Hey,

Today is about something I call HR Cancel Culture the slow, quiet way systems neutralise every new CPO or CHRO who walks in with the right thinking. This is based purely on my experience of helping new CPOs, CHROs, and heads of people try to drive real people experience transformation, and watching them hit the wall of the old guard.

Today's focus:

TL;DR: Stop trying to convince the system, Instead you need to infiltrate it with people who think outside it. One person operating with outcome logic beats fifty trying to convince through argument.

A CPO I know had already done the hard part. She'd mapped the function, built the business case, redesigned the operating model, and got the board behind a full people experience transformation. The thinking was right. The skill set was real. The ambition matched the mandate.

Within ten months, the system had cancelled her out completely.

Not because the strategy was wrong. Not because the board lost faith. Because she was one person with the right thinking surrounded by the 90% running the old one, and the function did what it always does: waited, absorbed, and outlasted her. She didn't lose the argument. She never got to have it.

Here's the maths nobody talks about. In any HR function going through people product, experience transformation.. roughly:

The 1% can't change the 90% directly, that's the mistake almost every CPO makes. The 1% changes the 9%, and the 9% changes the 90%.

Most CPOs walk in believing they can skip the middle step and convince the 90% directly. They assume that if the vision is clear enough, the argument strong enough, the deck compelling enough, the organisation will move.

It won't and it doesnt

What they walk into isn't a function waiting to be transformed, It's a system built over years to protect itself, because the people inside it built their careers, budgets, titles, and identities around the current model.

Leaders in their own bubbles, teams measuring their own scores.

The 90% are protecting the thing that gives them relevance, safety, and power, and most of them don't even realise they're doing it. Every silo has its own definition of value and its own reasons why the old way still makes sense. The reporting lines, the KPIs, the job descriptions all reinforce the same logic, so even the people who want to change get pulled back by the structure they sit in. The nodding heads in the meeting is agreement its patience

The instinct is to convince…more meetings, better decks, bigger vision statements, stronger business cases.

But you can't argue a system out of rules it built to survive. You can't outargue a function whose entire identity, budget, and power structure depends on staying exactly as it is.

This is HR cancel culture at its most costly. Using the same language, the same frameworks, the same change playbook that the old guard already knows how to handle. The old thinking knows how to absorb the old approach. What it doesn't know how to handle is something it's never encountered before.

The flood that changes things is never more HR expertise or another change programme, it's thinking the function has no existing language for.

Here's the thing most CPOs get wrong about the 9%. They try to convert the people already in the function. More training, more offsites, more workshops on "thinking differently." It rarely works, because you're asking people to unlearn the very thing that got them hired and promoted.

In practice, you've got three routes to building your 9%.

Bend talent from other functions into the people team, pulling in product thinkers or CX minds from elsewhere in the business. That works, but it's hard because the situational shift is enormous and most people underestimate it.

Build it through capability uplift, which means intensive work with existing leaders to rewire how they think. I've done this with C-suites and trust me anyone who says this is doable in a a 3 day course is selling you snake oil. Based on my experience of doing this many times now, You looking at weeks of structure deep work and coaching depending on how deep the shift needs to go.

Buy it by hiring from outside, bringing in people with the thinking and skill set already baked in. However finding these unicorns are hard, and when you do find them the first thing you do is put them into a traditional HR interview then scratch your head as to why they dont make it in.

They is also Bot, but thats one for another day

What you need is product thinkers who frame every problem around what the person actually needs. Experience strategists who measure whether something changed someone, if it time save, spent or invested not whether it had bums on seats. CX minds and service designers who see the end-to-end system instead of the silo they sit in. Business model and adaptive strategy thinkers who connect people strategy to commercial outcomes.

These people don't speak the old language because their disciplines never taught it. They measure by what actually changes, not what the function produces, and that is what the old guard cannot fight.

Think of it as a language.

The 1% speaks a different language and the function ignores it. But when the 1% brings in outside thinkers who speak that same language, the 9% starts picking it up. In meetings, in deliverables, in the way they frame problems.

When the 9% is fluent, the 90% starts hearing it everywhere. That's when the old language starts to sound like the past.

The old guard has been absorbing internal challenge for years. They smile, agree in the meeting, and quietly strangle it in the corridor. That's why your 9% has to come from outside, from people who have never worked inside a people function.

They don't arrive with a change agenda or political history. They have no existing enemies, no favours to repay, no history the old guard can use against them. They just operate differently, and without realising it, the people around them start to shift.

This is the virus logic.

A virus doesn't argue with the host, doesn't present a business case, and doesn't ask for permission. It replicates until the system is running different code. The old guard can't neutralise it because it didn't emerge from inside the system. It has no history to attack. It spreads because it works, not because it was sold.

The function never got convinced, it just woke up one morning speaking a different language.

It starts with the new CPO sharing the direction and having the hard conversations nobody else will have. Sometimes that means ring-fencing a dedicated people transformation team that operates outside the old rules entirely.

The shift that follows starts with mindset and capability. Once you start measuring in experience, services, and products, business value linked to strategy becomes visible. The old logic can't get you to the new world, and that becomes obvious to everyone, not just the 1%.

You're not trying to convince the 90%, you're building the 9% through bending, building, or buying the right thinking into the function, then letting the 9% carry it into every room you'll never be in.

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