsibilities, and we have to keep it organized so that we can keep it moving.  Change management in the traditional sense has just a few who really understand it. And the rest of us are just kind of, well, I guess they'll tell us what to do. So, change management is important. My question is really, why is change such a big deal for companies? I mean, life is all about change. I mean, as an entrepreneur, as a coach, I mean, all I see is everything is changing all the time. The change is happening faster and faster. So even handling it as a separate category is kind of anachronistic...