At ATD Show 2026 in Las Vegas, the American Truck Dealers event that runs as part of NADA Show, Allen Phibbs presented a session called Disrupt Yourself Before the Market Disrupts You. The room was full of truck dealer principals. The subject, despite the title, was not technology at all. It was whether the people in your business can absorb a change quickly enough for it to matter.
We watched the session and read the deck, because this is the half of AI adoption we spend most of our time on. South African dealer groups are not short of tools. What most of them are short of is a way to introduce one without the branch quietly deciding to wait it out.
“Because” or “Be Cause”?
The session opens with a montage of people finishing the same sentence on screen. “Because my mom was not there.” “I will learn to steward my finances.” Then the screen asks the room a question: what will you place after your because?
The slide that follows is the whole talk in four words: “Because” or “Be Cause”?
It is a small piece of wordplay that lands harder than it should. “Because” is the word that introduces the reason something did not happen. “Be cause” is a decision to be the reason it did. Every dealership has both kinds of manager, and you can name yours without thinking about it for very long.
A word about the statistics slide
Slide six is titled The “Disruptor” Statistics They Are Not Telling You, and it fills the screen with eight numbers: 70, 69, 50, 14, 29, 74, 82 and 7X. There are no captions. No units. No source printed anywhere on the slide. The meaning exists only in what the presenter said out loud as each figure appeared.
We have left those figures out of this article. We could guess what each one refers to, and the guesses would sound entirely plausible, which is exactly the danger. If you take one habit away from this piece and forget every framework in it, take that one: a number on a slide with nothing attached to it is not evidence, and asking the person presenting it where it came from is a reasonable thing to do.
Culture is not the poster in the workshop
The definition the session works from is more useful than most:
How we think shapes what we do. Thinking drives action. Actions shape interactions. Interactions determine outcomes. Outcomes deliver on the purpose of the organisation. Alongside it sits a three-word slide: Thinking, then Knowing, then Doing.
That chain is worth pausing on, because it puts culture upstream of your numbers rather than beside them. Most dealer groups treat culture as a thing the HR manager owns and the sales board reports on separately. This framing says the sales board is the last link in a chain that starts with what your people privately believe about the place.
Why this matters for your dealership: if you want a different result at month end, the lever sits further back than the month-end meeting.
The five anchors for leading change
The spine of the session is a five-step sequence that the deck returns to between every section:
- See It
- Plan It
- Sell It
- Do It
- Review It
Under the first anchor comes the sharpest slide in the deck. Three questions all followers ask:
- Can you help me?
- Do you care for me?
- Can I trust you?
Nobody asks these out loud, and nobody asks them about the change. They are asked about you, and they are answered before the change is ever discussed. A technician who has watched three systems arrive and disappear is not evaluating the new workshop module. He is evaluating whether the person announcing it will still be defending it in November.
Plan it: three big questions and six essentials
Planning gets two slides. The first is three questions to put to the team before you design anything: what matters, what is missing, what is next.
The second is a communication checklist: purpose, perspective, relationships, mechanics, questions, listen.
Notice that two of those six are about receiving rather than transmitting. Most dealership change communication is a Monday morning announcement, which covers purpose and mechanics and stops there. The announcement is not the communication. It is the opening line of it.
Sell it: turning engagement into margin
This is the anchor most dealerships skip, and the session gives it the most concrete slide of the day. It reads as an equation:
Weekly feedback, plus one-on-ones run as production meetings, plus recognition in plain sight, equals increased profits, rising sales and improved quality. Underneath, in capitals: no additional cost.
Two phrases in there are doing real work. “One-on-ones as production meetings” reframes a conversation most managers treat as admin into something that produces output. “Recognition in plain sight” means public and visible, not a quiet word at the coffee machine that nobody else witnesses.
Why this matters for your dealership: the rand cost of all three is zero. That claim deserves one qualification the slide does not make, though. It costs no capital, but it does cost manager hours every single week, and a manager already covering new, used and a share of F&I does not have loose hours lying around. If you want this, something else has to come off that person’s desk.
Do it: delegate authority, not just tasks
The distinction here is the best single idea in the session:
- Delegate tasks, and you will create followers.
- Delegate authority, and you will create leaders.
The deck pairs it with what it calls excitement to grow: people who are excited to be part of something bigger, and who can see individual progress coming from their own effort.
South African dealerships delegate tasks generously and authority almost never. The service manager can allocate every job card in the workshop but cannot approve a small goodwill repair without phoning the dealer principal. That business will always run at the speed of one person, and that person will always be the bottleneck in every change they try to lead.
Review it: what a culture scorecard actually measures
The final anchor is the one the deck spends the most pages on, and it is the part a dealer principal can act on immediately. It starts with ten measurable attributes:
- Effective communication
- Trust and respect
- Teamwork and collaboration
- Empowerment and accountability
- Continuous learning and development
- Living our values
- Celebration and appreciation
- Seen and heard
- Fun and positive environment
- Support and care
Those ten are then plotted on a worked example the deck calls a Culture Impact Scorecard. Each attribute is scored as a percentage and shown twice, an earlier reading and a current one, so movement is visible rather than implied. The bands are:
- 0 to 59 per cent, destructive. The behaviour is rarely seen and is actively eroding trust and performance.
- 60 to 74 per cent, at risk. Inconsistent and unreliable, leading to confusion and mistrust.
