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Loran Nordgren
Overcome resistance to change and innovation with Loran Nordgren, behavioral scientist and leadership speaker. Loran works with organizations including Amazon and Google on change management, innovation strategy, and reducing organizational friction. Wall Street Journal bestselling author and Kellogg School professor.
Loran Nordgren is a behavioral scientist who studies why good ideas get rejected and how to clear the hidden psychological barriers that block change and innovation.
He is a professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management and bestselling author of The Human Element, a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller praised by Adam Grant as "an engrossing read on what it takes to open other people's minds." A former Fulbright Scholar, he has published research in Science and been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, and Harvard Business Review.
Loran's research identifies four specific "frictions" that keep people rooted to the status quo: inertia, effort, reactance, and emotion. Rather than teaching audiences to push harder when selling an idea, he shows them how to reduce resistance through a process he calls Behavioral Design. He has applied this framework with organizations including Amazon, Google, and the Aspen Institute, helping them solve challenges from reducing employee turnover to increasing word-of-mouth referrals.
Audiences leave Loran's sessions with practical tools to diagnose which frictions are blocking their initiatives, strategies for redesigning their approach to neutralize resistance before it builds, and a science-backed framework for launching products, policies, or cultural changes with less pushback.
Book Loran to give your team the skill most leaders overlook: making it easier for people to say yes.
Nordgren's behavioral friction framework gives teams a diagnostic lens for why initiatives stall, drawing from his Kellogg research and work with Amazon and Google on reducing resistance to change. His approach shifts focus from persuasion tactics to removing the psychological barriers that keep stakeholders anchored to current state, particularly valuable when rolling out transformation programs or launching internal adoption campaigns.
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Loran Nordgren structures his sessions around a diagnostic framework he calls Behavioural Design, which identifies four specific frictions — inertia, effort, reactance, and emotion — that cause people to resist new ideas. He walks audiences through tools to locate which friction is blocking a given initiative and how to redesign their approach to reduce that resistance before it builds.
Loran Nordgren speaks on why good ideas face resistance, the psychology of change and innovation, and the practical application of Behavioural Design to reduce friction in organisations. He is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of The Human Element, a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller.
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