in the same direction. 과�selhronsay, cochen tower, dually cliniques, How can we tackle problems bigger than ourselves? How can we create the change that constantly needs to happen? How can we give up control? How can we balance our time and energy? So we can focus both on what we need to do and what we need to be. How can we hold space for imagination? How can we stop wasting time? How can we spend more time on the things that matter? How can we as leaders be courageous? How can we stop doing things that take us more? How can we fully unleash the potential of our people? How can we inspire humans and future fit our organizations? How can we39 aboutẹ want to do things that matter? Welcome to Thought Leaders 2021. We are excited to welcome you to this two and a half hour journey to explore the question, how do we create organizations that are fit for humans and fit for the future? My name is Susan Salzbinder. I'm a partner at Implement Consulting Group. And with me today, I have Steve Albertson, the chairman of the board. Before we continue, I would just love to share a little passion of mine because it really, you know, pertains to the topic. I'm very passionate about cultural transformations and how we make organizations more human centric. What about you, Steve? Yeah, I'm all about how do we make real transformations where we leave organizations at a truly better place, where they feel more capable. And actually, this Thought Leader event is a cornerstone in that ambition. Because for 15 years, we've been inviting thought leaders to come and push our thinking. And actually, today is our gift back to our community. So hopefully, these thought leaders will inspire you as they do with us. Exactly. So we've invited two thought leaders, Gary Hamel and Francesca Gino, but also a lot of organizations and companies that are going to share their stories, their experiences, and experiments that they have been running to explore this topic. And it is a learning journey. So we actually want to bring you along. So grab a pen and paper and note down your thoughts along the way. We might ask you some questions to explore together with us. And we're going to post some documents in the chat. You are able to chat with each other and the thousands of people that have signed up to this. But before you start chatting, I would love to ask this guy a question. Because you have been with leaders in organizations these past 12 months, maybe in a different place, maybe more on Zoom than on a physical meeting. But what's been sort of what has stuck with you the most? What have you been left with after reflecting on these past 12 months? One thing was this sense of the pandemic almost acting as a gift. Yeah, because a willingness in people to let go of old behaviors and mindsets that no longer serves us. And in that sense, it's a once in a generation lifetime maybe for us as leaders to step up. And then a second thing that was interesting was that the tectonic plates on which we strategize as organizations, it feels as if they are shifting quite radically right now. Okay. So that's kind of cool. Yeah, that's very interesting. But, you know, tectonic plates shifting in strategy, I think that requires a little bit more unpacking. So would you do the favor and tell us a little bit more about that? I'll be happy to. Great. Thank you. As leaders, we strategize to make sure that we are fit for the future. It's almost like an insurance against irrelevancy. And historically, strategy has been all about two questions. One is, where do we want to play? And the other one is, how do we win? What we'll try to convince you is that forward-looking leaders trying to take their organizations from good to great to awesome, in order to do that, we need to start asking ourselves new questions. And let me start by sharing with you the one conversation that got us curious as to what are those new questions. About six months ago, I was drinking coffee with a friend of mine, Bjarke Ingels. He is the founder of Big, he is an architect, he is an entrepreneur. And we were having coffee at his houseboat, sitting on the deck, in the sun, overlooking the opera in Copenhagen Center. Really nice. And Bjarke was sharing with me this vision that he's been working on. And when he did that, it kind of sat in me and it still sits in me. He has been asking himself the following question. Who makes the plan for how we can get to 100% sustainable human presence on the planet, with enough breathing space for 10 billion people in 2050? Who thinks this through, top down? And he realized, nobody does that. So they identified 10 areas, 10 vectors in which we have to crack critical challenges. And they curated all the existing technologies we have to figure out if we could get to carbon neutrality. And they realized, yes, we can totally do that. And so what Bjarke was actually doing was, he was applying the craft of an architect. They make a master plan for a house. They can make a master plan for a block. They make a master plan for a city. And he applied that at the scale of the planet. And they call it the master planet. The master plan for the planet. And while he was sharing this with me, I couldn't help thinking, what's going on here? And it was as if Bjarke was allowing himself to look at BIC, his beloved company, as a minimum viable product. He was allowing himself to imagine a second founding of BIC. Thinking about what could we possibly do with the capabilities we have today. And extreme courage to imagine the future for BIC. About two weeks later, I was at a meeting in Copenhagen together with Thomas Tuna Andersen. He is the chairman of Örsted. And we were at that meeting. It was raining. I had a car. He was waiting for a taxi. I offered him a ride. And he jumped in. And I couldn't help sharing with him this recent conversation I've had with Bjarke. And immediately, he started talking about the transformation that Örsted has been going through. Actually, by Howard Business Review, voted as one of the ten most profound transformations in the last decade. Turning DONG, this oil and gas company into Örsted, this 100% sustainable energy company. In fact, Örsted used to be, or DONG used to be, one of the most carbon intensive companies in Europe. And they turned it into now recently nominated as one of the most sustainable companies on the planet. And Thomas shared with me that Örsted