303: Don’t Change People with Patrick Seaton
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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 in my mind. Is this the opposite state of affairs that like stability is the normal thing and then change is kind of the unusual thing when you have to change something, otherwise you can keep everything as it was? Maybe I’m missing something.
No, you’re right. Change is happening faster and faster. And there are statistics showing that just in the last five years, from a company change, departmental change, things are happening faster and faster. The change is always there. But what we’ve done more so in the past is that we react to the change as opposed to proactively navigating the change. So we’re just trying to deal with it. Something comes up, triggers the change. Yes, there are those strategic changes that we need to make, but a lot of the changes that companies go through is not because of their doing, it’s an outside factor. So we are reacting to it, but even in the reaction, we don’t really have that how are we now proactively going to handle the change? Instead, we just, well, we’re going to deal with it. Well,
dealing with it is not really the best way, especially when you think about the different altitudes within a company.
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So is this a big thing, big company thing?
No. Oh, no.
Or even for small companies too?
No, even solopreneurs. I mean, we deal with change all the time. because we have to continually adjust and pivot and move as a company is small and growing, and you’re getting new staff in, new products, new markets, all of that is change.
Okay. So let’s talk about change. Let’s talk about Change OS. So this podcast is Management Blueprint and it’s all about business frameworks. Now the Change OS, as I understand, it’s got seven parts to it. So that’s maybe too much for us to absorb on this podcast. But can you tell me the first three or four steps of Change OS and what it does and how it came about and how to use it?
Sure. So as I said, I, after 30 years in change and saying, it’s just not really organized because it’s too big. There’s too much in the bucket. So I stepped back and I said, let’s think, let me think about the life cycle of change. and what it goes through and separate the milestones, if you will, into how a company can navigate that change. There is a flow to the seven formulas, but the first one is actually what I call Change Management. So I retained the title, but I defined or redefined what really is Change Management. And Change Management is asking ourselves, what do we want to do? Why do we want to do it? And who will be the person responsible for championing this? That’s it. That’s the management side. We have to understand that piece.
So what, why, and who?
What, why, and who? Whereas before it was everything. Now it’s just what, why, and who. After that, the next formula is Change Preparation. So we’ve got this good idea. We need to do this. We want to do this. We’re thinking about doing this. The next stop on the train is, okay, how prepared are we today if we decide to move forward? Let’s take an inventory. Let’s think about it. What are we missing? Let’s not just go running down the road, not considering what we’re going to need to have and then later stop and have to backtrack and regroup. So let’s spend a little bit of time thinking about. Are we really prepared for this? And if we’re prepared enough, let’s go. If we’re not, maybe we should spend a little bit of time filling some gaps so that we are more prepared before we launch into it and think about the different pieces. So we know what, why, and who. We’re prepared. We want to move forward.
So can you give an example? What does the preparation look like?
Well, so preparation is, let’s think about the vision and direction, is that really nailed down? What will be the processes and procedures that people will need to, across the company, who’s ever involved in this change, what will they need to have as the p
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