Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; 

indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. 

Margaret Mead, Anthropologist.

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The Landscape

New Zealand’s public sector is going through a brutal downsizing, initiated by the government’s drive to find greater cost savings and efficiency. Plenty of private sector organisations are in the same boat. It’s a tough landscape out there right now.

If you’re one of those leaders who’s had to make the tough calls and navigate the challenging emotional landscape of the past few months, I applaud you. You’ve done the necessary short-term work, and now you’re hopefully on the other side of that.

Now what?

How can you drive a strategy with fewer people and less money? Cutting staff numbers can only take things so far. 

As Ernest Rutherford once said, “We’ve run out of money. Now we have to think.”

A Frame for Transformation

Brutal though they may have been, in some ways the job cuts were the easy part. 

The work now is to transform how the work gets done. This is not a time for tinkering around the edges. It’s definitely not a time to work longer and harder. Instead, we need to challenge old, baked-in assumptions, belief systems, and ways of working. We need fresh thinking and fresh actions. As Albert Einstein said, we can’t solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. 

Yet this kind of transformation won’t come from the top alone.

The common story about transformation is that it happens top-down. It might look like that on paper, yet the reality is far different.

Yet it’s not bottom-up either.

As a thought experiment, let’s put aside the hierarchy model for now. And replace it with a circular one. A petri dish.

What’s in a petri dish? A culture. What transforms a culture? Two things: a) the right conditions and b) active bacteria that infect other bacteria.

Your organisation or industry is the petri dish. The conditions are the tough landscape you find yourself in. Your people are the bacteria. And your change-makers are your most active bacteria. They’re small in number, but big in potency. 

Tap your change-makers

Your change-makers exist right across your organisation. They’re already active because that’s how they’re wired. But is that activity being channelled in the right direction? Or are they simply being restless and disruptive? They might be eroding your culture, not driving it.

What if you could harness the energy and ideas of those change-makers to accelerate transformation? What if you could help them grow their ability to influence and create positive change that sticks?

This is what happens:

Let’s go back to the hierarchy model for a moment. If you’re near the top of your hierarchy, your job as a leader in transformation is to create the conditions for your change-makers to maximise their contribution through their talents, networks, and drive. 

It’s not your job to be the hero. It’s your job to share, equip, enable and connect: 

• Share the story of why we need to transform, and what that transformation will enable. And in doing so, avoid the ‘when…then trap’.
• Equip your change-makers with the permission and tools to challenge old ways and experiment with new ways. 
• Enable them to engage and grow others so new ways of working can spread. 
• Connect them across the organisation and/or industry to form a network that accelerates and sustains the transformation.

Help your change-makers to lead from where they are. 

Do you know who your change-makers are?

Do you know how to tap their energy and talents?

Do you know how to play your part?

Transformation is not a mechanical, ‘roll out the vision and strategy and get all our managers to create buy-in’ process. It’s also not about Gantt charts. Transformation happens in non-linear ways across pockets of the organisation. You can’t predict or control what will happen. But you can understand what conditions you need, create them, and actively respond to what happens.

How I Can Help

If you want to stick to change as a process that starts and ends with a restructure, you won’t need me. If instead, you want to drive real, sustained change through your change makers, let's talk.

Here are a few ways I can help:

1. Identify: Run a Change Makers Snapshot Survey to identify the change-makers, and change-maker hot spots, in your organisation.

2. Equip: In a half-day workshop, I’ll teach your senior leaders and change-makers a repeatable, scalable process that makes it easier to uncover the assumptions and limiting beliefs about how work gets done in your organisation, and accelerates the creation and adoption of new and better ways. 

3. Lead: Starting with a half-day workshop, I’ll teach your senior leaders how to be less of the ‘hero’ and more of the ‘host’ to play their part in shaping the work of transformation.

4. Grow: Invest in growing your change-makers by putting them on the Change Makers Foundation programme or have me work with you to create your own in-house version.

If these ideas excite you, please get in touch for a chat to get things moving.

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For more like this, check out Are You Transforming or Tinkering?

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