has been here. And Thomas shared with me that at some point in that transformation, they started asking themselves, why don't we kill our core business and build an entirely new company? And when he said that, it was almost like an epiphany moment for me. I was thinking back at the conversation I had with Bjarke. Once again, a leader showing courage, holding space for a conversation, a conversation around a second founding of a great company. So fueled by that and those conversations, we gathered a bunch of colleagues to talk about this. We both talked about what would a second founding of Implement look like. And we also talked about what are the tectonic shifts that are happening here that are worthwhile looking at. And a good place to start is to go to the World Economic Forum. Because why? That's where leaders from everywhere in the world go to figure out what do we need to look at. And this year in Davos, it was very, very clear that one thing stood out. Humanity is facing a series of unprecedented systemic challenges. In fact, we are in a COVID crisis within a broader crisis, specifically with the man-made climate change turning into an emergency situation. But as a matter of fact, with a handful of crises being existential. So crisis written all over it, that's a shift. A second shift we experienced was that our notion of stakeholders is changing. For the first time ever, stakeholders, broadly speaking, are as important as shareholders. And historically, we've said the business of business is business. We focus on shareholders, profitability, growth, and so on. But suddenly, the planet as a stakeholder is pushing CSR and sustainability and purpose work to the center stage of how we strategize. And we see investors migrating to ESG funds and investors asking new questions. But maybe most importantly, what about us? What about our role in all of this? And a couple of facts that are quite interesting. For the first time ever, business is considered the only institution that's both competent and trusted to deal with these systemic challenges. As a matter of fact, 66% of citizens expect CEOs to take a lead in this. 86% expect CEOs to speak up. And 60% consider a higher urgency now than just one year ago. So, the world is looking at us to propel not just business and the economy, but actually propel society forward. So, if we're going to take a new role, if we're going to come up with new answers, I guess we need to ask new questions. And we need to look for questions that unlock the imagination and the courage that we experienced with Bjarke in Big and Thomas in Oersted. So, we went and discussed and tested and probed different questions to see what they could do in these conversations. And we found out that one question had a transformational impact when handled well. And that was, what is the biggest worthwhile problem we could be part of solving? How do we connect our craft to a worthwhile problem? Because when we glue our craft to a worthwhile problem, we experience this pull of meaning and engagement, both with employees, but also with the external environment. So, we suggest that you ask this question in your own company. And what happens when we zoom out and look at these systemic problems? We realize that they are complex and they are systemic in nature, which means that none of us can solve them alone. We need to solve them in an ecosystem. And there are companies that are pioneering this way of being in the world. As an example, we have Unilever. They decided to engage 65,000 suppliers to fix the plastic challenge of retail. They decided to carbon label 70,000 products to tell me as a consumer, what's the tax we put on the planet every time we buy this product and consume it. But also to inspire other organizations to do the same. We can look to Novo Nordisk. They decided to build a global supply chain for recycling diabetes pens so they don't end up in landfills. They decided that you can no longer be a supplier for Novo Nordisk unless you use green energy by 2030. Organizations that by choice choose to take a catalytic role. And that led us to the second question that has a transformational perspective. That being, how might we take a catalytic role in creating collective action? Where do we have potentially a superpower, a voice, capabilities that could inspire others and make others more capable? And what's the message here for us? What does it mean to how we future fit our organization? How is the playbook for strategy being rewritten? And as I said in the beginning, historically, strategy has been centered around two questions. Where to play and how to win. Very finite questions that has to do with winning. born in the era of from good to great. What we are suggesting is that what might differentiate the good from the great, from the awesome companies of the future, might be the ability to twin these two finite questions with these two infinite questions that has to do with how do we change the game, how do we propel also society forward in a positive manner. And skeptics might be thinking now, you know, I'm not the CEO, I don't make the strategy, but we need to remind ourselves that, you know, in a modern organization, change can come from anywhere. As a matter of fact, if you're in a vanguard company, you would encourage everyone to act like a leader. And I guess you could say that society is saying, please unmute. Please have the courage to lead. Speak up. In a moment, we'll be unfolding this further, together with three inspiring leaders representing catalytic organizations by choice. I would encourage you to have a pen and some paper ready, and please take notes and ask yourself, what inspires me in what they say? And while you do that, maybe give yourself permission to also think about or listen with the intention of identifying where might I be able to play a catalytic role in my organization. In the old days, we thought that it would be governments that would change things, but I believe in the future, it would be companies that can take a much bigger responsibility for solving societal problems. It's also interesting nowadays to see how investors are picking up on environmental and social aspirations for companies. BlackRock, which is one of the biggest investment companies in the world, they're also one of our biggest investors. They are asking of companies now to have environmental and