CEO & Principal of Tr33 LLC | Author | Non-Fiction Writer | Change Manager | Strategic Planner | Cross-functional Team Leader | Team Builder | Mentor
The cut he made was not about cost. It was about who actually knew how to lead people through change.
“Most leadership teams attempt to solve EQ problems with IQ tools,” says Darryl Anderson. Spreadsheets, org charts, technology platforms, deployed against problems that live in how people experience change and not in how well the numbers apply to a leadership scorecard.. Anderson built his consulting practice, Tr33 LLC, on the opposite premise, that a leadership team’s blind spot for its own people is the actual point of failure. When USAA needed to fix a change management function stretched across 137 practitioners, that premise is what determined who stayed.
Darryl Anderson is CEO of Tr33 Inc. and Principal of Tr33 LLC, an Arizona based consultancy specializing in People-Side Risk Management and Organizational Change Management. Tr33 LLC is a Certified Change Management Professional firm.
The Difference Between Headcount and Capability
For most of his career, first at BNP’s Bank of the West, then Southern California Edison, and tenures at USAA and MUFG UB NA, Anderson has argued that the difference between business initiatives that survive and those that quietly fail rarely show up in the plan a company writes. They show up in what its leadership cannot see, a pattern he calls Hierarchical Myopia and Peripheral Blindness, the tendency of leaders to act only on what they were trained to notice while the risks sitting outside of their focal view go unaddressed until Human Factors surface as a crisis.
He traces that conviction to a specific moment. As he moved from middle to senior leadership in the late 1990s and into the years just after Y2K, Anderson concluded that leading and managing are not the same discipline, and that any company serious about surviving continuous change long term needs a Target Operating Model, a standing framework for how the organization runs, rather than relying on an annual plan or a rolling three year strategy to carry it through disruption. A plan describes what a company intends to do. A Target Operating Model is what a company both practices and falls back on when business initiative planning runs into a reality they did not anticipate.
He watched that pattern play out at a former employer that had, in his account, cultivated a culture of distrust toward leadership after a string of decisions made over multiple annual cycles without input from the people who understood the technology already in place and/or the beneficiaries of the changes that were to take place. The company’s leadership team approved a complex, multi-year enterprise-wide transformation initiative for a platform meant to correct years of deferred regulatory compliance work, communicated the decision broadly, and began the rollout. Less than ten months into a planned thirty month initiative, the business unit the platform was meant to support was sold to another company, and employees were displaced in the acquisition that followed. The open question, as Anderson frames it, is what would have changed if the people closest to the existing technology had been part of the decision before it was made, rather than informed of it after. What additional analysis and insights would the leadership team become privy to that would have improved their decision and the experience/s their employees realized?
The Correction at USAA
USAA gave him a chance to run the correction the other way. Brought in as Director of Strategic Change Management, Anderson inherited a change function consisting of 137 practitioners supporting business initiatives across seven operating companies, sized for regulatory pressure and general business enhancements rather than for what the discipline actually required. Rather than treat the headcount itself as the asset, he treated it as a question, how many of those 137 people were doing work that matched the global standards of the change management discipline, and how many were performing adjacent work under a change title. The answer brought the number down to roughly 54.
“The focus was not on the number of Change Practitioners so much as it was on ensuring those that practiced Change Management were knowledgeable and qualified to practice and add value to what the company was mandated to accomplish,” Anderson says. The reduction was one factor among several, alongside the elimination of redundant business processes and/or inter-company sub-processes. But it was the retooled function itself, aligned to a single set of standards and the creation of a Change Management Office that led the company to reduce operating bloat without losing its ability to deliver on regulatory corrective actions and key business projects across seven operating companies that minimized change saturation at the top of house and change fatigues at the operational layer.
The two situations share a structure. In one, a decision got made without the people who could see the risk coming. In the other, the decision got remade around the people who actually could see it. Anderson’s argument is that the second version does not happen by accident. It happens because leaders assessed organizational capability and the ability to successfully navigate multiple planned business initiatives before approving changes to headcount, rather than after.
