Takeaways from Rethink Change Summit

Last week, I was lucky enough to both present at and participate in the Rethink Change Melbourne Summit.

One of the best things about the day was the opportunity to connect with likeminded individuals. The other was learning from some brilliant minds. The day's discussions ranged from how to use tools like AI platforms and personas to ways to navigate difficult change and the many hats change managers often wear.

As someone who strongly advocates for using play and creativity in driving change and also someone who openly admits to being somewhat tech/AI resistant, I thought I'd zero in on some of what was covered in the workshops that Greg Taylor and Trudi Boatwright facilitated along with a snippet or two from my own presentation.

On play and creativity

The value of play

Did you know that learning through play can encourage new synapses to form in the brain after just 12 attempts compared to 400 repetitions normally?

As someone who uses play, gamification and simulated learning experiences to help people embody and become more open to change, I've always been a big advocate of play and creativity as tools for helping others embrace and drive change. Trudi's presentation was a wonderful reminder of just how powerful play can be in helping to:

• Increase empathy
• Support innovation
• Create deeper human connection
• Improve problem solving
• Reduce stress
• Improve learning retention (play can lead to 85% learning retention compared to 16% when under stress)
• Speed up productivity
• Encourage psychological safety

How to integrate play into your workplace

Despite it being something innate in all of us, as adults, we seem play-averse. It's something we see as being exclusively for kids, choosing to treat it as an add-on instead of a part of how we do things. For this reason, we need to take baby steps to ease ourselves back into our natural imaginative states.

While the activities you may choose will depend on what you're trying to get as an outcome (ie strategy, teamwork), Trudi recommended starting small to ease people into becoming more comfortable with play. Companies can choose from all sorts of activities which can be integrated into daily work depending on what the objectives are.

A few examples of this include:

• Building energy/excitement: getting people to use their whole bodies and stand up/sit down rather than just raising hands creates a full-body engaged experience and works to build energy and enthusiasm before starting an activity, especially when people are a bit deflated.
• Practice listening and problem solving: At the start of a meeting with attendees who don't know one another, have everybody introduce themselves as some kind of inanimate object and have the other members of the meeting attempt to work out what the object is.
• Solve a problem with a problem: use an irrelevant task to take the emotional sting out of a situation. Even better, bring people into the game so they can experience it for greater impact.

On embracing AI

As someone who has been trained to understand the implications of misinformation and biases in programmers designing solutions, I openly admit that a lot of things about AI scare me. However, Greg's presentation was a refreshing reminder that AI doesn't have to be the enemy. Rather, it's simply a tool and it's up to the wielder to decide how to use it.

We discussed the ways that AI can improve how we work including how:

• Doctors can more effectively spend time diagnosing really complex problems while leaving simple analyses to AI.
• Customer service teams can focus on more interesting and pressing problems while chatbots that they've trained can confidently handle simple questions (although there was a warning about how courts will deem incorrect information from a bot as being an extension of the company)
• Change managers can utilise AI in research and ideation, planning, content development and data monitoring

Greg spoke about how AI is already at the agentic stage (think chatbot 2.0 capable of actually understanding context) and quickly moving towards general intelligence and how in light of this, we really need to think of AI platforms like personal assistants instead of the threat about to take all our jobs. That said, I did get a giggle when a few participants insisted that our requests of the AI platforms include pleases and thank yous.

He shared tools and software for generating images, slides, videos and audio (a few I'm currently playing with include bing create, invideo and ideogram) before unleashing all attendees on a problem where we had the opportunity to play with a range of tools and create some hilarious content.

My biggest takeaway from this session was that fear of the unknown and hypothetical consequences often keep us from embracing wonderful opportunities. So give yourself a chance to reframe and simply have a play with some of the programs out there, even if it is just in Canva or ChatGPT. You might be surprised by how much of the less exciting parts of your job it can help you with!

On psychosocial wellbeing

Psychosocial wellbeing isn't exactly a sexy topic to present on but it is definitely one that resonates with everybody. One of the most powerful moments for me was watching every attendee get to their feet when I asked people to stand up if they'd seen or experienced 2 or more examples of psychosocial harm at work.

There are countless ways to nurture and protect psychosocial wellbeing, both at an individual and cultural level and the benefits are astounding. Whether your aim is to implement more sustainable change, boost employee performance or reduce errors and harm, even the smallest of tweaks to a meeting framework or company processes can make huge differences.

Biggest thank you to Doug Wolfson and Janine Ellison for hosting such a fantastic event and for letting me be part of it. I can't wait to see what next year has in store!

PS. If you're looking for a presenter for your next Town Hall or Team away day, I cover a range of topics from improving wellbeing at work to making change easier for everyone. Why not take a look at my website to see if one of these topics is just what you've been looking for?