social ambitions. And this fits right down our alley and something we worked with for many years, but we did work with it as something a little bit separate from the core business. And now we're trying to integrate it into a truly sustainable business where it's a natural part of what we do. So not a sustainability strategy, but a sustainable strategy. Yeah, a sustainable strategy, and we call it sustainable business. So it is, as part of our purpose, it's the underlying foundation, sustainable business. Sometimes you think, make a lot of sacrifices and then we will reach it. But our ambition is really to have a sustainable business, meaning that the environmental considerations should be included in our business strategies. It should not be either or, it should be both and. And that's what we are working on and what also sometimes poses us some challenges. I think a company has to have an ambition about what type of company do we want to be, how do we want to be respected, and how do we encourage our employees, the current and the future, to work for us. So to define an ambition of where do we want to take this company and what role model do we want to be in society. And you've also launched an initiative where you can't be a supplier for Novo unless you use green energy by, I think it's 2030. Yeah. You could argue, but that's none of your business. It is actually a big part of our business because 80% of our carbon emissions are coming from those suppliers. And we have 60,000 of those, but the top 300, they account for 80% of what our suppliers emit. So we do need to work with them on that. And now we found a way ourselves to run only on green energy. So that means we can also help inspire them how they can do that by 2030. We would like people to engage in our biggest problems. And we do have a few problems with regards to Circular for Zero and our environmental impact. So if we can have people work on solving some of those problems while they're also solving the business problem at the same time, then we believe we are more sustainable company for the future. So, Stee, you had an interesting conversation with Camilla. Obviously, we've seen a short excerpt of that full video, and we can find that video on our website if people want to re-watch it or want to pause and replay it. But, you know, you've taken your notes. We've asked participants, audience to take notes. I have notes here. But I'm actually kind of wondering, what did you leave that meeting with? It was a 30-minute conversation. What sat with you? Purpose-driven company with an ambition on Circular for Zero that influences all the business decisions they take. That felt kind of... That came across. And also the fact that they've turned this into a real movement. It's not a CXO play top-down. It is a movement. They have these 300 ambassadors that are literally ambassadors internally. And I've sensed in Novo what this has done to their pride and their sense of meaning. It's not just a project. It's a lot more profound. That was clear. So Novo Nordis really created this movement around sustainable business. Another point she made, which I thought was interesting, is this... You talked about it. Shareholders, you know, need to go away from just thinking about that, but looking at different stakeholders. She brought in investors, which you don't hear that often as someone who puts pressure on an organization to live up to sustainability goals or something like that. But apparently that's the case in Novo Nordisk. What should... You know, what might that pose as a question to our listeners? I think it's an invitation, a curiousness as to being pushed by someone who have, you know, challenging questions to you. And it is as if they invite that voice in. And actually Camilla shared in a part that we didn't show here that she was really impacted by speaking to activists and people at the fringes of their stakeholders. And, you know, every company has their issues. And inviting someone in to ask you, what's your dirty secret in your company? What do you need to work on? Right. I think that's super healthy. Yes, exactly. So just as Camilla from Novo Nordisk is inspired by these external opinions or pressure points, we believe that there's another very inspiring thought leader out there. And that is Lena Nair, the CHRO of Unilever, which is another organization that is thinking very, very hard about where they can play a catalyst role in their industry. The first thing I want to ask you is, what is your thinking on the role and the responsibility of businesses in solving worthwhile problems? I believe very, very passionately that business has a huge role to play in solving the biggest problems of our time. If you don't have a healthy world, you can't have a healthy business. You're one of the companies who, to a very large extent, has asked yourself the question of, you know, where could we take a catalytic role? And there's two areas that kind of stands out for me. One is you activating, I don't know how many thousands of suppliers to solve the plastic challenge of the world. And the second area is your carbon labeling of your products to inspire other producers to do the same. Could you, is that, is that, you know, how did that happen? So we have partners with purpose program, a program that we bring all our suppliers and definitely the big ones who have huge impact on our value chain and take them through an education process of what is happening in the world. What is happening with, for example, plastic or what's happening to climate emissions. You've got to educate them, build their awareness and bring them on the journey with you. What we also then do is we work with governments and NGOs everywhere. So in country by country that we operate in, we operate in 190 countries, we try and map out who are the partners in this country that we need. We therefore work with the ecosystem of partners, policymakers, governments, NGOs, to then advocate and shift some of the policies and practices to make this more effortless. Is it hard? It is, because sometimes suppliers say, you're asking us to do things that's going to cost us more. You know, how's this going to happen? But I have seen this over the last 10 years that while in the early stages you see enhanced costs, over a period of time, you see more benefits for the business than you can imagine. And I guess a lot