Why does transformation matter?

Transformation matters to me on a number of levels. Perhaps the most important, at a personal level, is the sustenance of happiness. I know transformational leadership has come to an organisation I'm helping to pivot when I hear:

“I no longer take stress home to my husband and children. That’s because there’s no stress in the office now. Just pressure. Life really is all shine, right now.” CEO Hospitality

“My relationship with my son is amazing now. I used to think I had to tell him how life was to prepare him for success and the future. Now I am listening to him, I find I have more to learn from him than I could ever teach him. We both make the time to talk now because we find such pleasure in hearing what the other has to say” CEO Petrochemicals

Or

“I felt on call pretty much 24/7. It got to be I watched movies at home with the phone in my lap. I could never really relax and just enjoy being with my husband and daughter. I felt so bad because I could see my relationship with my daughter slipping away. Now I turn the phone off at 8, read to my girl in bed and talk to my husband about the day. Being back in my daughter’s life makes all the difference to me. It’s changed the way I feel and really improved all my relationships at work” COO Franchise

Or

“I realise all the stories I told about myself reflected other people’s judgement on me. I was always trying to justify my own sense of worth. Without realising it, all I did was project dissatisfaction and exasperation to others. My staff found it incredibly stressful. I’m not surprised they called me a witch. When I started to tell the story that mattered to me, I discovered I was in the wrong job because all my career choices were based on trying to please others, totally ignoring my own needs. Now I judge my success on how I bring happiness to others by answering the questions that no one else can answer in their lives. That’s being the witch that matters to me” ‘Zebra’ Founder (AltTech high success entrepreneur)

At a professional level transformation matters to me because this is about unlocking organisations’ and individuals’ abilities to solve the problems that matter to them. Clean energy. Safe water. Effective health care. Good eating, Easy mobility. Cost-effective insurance. Reliable postal services. A life-enhancing cityscape. Whatever the specific problem the organisation exists to crack, transformation enables the individuals in that organisation to pull together as a team to deliver their work with ever greater impact. In doing so, the sense of satisfaction rises because everything has a sense of purpose fulfilled. So, working at scale has meaning. Working at pace has real drive behind it. Increasing the rate of innovation has an immediacy defined by the urgency of the needed solution. Engaging with tech becomes a tool to change what is possible and deliver the impossible. Keeping things simple becomes a rigour, discipline and way of thinking that lets nothing distract from the problem in hand.

And the key to transformation, game changing team work and purposeful leadership?

Trust

Trust-building communication

Trust-built psychological safety driven by purpose.

Trust-built resilience, empathy and fellow feeling driven by leadership literacy

All of which delivers the powerful ability for a team to come through difficulty, struggle and complexity with toolkits fostering trust, dialogue, sense making and co-creative collaboration.

Simple.

And still the most complex endeavour of which we are capable.

Problem solving together.

Being the change, unrelentingly, that brings future to our world.

“Siting a learning centre in the desert without power cables or sewage pipelines means we can open a world of learning without damaging fragile eco-systems or ruining a uniquely pristine, world-heritage landscape. We can take people out of their comfort zones and deliver self-reliance in the oldest university of the world – the Arabian desert – in a space entirely defined by a self-reliance aesthetic that creates new architectural legacy for the world’ CEO Architect and CEO Leadership

“Giving very young children the tools to experiment safely with circuitry design we think will develop the innovative bio-chemists, nano-engineers, botBods, hyper-logicians and eco-logisticians enabling 9 billion humans to live without mass extinction, war, plague and famine” CEO EduTech

Finally

I am interested in transformation at a systems level. My engagement with organisational transformation and observation of transformational leadership impact suggests that leadership is subject to the same exponential rate of change driving the global economy. More precisely, it is the exponential potential of leadership that drives the rate of global innovation and change.

Given that all economic activity is the outcome of human business decisions, it is self-evident that leadership is the starting point of all the impacts we observe in the world. In this sense, we always live in exponential times where business leadership treads the frontier of what is known, what is uncertain - and what is yet to come.

If this is so, then it is good news.

Because unlocking the exponential in our business leadership – rather than technology - provides the key to solving the converging exponential threats that are racing towards us, of which Covid19 is but a harbinger.

So, through the agency of our leadership, we have to collectively ask and solve what it means a s human to:

·       Share intelligence with machines as well as other organic life

·       Work in a universal economy increasingly driven by ideation rather than production

·       Understand our intersubjective domain in terms of currencies such as trust, rather than just money

·       Address issues of mortality, equity, education, identity, health, happiness, liberty, belonging, property, guardianship and other inalienable rights conferred by existential relationship as THE means of ideation

I live in hope that what I have learned about the exponential rate of transformation will be of use to you if you:

·       Lead a team or an organisation

·       Work in a team

·       Are applying to work in a team or an organisation

·       Need to unlock exponential leadership capability

·       Need to game change intrapreneurship, innovation and out-of-the-box thinking

·       Seek entrepreneurial flair and risk empathy

·       Seek to be the change you need to see in the world

If so, why woudl you now say transformation matters to you?