What does a youth minister turned Boeing AI engineer have to teach engineering executives and change agents? As it turns out, quite a lot.

Dr. Ryder Dale Walton has spent the last decade driving two of the most consequential transformations in aerospace engineering: the shift from waterfall to Agile, and the integration of AI and large language models into engineering workflows. In this conversation with Chad Jackson, he offers a perspective on change leadership that you won't hear from most technical practitioners — one that's as grounded in human psychology as it is in engineering discipline.

Ryder makes a case that the soft skills change agents most need are the ones they're least likely to have been trained on. When subject matter experts resist change, data and dashboards won't move them. What moves them is understanding what they stand to gain — and being patient enough to show them. His background in ministry and the arts, he argues, gave him the "ambidextrous brain" that makes the difference between a change initiative that gets funded and one that actually gets adopted.

The conversation also gets into the real-world mechanics of change execution — why deploying fast beats deploying perfectly, how Agile adoption actually works through mentoring rather than training, and how to navigate the hardware-software integration challenge as product complexity explodes across aerospace, automotive, and defense. And on the topic of AI, Ryder offers a quietly unsettling observation: when machines automate the creative work, they may be taking away the very activities that help us recharge as human beings.

Perhaps most relevant to change leaders: Ryder sounds a clear warning about burnout. When people are already stretched thin, the emotional bandwidth required to genuinely engage with and bring people along through change simply isn't there — and that's when initiatives quietly die.