of companies would feel that when you go into an ecosystem way of thinking, working with suppliers, even working with competitors, I mean, it's a new model because you're no longer in control. How do you do that? It's a great question. You know, this is all about new power. This is about learning to work through networks. You know, this is about learning to work without hierarchies. This is about being prepared to engage with anybody. It might be 18-year-old, you know, activist or plastic in a country. You know, one of the things we are doing in our leadership development is to build our leaders on their inner game of leadership and their outer game of leadership so they can lead in this new way so that when they engage with their suppliers, when they engage with their employees, they are tapping into new power ways of working, not old power ways of working. So, for example, we call the inner game of leadership is all about a sense of purpose and service. It's about learning agility. It's about a sense of resilience and personal mastery. And our outer game is all about consumer love and business acumen and passion for high performance. There are no guidebooks to tell you what to do in my country if I have to start a movement of catalysts. But if you have a strong inner game and you have a foundation of a sense of purpose and learning agility, you will find a way. You will find a way because of the audacious commitments and because you're learning agility. You know, one of the things we do with all our suppliers is share best practice because somewhere in some part of the world, someone would have cracked how to make plastic recycling possible. And then we shine a spotlight on that and say, hey, if that could work in Brazil, can we pick that idea and try it in Thailand? Or if it worked in Indonesia, can we pick up that idea and take it somewhere else? So the power of networks and community building teaches you to share best practice in real time and learn from each other so you're co-creating it together. From the bottom of my heart, for you taking time to have this conversation with us, thank you so much. The biggest gift for me will be this conversation catalyzing a movement among influential people. So, Steve, we heard Lena talk about something actually quite similar to Camilla in terms of the ecosystem approach that they're taking involving suppliers, you know, putting all of their people through this purpose workshop. and there is this, there is almost a little sense, a little voice in me. Like, you know, I'm the most cynical of days where I think sounds almost too good to be true. What about you? I think I was with her. She's a powerhouse and she is super authentic and, yeah, she represents a company that's admired by most other large companies. So, I know what you're talking about. I can also, I also have that voice in me but I was actually sitting with it afterwards and what I connected to was maybe it's just, you know, my own inner voice that, you know, I'm not leaning in to the extent that she does. I'm not, you know, sticking out my neck being as vocal as she is not just here but in general. So, there's a little bit of, well, I actually admire that and then on top of that, I mean, they are running, you know, purpose workshops with 30,000 people, individual purpose workshops. Why? Because they want to engage everyone into this and then connect that to the purpose of Unilever. So, I think there is an authenticity to this that is, that wins in me. Yes. And the fact that they put commitment out there for people to hold them accountable for, right? It makes it super hard to get back and say, you know, we tried. I mean, you know. And you train, you choose to train 65,000 suppliers, take them on a journey, educating them and so forth. I mean, you don't have to do that. You could say that's not us. We take care of our operations. They are catalytic, so, yeah. Yeah. In addition to Camilla and Lena, we've also asked Matt Snipper, the current CEO of Oersted, to answer a few questions. Stee actually interviewed him to talk about his experience as a CEO in different organizations and talk about that personal experience as a leader. He's been the CEO of Grundfos and just stepped into the position at Oersted. So we're going to get a very, very personal experience of MESS. I sense that organizations to a large extent are starting to ask themselves questions like, what is the biggest worthwhile problem we can solve with what we're able to do today? It's a wonderful question to ask and I think it's a necessary question. Whether it is that exact question, sort of, what's the biggest worthwhile problem, I guess my personal favorite is what would the world miss if your company did not exist? Because it circles around the same topic, that what you do as an enterprise and therefore by definition what all of us as employees are part of, is that truly meaningful or not? And I guess it's a reflection of the very privileged situation that most of us, at least in this part of the world, find ourselves in, that we do not only go to work to be able to have shelter and feed our children and we're circling in on what is the meaning, what is it we contribute with, what is it I want to be proud of and feel that it is worthwhile doing my very best, I think it's foundational for all of us as human beings, but I think it also holds a huge untapped potential for many organizations to be much clearer on. Is there something in our times that makes this more relevant now than it was five or ten years ago? For sure. I think we all realize that the world has actually seen progress on many important things such as extreme poverty over the past decades. Fact is that obviously with the man-made climate changes as sort of the pinnacle of those challenges, we are facing fundamental challenges both at a global scale but also in many societies that are threatening our way of life and what we are handing over to our children. This notion of us not just cruising around, looking into next year, into next decade, taking for granted that our children will of course be wealthier and happier than we were, that logic is no longer there and that means that I think at least many, many people thankfully are a lot more thoughtful about what we not only do but what we should do. Every single executive or leader that I know of already have more than a full-time job running