What Executives Can Steal From the Human Factors Assessment
Anderson runs a three part assessment with every new client before agreeing to any statement of work, and it is short enough for an internal team to run before its own next initiative reaches a leadership vote. First, evaluate the Target Operating Model, the company’s actual method it routinely practices for aligning communication and transparency as it decides to implement its next business initiative, rather than a plan that simply assumes people will absorb whatever comes next. Second, separate capability from capacity, whether leadership and the organization beneath it have both the skill and the bandwidth to take on this initiative alongside everything else already in flight, without slowing client delivery or burning out the people doing the work. Third, test whether leadership has actually earned the trust it will need to lead through the change, not whether it assumes it has. Underneath all three checks sits a simpler discipline: tie every initiative’s Objectives and Key Results, its Key Risk Indicators, its Key Performance Indicators, and its Key Behavioral Indicators to a single question before the work starts, how this will land on the people who have to carry it out, not just what it will return once it is done.
Three Checks Before the Vote
That third check has a specific failure mode Anderson has watched repeat itself across companies, most often in fourth quarter town halls, when a leader delivers hard news about performance and bonuses in the same breath. He has watched leaders “make a horrible announcement and then ask the question, does anyone have any questions, and accept the silence across the room as alignment or acceptance of their message.” It rarely is either.
Before the next initiative goes to a vote, a leadership team can run the same three checks in order. Pull the current Target Operating Model, or the absence of one, and put it in front of the room as a document rather than an assumption. Map every in-flight initiative against the team that would also own the new one, and force a real answer on capacity instead of a hopeful one. Third, before signing off on the initiative’s metrics, add the employee facing outcome to the same scorecard as the financial one, so the team approving the work has to answer how it will affect the people executing it, not only what it will return. Then test trust directly, ask the people who sat in the room for the last hard announcement whether the silence was agreement or self-protection, and act on what they say rather than the read the leader had at the time.
None of this replaces the work of building a Target Operating Model itself. It only tells a leadership team, honestly, whether it is ready to start and once the initiative begins how successful they will be in sustaining adoption. “By re-focusing them on employee Return on Experience and how it drives the company’s Return on Investment leaders gain the analysis and insights needed to make great decisions that translate to great executable outcomes,” Anderson says.
Who Is Darryl T. Anderson?
Darryl T. Anderson is CEO of Tr33 Inc. and Principal of Tr33 LLC, a People-Side Risk Management and Organizational Change Management consultancy headquartered in Peoria, Arizona, and a Certified Change Management Professional with two decades in organizational change and operational performance. Anderson’s career focus on organizational performance began in 2005 as Senior Vice President of Enterprise Operational Performance at BNP’s Bank of the West in San Francisco, then moved to Southern California Edison as Senior Manager of Operational Excellence, before joining USAA in San Antonio as Director of Strategic Change Management, where he led the realignment of the company’s change practitioner function. He founded Tr33 LLC in 2011 and incorporated in 2014 and has run it as an independent consultancy since, advising leadership teams on what he calls People-Side Risk Management, the exposure a company carries when it approves business initiatives without accounting for how its own employees will absorb the change/s both across the initiatives’ journeys and throughout adoption. Tr33 LLC works with financial institutions, healthcare organizations and energy and utility companies navigating regulatory compliance driven change, the same terrain Anderson worked from across his (30) year career.
During his corporate career, Anderson spent twelve years as a bi-vocational associate pastor and prior to entering the business sector he spent eight years in active and reserve military service, experience he credits with shaping how he reads a room under pressure, though neither defines the work he does now. In July 2026, Jones Media Publishing released his book, The Culture Architect, which sets out his framework for leaders who intend to design their organization’s culture deliberately rather than let it form by accident. He has also designed a companion community under the same name, meant to train and connect change practitioners around the standards he applies at Tr33 LLC to become Culture Architects, still in its early stage.
Anderson’s argument has stayed consistent across three decades of enterprise seats and a decade and a half of independent consulting: a leadership team that cannot see its own blind spots will keep mistaking the symptoms of a failed initiative for its cause. The fix, in his telling, starts before the initiative is approved, not after it fails.
Darryl T. Anderson is CEO of Tr33 Inc. and Principal of Tr33 LLC, a People-Side Risk Management and Organizational Change Management consultancy headquartered in Peoria, Arizona. To connect with Darryl or learn more, visit his LinkedIn Profile.
