Why 70 Percent of Transformations Still Fail (feat. Jackie Insinger)

Most leadership models still treat change like a project: a start, an end, and a return to normal in between. Jackie Insinger, CEO and Founder of Spark Brilliance, argues that premise is exactly what’s breaking down. There’s no dry land left to land on, which means the old idea of “managing” change through to completion isn’t just outdated; it’s the thing quietly wearing leaders and teams down.

Matt Poepsel sits down with Jackie to unpack her new framework, the Four Drivers of Change: signal, safety, agency, and purpose. Jackie makes the case that a single leadership style can’t hold up once things get this unpredictable; leaders need to read what a team actually needs moment to moment, the same instinct behind PI’s behavioral data. She and Matt dig past the framework’s language into what each driver actually looks like in practice: what a leader says in the first five minutes of a hard conversation, how they respond when someone brings them a mistake, and why purpose, the thing everyone’s told to lead with, only works once trust, safety, and ownership are already in place.

What you’ll learn:

• Change Management Is a Dying Model: With no beginning or end to disruption anymore, leaders need durable capacity to navigate change continuously, not a sequence of steps to manage through it.
• One Leadership Style Doesn’t Survive Pressure: Reading what a team needs in the moment, not defaulting to a fixed style, is what separates leaders who keep their people moving from those who lose them.
• Signal Becomes Culture in 33 Milliseconds: Teams absorb a leader’s emotional state almost instantly. The signal a leader sends, intentional or not, becomes the echo across the whole organization.
• Purpose Is the Last Driver, Not the First: People need signal, safety, and agency in place before purpose can activate anything: skip the order, and even a great “why” falls flat.

Highlights:
(00:00) Meet Jackie Insinger
(03:24) The forces driving change all at once
(06:18) Why change management hasn’t worked in 30 years
(08:08) Introducing the Four Drivers of Change
(15:28) Signal: the echo every leader sends
(19:06) Safety: building a culture where mistakes surface early
(22:02) Agency: the difference between compliance and commitment
(24:50) Purpose: why “start with why” comes last
(29:28) Building self-care into the change model
(33:25) Where to find Jackie’s free leadership diagnostics

Resources:
Follow Jackie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackieinsinger/
Learn more about Spark Brilliance: https://www.sparkbrilliance.com

Follow Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattpoepsel/
Subscribe to The Predictive Index on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ThePredictiveIndex

Created in partnership with Share Your Genius: shareyourgenius.com