their current business. Many people work a lot of hours already. It becomes sort of something you do next to a day job and I think we can all relate to that and reimagining the business like you said five minutes ago is almost something and say it's a privileged thing to be able to do that. That's when you take your executive team for an offside and say now we need to ask the big questions but in the breaks everybody runs out and say how can we solve the problem that's at hand right now. I'm not trying to take anything away from that because there's also sort of a deep responsibility and accountability in ensuring that what we do we do well because no organization can live from having a bunch of dreamers just talking about how great things could be. You need an execution ability so I guess what it is it's about all of us we should be better at compartmentalizing when do we do what and how do we equip other people better to be prepared for what needs to get done if we really want to transform the business. At least in theory now is this notion of that leadership to a large extent right now is an ability to deal with paradoxes which means there is no right or wrong you need to balance two different consciousness levels at the same time. Exactly. You're touching upon some of the most vital things I think in business but potentially in life even is that if you force yourself to an either or I mean either your company does good or it makes money I mean everybody knows that that's an absurd sort of contradiction but in reality you're often faced with both opinion internally and externally from the company but also real choices that actually forces you a little bit into that and everybody can say I should be both it's a lot harder than that so I think it's I think embracing paradoxes smarter than other people is one of the most important things you can do as a leader and I think it forces you to reflect Thank you Thank you, Maz You're welcome It was an inspiring conversation I wanted to be part of it like a little mouse in the background so sorry I couldn't be there But he's so thoughtful and so conscious It's super inspiring One thing that really struck me was this notion of I have to put my cards down here this notion of balance paradoxes, right? So running, changing short term, long term like he really puts a finger to this by describing how we're all like running around trying to solve the here and now and it's a privilege to deal with the future Yep Do you have like ah you know how do we get to a point where that becomes actionable what can we give the listeners all of the participants here to really think about this and implement something in their day to day life Yeah I think as an as an like he's searching upon maybe the most profound dilemma whatsoever running and changing and I guess at least for me I spent maybe 90% on running so on an individual level I think we need to make more conscious choices as to balancing our to do with our to be activities and energy and and today I mean outlook is running my life and I and I and I need more outlook real outlook and and I I need less zoom meetings and more zooming out so there's something on the on the individual level of of bringing a better balance to between to be and and and to do's do you have some concrete examples yeah I think interesting thing that that we've been experimenting with is when you have meetings in an organization separate those meetings into two sections half of the meeting on running the business and the other half of changing the business and do that all the way through the organization and even I mean I'm I'm actually getting to a point where even strategy you need to separate the conversations on how do we win from the strategy conversations on our more infinite legacy game as a as a company with a 30 40 50 year horizon those two conversations don't live well together thinking about generation yeah the short term wins all the time yeah and perhaps I mean we see some organizations already starting to give that question of short term strategy to the organization yeah to answer it as a collective exactly yes so we've heard three inspiring speakers to talk about their catalystic role that they've taken in their industry to really challenge the ecosystem of suppliers customers investors that they're working with they all touch upon one thing and that is the notion of and both the paradox and one speaker that really inspires us and talks about paradox as a principle to humanocracy is Gary Hamel he is a professor and business thinker alike no other we have ever seen we've worked with him for quite a while now and he's a dear guest of the house he's just published a book called Humanocracy and he is going to speak to Steve about some of those principles and how they apply to solving the biggest worthwhile problems hello Gary and thank you for calling in it's a great pleasure Steve glad to join it is it's always a pleasure to have these conversations with you I would like to start out with you know what is your we're talking worthwhile problems in relation to organizations I'd like to have your view on what are the most prominent the most important worthwhile problems to tackle in your view you know I think I should start by saying that Steve that you know every day businesses are solving an immense number of worthwhile problems you know if we take Denmark you know every day a vast array of businesses ensure that 6 million people get get fed and that happens without any government czar for food you know around the world companies like Apple and Samsung and Vodafone every day are asking how do we how do we help people connect with the ones they love how do we help them you know use apps and other things to navigate their way in the world I think of companies like BHP and Rio Tinto that are doing the incredibly difficult and dangerous work of digging things out of the ground that allow us to make computers and cars and so on you think of companies like NVIDIA and ARM and TSMC that have figured out how do you pack billions of transistors on a silicon chip that allows us to you know model the shape of wind turbine blades or to model the effects of a new drug or unpack the genome so you know by definition if you're a successful business and you're successful over time you have to be solving important problems now all of the time we have new problems to