Nine times out of 10, when people stop using a system, it's not the head, it's the heart.
1. The Mastering Risk Management Podcast, Episode 123, covers why CRM and ERP rollouts fail on adoption, with Dan Godden of Solve Simple.
2. Host Anthony Wilson, who co-sources chief risk officers with his business partner, talks with Godden, a former primary school teacher and church pastor who moved into tech in 2018 and founded Solve Simple at the start of 2023.
3. Godden's thesis is that every technology project has a parallel "people project" that organizations rarely plan or resource, and that a team of four at Solve Simple exists to handle it.
4. He tells of a B2B client whose technologists built a customer ordering portal while the sales reps, who are the face of the company to customers, had never seen it, and he says technologists "throw technology" at problems because "they're builders."
5. He argues for workflow-first training over platform-first training, contrasting his approach with large consultancies such as Deloitte or Accenture and using a potty-training analogy in which a plumber explaining S-bends would not help a toddler.
6. His "heart, head and hands" model says nine times out of 10 a system is abandoned because no one explained why it matters (heart), not because of a training gap (head), and that follow-up tracking weeks later (hands) is often skipped.
7. Godden describes two engagement models, implementation support and an "embedded partnership" of about five days a month, which Wilson likens to his own co-sourced risk officer model and to a fractional CMO.
8. He says technical staff promoted into leadership, such as Salesforce administrators, often lack soft skills, which led him to run a program called Platform Leader, aimed especially at not-for-profits, and he warns that bitterness between IT and sales creates cracks where staff paste customer files into an LLM without checking policy.
9. Both speakers cite 70-90% (Wilson recalls Dr. Patrick Scolier-Gray saying 95% or more) as the share of cyber breaches involving human behavior, and Godden uses the Qantas breach and an unlocked front door to argue that more tools will not fix it.
10. Suits risk, IT, and change leaders planning software rollouts.
