Meet the Authors

M. Mari Novak has spent four decades doing the work that most institutional reform frameworks describe but rarely account for: the slow, relationship-dependent, culturally sensitive labor of helping organizations improve from the inside. Like her co-author and partner Steven Kelly, she has worked across Eastern Europe, the former Soviet states, sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America—often in environments where political instability, weak infrastructure, and institutional fragility made the work as demanding as it was necessary.

As co-founder of KNO Worldwide, Novak brought to each engagement a practitioner's understanding of what performance improvement actually requires: clarity about what is being asked of people, honest diagnosis of why performance falls short, and interventions designed around human behavior rather than organizational charts. Her work has taken her into ministries, nonprofits, training institutions, and field operations—always asking what needs to change, who has the authority to change it, and what will make the change last.

Novak is known among colleagues for her ability to read a room—to understand the unspoken dynamics that determine whether a reform effort will be adopted or quietly ignored. That instinct, sharpened over decades of field work, runs through the pages of In the Trenches of Change. The book reflects not only the formal methodology she and Kelly developed together, but the harder-to-teach knowledge that only comes from years of being present when plans meet reality.

Long-time life and business partners, Novak and Kelly bring to the book both a shared professional perspective and an intimacy of observation that makes the memoir unusually candid—about what worked, what did not, and what they would do differently.