You cannot transform anything unless you are willing to transform yourself….

This week, while sitting on another early morning flight to Auckland, with a beautiful sunrise (photo attached), it gave me some time to reflect. Work has been full on - I am confident I, and the team at In Your Corner Ltd , are having impact with our clients, family life is great and am excited that my youngest two university aged children are moving home for the university holidays (noting I reserve the right to complain about the food bill and the mess they make while they are home!)

For all intents and purposes, life is really great in my part of the world. I will admit to being too busy, which is code for being rubbish at prioritization, and using my normal practice of smashing my wellbeing in service of everyone else – which I know is wrong and something I am at work on this but changing habits of a lifetime is not a one step process – but feeling like I am finding some balance.

But then I step back and look at the world we are living in and the constant turmoil that is happening at our individual, family, community and national level. Everywhere I go, individuals, and the organisations they work in, are being smashed by the circumstances they are incurring and reaching breakdown and burnout just to try keep things the same, let alone try to improve things.

We live in a world of relentless change and the tool we are using to address this is quite simply, effort. We are working harder, longer and at a more frantic pace to try and beat what is coming at us. Effort has always been our go tool to combat circumstances and when the going gets tough, we go back to our tool box and pull out a bigger effort tool and try to use that.

Now effort can work in an environment where the challenge is time bound. I.e. we can see the light at the end of the tunnel is say 3-4 weeks so a few weeks of less sleep and higher effort can combat this.

But the problem we face is that future circumstances are not timebound and are going to get more complex, faster, more volatile. It is scary to think that the last 10 years of our life are the greatest change ever experienced in human history and even scarier to think that at the same time, those 10 years will be the least amount of change we will ever experience again.

Using effort as our tool of choice is why the majority of the world is entering dangerous territories of mental health and burnout.

Enter the transformation era……

World over, there is recognition of the need to transform to new ways of operating to be a match for the future circumstances – both known and anticipated. Feverish effort is going into the development and commencement of transformation plans – most of which are destined for failure or less impact than they need.

Why is this – well my take is that the focus of most transformation projects is about trying to transform the circumstances and not about transforming the way you are thinking about the circumstances – in other words, they are grounded in shifting what we do and not how we operate.

And secondly, and more importantly, organisations themselves don’t transform – individuals transform – and when you get enough individuals transforming you start to see an organisation shift. And first and foremast that transformation must start with the leader and at the leadership table. Leaders cannot expect others to transform, or transform anything, if they are not willing to transform themselves. ?However, I think most leaders are most likely to deploy their transformation plans in exactly the same way they always have – with more effort.

I have a weird need to want to solve things that others think are impossible (that's a whole different article) – this often presents as wanting to take on national and human level projects way beyond my current stature. This is balanced against my identity’s need to keep doing what has made be successful in the past. These two things are often in conflict with each other with leaves me with the challenging question…..’Am I willing to transform myself in order to transform the world we live in?'