solve today so we worry about climate change and racial injustice and cyber security and feeding 7 or 8 billion people on the planet so there are always new problems out there but I have enormous confidence and trust in the power of entrepreneurship to solve these problems if we let that happen if we get out of the way and we create the environment in which this creativity can get unleashed I would say though having said that I think some truths need to be rediscovered by each generation and so perhaps right now the importance of purpose is getting rediscovered by a new set of leaders and also in organizations as they grow and as they mature it's very easy to start to mistake the scoreboard for the game and believe that the scoreboard of profitability is actually that's what you should focus on and of course it's not profitability is an outcome and it's a very important barometer of whether an institution is using society's resources in an effective way but profit is not purpose not fundamentally and so I think it's good to have these conversations about purpose and for me when I look at an organization's sense of purpose I'm looking for three things Steve my first question is it noble is it inherently worthwhile does that purpose speak to something that is deep in our hearts does it challenge us to make a positive difference in the world is it something that's worth sacrificing for and it will encourage us to persevere despite difficult challenges that's my first question is it noble my second question would be is it ambitious does it stretch us does it force us to go beyond the safe precincts of conventional thinking is it ambitious enough that it forces us to be innovative that it demands boldness I think the third question I would ask is and is it future focused is there real foresight baked into that aspiration is it leveraging emerging technologies is it proactive rather than reactive and does it challenge us to lead rather than follow so to the extent we're having a renewed conversation about purpose to the extent that every leader every organization is asking do we have a sense of purpose that is noble that is ambitious and future focused I think that's a very very important conversation to have thank you could you say a little bit about if you want to create an organization of problem solvers like you want to be good at solving the worthwhile problems and you want to create that organization both Novo talked about it but also other leaders are striving to do that so how do you do that how do you unpack that if you want an organization full of problem solvers so to speak Well that's such a great question Steve because getting focused on a big problem and committing your organization to making a real difference in the world that's certainly the first step but then the question is well how do you unleash the initiative the enthusiasm the creativity the passion of people in an organization to go tackle that problem now you tend to see this in startups right that are deeply committed to making a difference in the world I think of a little company based in San Francisco called Zipline which is working in Africa and it's using drones these are literally like little airplanes that launch off a little catapult but they're delivering by a little parachute they're delivering vital medical supplies in Rwanda in Ganda across Africa and so where does that kind of creative energy come that helps you solve a problem in a new way or to take a much more significant example you think about Tesla this is a company that set out to change the way we move that has this deep commitment to zero carbon transportation that proactively built an entire infrastructure of chargers around the world so we see this in startups we see companies that are fearless and bold and there's very little politicking very little bureaucracy and they've unleashed that capacity to solve problems but in most large organizations you don't find much of that entrepreneurial energy bubbling up and the reality is there are simply not enough startups in the world to help us solve these big problems right we need the large organizations both in public sector and private sector we need large organizations that are every bit as entrepreneurial as any startup so what does it take to do that well you have to flatten the hierarchy right you can't have five or six or seven management layers where people at the front lines are laboring under all these layers and all these rules number two you have to give people on the front lines more decision rights you have to let them have that gift of making real decisions you have to empower them in a real way you need to give them a financial upside in their work and the success they create you know the two kind of traits of every startup is autonomy and upside and yet we know Stia you know you've seen this data we know from a lot of data that in most organizations employees have very little real power and very little upside we know from Gallup that only one in five employees around the world believes their ideas matter at work we know that fewer than one in ten will say that they have the freedom to experiment with new methods tools solutions at work so the fact is many organizations waste more human capacity than they use and if we want to solve these tough problems we have to unleash that human capacity that means empowerment it means upside it means flattening the pyramid and it also means investing in the business literacy of every single employee so they have the skills they have the knowledge to make smart decisions so you know setting an aspiration is great but unless you unleash that internal human capacity that aspiration is very unlikely to be reached are you saying that we have some problems internally in our classic organizations that are actually worthwhile solving beyond external worthwhile problems yeah I think so or let me say it slightly differently it's going to be hard to solve these new challenges without unleashing the human capability the latent right the under under leveraged human capability that exists in our organizations again we know we know from data that only 15 1.5% of employees around the world are fully engaged in their work and what that says is they are coming to work every day they're bringing their physical selves they're there they're obedient they're smart they're diligent but what we are not