When you work in Agile Transformations you start to notice trends – things that happen regardless of the organisation. One of these is how internal talent is activated and leveraged.

What do I mean ? Well a Ways of Working shift can’t happen unless the people doing the work use the new ways of working and shift their thinking so that these new ways of working not only make sense, but are easy to access and evolve. One strategy for this is to bring in people with experience already – the assumption being that they will bring that expertise and know how into the day to day and so boost the uplift.

What we don’t ‘see’ is how stable and resistant to change a large Corporate really is. The existing process, people and behaviour co-exist and re-enforce each other. Change one and the whole system reacts to try and get back to that comfortable status quo.

Which means new talent is often left in a rather chaotic world where there is just a lot of stuff that isn’t new Ways of Working. To be fair, our brains function like this. When we enter new places we use our past experience to make sense of it all and to help us craft a path to something more familiar or desired – so we are programmed to see the differences.

The down side of this is that it is easy for much needed talent to start to give up – it just seems so impossible

Which got me to thinking – how does change happen (other than 1 person at a time) ?

Are you focused on the Present or are you focused on creating a different future today ?

It is an important question to ask oneself as it makes a big impact on both your experience of work and the impact you have (and so the influence you have in leading people out from where they are).

How are you leading people out from where they are ?

The experiment is to start to shift the conversations we hear around us, to bring the future into today.

What would an amazing workplace look like for you ?

What could you do today to make that happen and experience some of that today ?

I am really curious to see what happens if we started to talk about what it could be like, started to get people curious and imagining a different future.

We have all (hopefully) worked with leaders who are good at this, they tell stories of how it could be and then encourage us to be a creator of that vision.

What would it look like for you to start being one of those leaders ?

What is the smallest thing you could do now ?

Because if you don’t start now…..