North Highland's Technology Consulting Portfolio team recently attended ACMP Change Orlando and the theme was hard to ignore: change is moving faster than most organizations are built to handle. Here are a few moments from the summit that stood out to our team.
Researchers from the University of Connecticut's Leadership Research Institute and the Change Curiosity Lab analyzed multiple in-depth interviews with senior leaders and executive coaches. The goal was to understand what separates the organizations where AI adoption is working from those where it is stalling.
Visible leadership modeling was the single highest-leverage factor, cited by 83% of participants. Fear of replacement was the dominant barrier, also cited by 83%. The credibility risk of what researchers called 'careless AI,' unedited and unreviewed output shared as original thinking, was identified by 58% of participants as the top threat to leadership trust.
The research pointed to three clear actions for change practitioners:
Coach leaders to model AI use openly, including what didn’t work. Vulnerability builds more trust than polish.
Anchor AI to capability-building and team values rather than cost savings. Cost-cutting framing feeds the fear of replacement.
Create space to experiment before building a formal strategy. Permission to try, fail, and share is what moves adoption.
Most resistance to change isn't about the change itself. It's about the disruption of relationships, routines, and sense of belonging that people rely on. Research grounded in Attachment Theory and Bandura's Social Learning Theory made that case through the Culture CURV framework (Commitment, Unity, Relationships, and Visibility).
The organizations achieving the strongest cultural outcomes don't just communicate change from the top down. They protect peer relationships and connections that make behavior shift. Programs that rely solely on leadership messaging, disconnected from how people work and relate to each other, tend to fall short.
The CURV framework gives four places to focus:
Check whether your commitment signals are consistent over time, not just at launch.
Look for gaps in how messages land across teams. What leaders say and what employees hear are often two different things.
Protect the relationships and routines that ground people during change, not just the process.
Recognize that leaders experience the culture differently than everyone else does, and that gap is where most change programs quietly lose momentum.
A team from NASA shared a candid account of what it takes to move change management from a project-level service to a sustained organizational capability. Their framework centered on three things: helping people see where the organization is going, building the tools and skills to get there, and shifting the mindset so change becomes something employees lead rather than survive. The goal is not to create more managers but to build an organization in which every employee thinks like one.
The session surfaced three beliefs that quietly undermine change before it begins, limiting the organization's capacity to move through it:
Communication alone is enough
Resistance is inevitable rather than addressable
Change management is someone else's responsibility
Further, sustainable change does not end when a project closes. It requires ongoing capability-building, leadership reinforcement, and an environment where navigating uncertainty is treated as a shared skill, not a specialized function.
Diana Kander, author of Get Curious and Grow, and former White House Entrepreneur-in-Residence, closed the conference with a keynote that reframed innovation as a discipline rather than a talent. Change is inevitable, innovation is optional. The Success Plateau, as Kander describes it, is what happens when past accomplishments quietly become the ceiling for future growth.
Here are three concepts from the keynote worth carrying forward:
Audit your zombie work: identify the projects that cost more effort than they return.
Reimagine, don't just iterate. Ask what you would build if you started from scratch. Never be SALY (Same as Last Year).
Build your pit crew. You cannot see outside your own expertise. Find the people who can and ask them.
The pattern across every session at ACMP Change Orlando was consistent with what practitioners are seeing in the field: the organizations navigating change well do not rely on technology alone. They are treating people, culture, and capability as the work, not the afterthought. At North Highland, our Technology Consulting Portfolio team works alongside leaders to build both the technical foundation and the human strategy to make change stick. If you want to talk through what this means for your organization, reach out.