getting what we are not getting is their initiative their imagination and their passion and there's little hope you know if you look at that the set of challenges we have to solve as a species and we talked about some of these already whether it's climate change whether it's racial injustice and so on if you look at these problems Steve we need we're going to need every gram every ounce every milliliter of human initiative and imagination that we can muster to solve those challenges so the fact that when you look at this data and you see that we are dramatically under leveraging that human capacity yeah that's that's a big challenge and so you know my my my my you know argument for a CO would be yeah talk to me about the big problems you want to solve in the world that's great but in the same breath I need you to talk about how you're going to get rid of bureaucracy how you're going to empower people and how you're going to unleash that problem solving capacity inside your own organization because if you're not doing that all of that grand ambition is is is mostly you know that's you know that's that's sentiment that's that's like feel good marketing but it's not you're never going to get there unless you turn on the the entrepreneurial capacity of every single human being at work lastly here I'd like you to to make at one time when we spoke you said life is too short to work on inconsequential problems I think you said that isn't that right I that sounds familiar okay and and so it sounds as if you have identified a worthwhile problem that you want to you know create a movement around could you what is what is that big worthwhile problem for you well you know talking about purpose you know yeah yeah well you know I'm I'm part of a little something we call the new human movement and it's a grand title but but and and but but the thought behind it is exactly what we've been discussing uh steve that that you know if if you look around the world right now there there's some fundamental challenges that I think lead us back to asking really deep questions about how how how how how we use people at work right we we see that across the OECD across the G7 productivity growth is coming down and that has huge implications for our ability to fund these new challenges and I think that turning around that that declining productivity growth means turning on the problem-solving skills of every human being we see that that that around the world people are losing faith in capitalism you know now over the last 40 years capitalism has reduced the number of people living in extreme poverty from more than 40% of the world's population to less than 10% and yet people are losing faith in capitalism because so often they see the rewards of capitalism going to the investor class to the CEO class rather than every employee having that financial upside and that chance to participate and to turn kind of dead-end jobs into get-ahead jobs so I think if you look at these bigger challenges that we face as a society part of the solution here is getting rid of these bureaucratic multi-layered disempowering you know rule-choked organizations that are simply no longer fit for purpose we need new ways of bringing people together to do collectively what we can't do individually and that is my passion and I understand Steve that many of these challenges we face today in our world they are systemic challenges it's going to be difficult for one organization to solve them you know alone or by itself and so we need to bring you know different groups together we need companies we need government we need investor groups we need unions we need the consultants we need the business schools all of you know we need to come together to solve these difficult problems and then we have to be very smart about what are the different levers that we can pull here right how do we create the incentives for people to take on these new challenges how do you create real accountability how do we need to change our accounting system so we can start to measure these problems and measure our success what are the new models that we need to be holding up that will inspire us you know what do we need to change and how we train people and and and and and particularly how we train leaders what are the new tools and technologies we'll need to deploy in our organizations and and and and and how do you go from here to there so we're trying to work across that entire landscape recognizing that you know any one of us can only do so much but but together I think we can solve these very very challenging problems but it requires a deeply collaborative approach where where you don't think you have all the answers you're very humble and you're eager to partner with others thank you so much Gary it's always a pleasure when you when you share your insights with us and I can't wait till next time so thank you so much thank you Steve super inspiring as always unleashing human potential that's what it's all about in order to solve a problem we need to be able to engage other people and in fact to be catalyst in that we need to be able to create movements and in a moment Susan will be back and she will share with us her experiences in creating real movements in fact she will tell us the steps we have to go through to be movement makers but before we get to that we'll allow you a little break and in the break please think about the following question where can you be a catalyst in your organization move to a new Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And you might have been a little provoked by Gary's thoughts on how much there is still left to do to really unleash that entrepreneurial energy in your organization. Well, now we want to get to the question, how on earth do we do this? How do we create change movements? How do we create change that feels like a movement? The effort of that? A worthwhile problem sets free energy and creative potential in the organization. Imagine what your organization could accomplish. Imagine what you could create and sustain with that sense of ownership. Imagine if you could set free that energy that you just felt in your organization. It would be amazing to change something, wouldn't it? So why now? Why do we need to think differently about change? We are currently seeing that managing change, it doesn't work that well anymore. And why is that? Let me walk