- 75 to 89 per cent, unstable. Some traction, but not dependable.
- 90 to 100 per cent, optimal. Consistently lived across the organisation.
A footnote on the slide sets the practical line: cultures scoring under 70 per cent agreement are flagged as at risk, a threshold the deck attributes to Gallup and Deloitte. The ten scores then roll up into a single Culture Impact Index. In the sample company used, the three weakest attributes were continuous learning and development, empowerment and accountability, and teamwork and collaboration, and those three are labelled high-risk areas.
One caution the deck does not raise. A survey like this is worth exactly as much as your staff believe the anonymity is real. In a dealership with six people in aftersales, reporting results by department is the same as publishing names, and everyone answering knows it. If you cannot protect the anonymity, you will measure how safe people feel rather than what they think, which is useful information but not the information you asked for.
Where AI fits, since the session never mentions it
Worth being straight about this: the word AI does not appear anywhere in this deck. The market disruption in the title is left deliberately unnamed. For the dealer groups we work with, it has a name. It is AI answers changing how a buyer researches a vehicle before they ever reach your website, AI sitting inside the CRM and the BDC, and AI scheduling and follow-up in the service department.
Here is why the session is relevant anyway. Almost every stalled AI project we are called into failed at anchor three. Somebody saw the opportunity, planned the rollout, skipped selling it to the people who would have to use it, told the team to use it, and never reviewed whether they did. Six weeks later the sales executives are back on their own WhatsApp threads, the data in the platform is half-complete, and the licence renews anyway because cancelling would be an admission.
Why this matters for your dealership: the return on an AI tool is set by adoption, not by capability. If you cannot answer “can you help me, do you care for me, can I trust you” for the person expected to use it, the specification of the tool is irrelevant.
What is different in a South African dealership
The frameworks travel. The context around them does not, in four specific ways.
Selling the change is not optional here. In South Africa, meaningful changes to how work is organised carry consultation expectations that an American dealer principal simply does not face. Anchor three is partly a compliance step for us, not just good practice. Speak to whoever handles your labour relations before you announce a restructure, not after.
A culture survey is personal information. Running a scorecard across your staff means processing employee data under POPIA. Decide up front what you collect, who sees it, how long you keep it, and whether your promise of anonymity survives contact with a small branch. Get that right before the first survey goes out, because you only get one chance at people believing it.
Your managers are stretched thinner. The weekly rhythm this session asks for assumes a management layer with room in it. Most South African dealerships run one manager where an American group runs two. That does not make the advice wrong, but it does mean you have to take something away before you add the one-on-ones.
For commercial vehicle dealers, the stakes sit with the customer. This was a truck dealer audience, and that translates directly. When your customer is a fleet operator, downtime is their revenue, and any change that touches the workshop touches their business the same week. The technician shortage is more acute on the commercial side too, which makes retention less of an HR metric and more of a capacity constraint.
What to do this month
- Take one change already under way in your dealership and work out which of the five anchors you skipped. It is nearly always Sell It.
- Move one approval down a level and write the rand limit down. That is the difference between delegating a task and delegating authority, and it costs nothing to try.
- Put weekly feedback, one-on-ones and visible recognition in the diary as recurring appointments, then remove something else from those managers to pay for the time.
- Score the ten attributes yourself, honestly, before you survey anybody. If your own guess is under 70 per cent on something, you already know where to start.
- If you do run the survey, settle anonymity and POPIA first, and never report results for a group small enough to identify people.
- Ask one person this week what would have to be true for them to trust the next system you introduce, and let them finish the answer.
The honest summary
This session offers no data you can verify and no technology. It is a leadership talk built on frameworks that have been circulating in management training for years, delivered to a room of truck dealers. If you came looking for evidence, the statistics slide will disappoint you as much as it disappointed us.
The diagnosis is still right, and it is the one we keep running into. Dealerships do not fail to adopt AI because the tools are bad. They fail because nobody sold the change internally, nobody moved the authority to act any closer to the work, and nobody checked six weeks later whether anything had actually changed.
The deck closes with a question and a line. The question: is your culture one of complacency and status quo, or one of change and growth? The line, credited to Chris Robinson of Maxwell Leadership: “Stop doing what is stopping you.”
You do not need a consultant to start on that. You need one honest look at a change you are already halfway through, and a decision to be the cause of it rather than the explanation for why it stalled.
If you would like help working out why a tool you have already bought is not being used, or how to introduce the next one so that it is, get in touch. We will look at it with you.
This is the third piece in our series on NADA and ATD Show 2026, read alongside Leading With Emotional Intelligence in the AI Age and Driving Service Revenue With AI and CDP Advertising.
Source
- Allen Phibbs, “Disrupt Yourself Before the Market Disrupts You”, ATD Show 2026, held as part of NADA Show at the Wynn, Las Vegas, 3 to 5 February 2026. Rating bands and the 70 per cent at-risk threshold are as printed on the deck’s Culture Impact Scorecard, which credits the threshold to Gallup and Deloitte. Closing quotation credited on the final slide to Chris Robinson, EVP, Maxwell Leadership.
- The deck contains no monetary figures, so there was nothing to convert into rands. The eight figures on the “Disruptor Statistics” slide carry no captions or source in the deck and have deliberately not been repeated here. The South African labour and POPIA commentary, the commercial vehicle context and the section on AI adoption are ours, not the presenter’s.