In this episode of MustardHub Voices: Behind the Build, Curtis Forbes sits down with Randy Fisher, executive coach and career strategist, for a conversation about the thing most change initiatives are missing before they ever get to strategy: an honest conversation with the people who have to live through it.
Randy's path ran from business journalism into a nonprofit career-transition role, where a director once pulled him aside and told him he needed to learn to listen with more than his ears. That sent him into a counseling certificate program, where he picked up the insight that has shaped his entire practice since: most people, most of the time, are afraid of looking bad, of new technology, of a change nobody has explained to them, and fear is what quietly sabotages every initiative that fails.
The conversation covers why a stalled project is almost never a strategy problem in disguise but a human one, why the people with the clearest read on what's actually broken are often the ones least likely to speak up in a meeting, and why Randy builds buy-in the way Malcolm Gladwell describes a tipping point: find the one person already excited, build a small circle around them, and let momentum do the rest. Randy also makes the case for what leaders owe their teams in a moment where nobody, including the leaders themselves, actually knows where AI and constant change are headed: not false certainty, but honesty about the business reality, realistic goals instead of impossible ones, and enough safety that people will actually tell you the truth about what isn't working.
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