🎙️ Dr. Charlotte Blum - Director Change & Organisational Design, edding Group

Two fears run underneath every AI rollout, and most companies manage neither. Dr. Charlotte Blum works the human emotions of AI transformation - the fear, identity, and trust that decide whether adoption sticks - from a board-level role most organisations don't have. This is a conversation about why people resist AI, and why the technology itself may be the hardest thing in the room to trust.

📌 The episode

Charlotte Blum was hired after an agility transformation failed, into a staff function reporting to the board, to do the thing change management usually skips: work with what people feel. In this conversation she separates two fears companies tend to blur - fear of the technology and fear of change itself - and argues that AI destabilises people at the level of identity, not workflow. She makes a case that AI is structurally untrustworthy for an unexpected reason: it has no self-interest. A system built only to please will give you the answer it thinks you want, not the true one. Asked whether she has seen an organisation genuinely succeed at AI transformation, her answer is short, and it isn't yes. For any leader who suspects the resistance in their team is emotional rather than logistical, this is a conversation about what the roadmap leaves out.

🧠 What you'll sit with

• Why the fear of AI arrives before the technology does, and why it's measurable
• Why an organisation that can't move someone's desk won't move them to AI
• What happens to a person when their role, and their sense of self-worth, is suddenly in question
• Why a tool built to please can't be relied on to tell you the truth
• Why the thing to optimise for is trust, not results, not time

👤 About the guest

Dr. Charlotte Blum is Director Change & Organisational Design at the edding Group, where she leads AI and organisational transformation from a rare board-facing position that treats the emotional side of change as core work rather than an afterthought. Her method is to enable leaders for the conversations no job description trained them for, and she has the internal data suggesting it moves the numbers.

⏱️ Chapters 

[00:00] Trust too much, or not at all - the problem with both
[02:16] Why AI is a human shift, not a technology one
[07:12] The skill capitalism doesn't want you to build
[13:48] Why leaders are handed a job they were never trained for
[30:22] The trust equation, and where AI breaks it
[38:11] Three things an organisation must get right

🔗 Links

Dr. Charlotte Blum on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-charlotte-blum/

edding Group - https://www.edding.com
The trust equation (credibility + reliability + intimacy / self-orientation) - https://people-shift.com/articles/the-trust-equation/
AllBright Academy - https://www.allbright-stiftung.de/academy
Related episode - Why Empathy Can't be Automated with Gifty Enright - https://open.spotify.com/episode/5NYYRgwROaiZLHur5gbksw