you through three shifts that are currently ongoing that will act as conditions for change movements to become more successful in organizations. The first shift is about the problems we face. Going from technical challenges that are very clear defined in scope and can be solved by experts and then rolled out. To adaptive challenges that almost change in nature as we're starting to solve them. So we have to work with the people that are closest to the problem. Besides the problems we face, we're also seeing a second shift. And that is in the structures we operate in. From hierarchical rigid structures with set responsibilities and clear frames of job descriptions. To fluid, networked teams that operate temporarily to solve a problem in small project teams. And thirdly, you see a shift in power dynamics. Going from formal, old power that is nestled in authority. And you know, it's about how long you've been in the organization and therefore you have more power. Into informal, transparent, fluid power. That moves like a current through the organization and gains momentum the more people join. These three shifts are creating the conditions for change approaches to be fundamentally questions. We can no longer sit in a room with three people thinking we can predict and plan for two years ahead and then roll it out into a disengaged crowd. I don't want to deny the existence of classical change management approaches. If you do have a technical challenge that can be solved by experts, by all means, take the steps and make it happen. But if you are going to change your organization in a way that requires people to take ownership, which you could argue any behavioral change does, well then simply we have to rethink the beliefs and the assumptions we have about change management. Rather than change being done to you, we need change to be done with you or even better, by you. So in order for this to happen, we need to check our assumptions. And I would like for you to check these assumptions along as I read them out to you. If we want change to be like a movement, you need to believe that people have more to give than we know, and they will take responsibility if we let them. You also need to believe that everyone is a change maker and a problem solver with a perspective worth exploring. And lastly, you also need to believe that the best change initiatives, they will emerge through the collective and they can't be forced into existence. I know it's a lot to unpack. And I myself find myself being challenged by these assumptions from time to time. As a leader, in your understanding and your role, you might be thinking, but where am I in all of this? What is my role in change movements? If you're a project manager, you might be wondering, how on earth would I align and coordinate all of these chaotic change things that are going on in the organization? And if you're an employee, you might be thinking, this would never work in my organization. Or you might be thinking, finally, she gets it. Somebody lets me talk and have a perspective. Whatever it is you're thinking, we've actually asked these questions to organizations and representatives that have been on this journey, that have actually created change movements. But before we start exploring these questions with them, let's have a look at how change movements unfold. Change movements are essentially about two things. They are about talking and doing. Talking is about connecting, co-creating, rallying a community of like-minded people. And doing, well, it's about experimenting, trying something out, actually doing something together. So imagine a group of engineers sitting together over lunch and talking about the challenges they have at work, realizing every time they have lunch together, they can solve so many problems because they're together and they have these different perspectives that they bring to the table. Over the next couple of lunches, they kind of start to co-create this idea, this dream. What if we could create something that would actually make this easier to do in our everyday life where we're too busy to sit and have coffee and lunches together? And someone has been on a course and he comes back to the lunch and says, actually, I've heard about a company doing this. Let me try to figure something out. And without any approval or process, he just goes and starts prototyping a platform. People become curious as they start seeing this platform taking off and really adding value and benefit to the organization that these people are working in. And somebody starts asking, why don't we do this for the whole organization? What's holding us back? And someone jokes and says, why don't we do this for the whole population on Earth? And that's exactly what happened. NASA created a platform where all of us can crowd solve challenges together on how we can better explore the universe. This centennial challenge has been around for over 10 years now. And they've done a lot of research of who actually used this platform in NASA the most. And it's no surprise that it's exactly the researchers who have the belief and assumptions that I just talked about before. Those researchers at NASA that believe that we, all of us, have a perspective worth sharing and exploring, that we can be problem solvers, they are the ones engaging and utilizing this platform the most. So if movements are about talking and doing, then what are the changes? What are the stages? How do movements unfold? Let me walk you through the three steps. The first step is about ignition. It's about sparking an ambition that people can set their energy behind, that they can feel passionate about. It's not something you force into existence. It's not something you tell people to do. It's people co-creating a dream that they can all get behind and then start to experiment on. As they're starting to experiment, you enter the emergence stage. That's where you see small changes happening on a small scale, but nevertheless important enough to create learning and evidence that something needs to change. It's almost like the DNA of the culture of an organization slowly evolving by taking little bits and pieces out and replacing them with something new. And if you do that multiple times, and you rally more people, and the community starts gaining momentum, well, then at one point, you reach the tipping point where you can no longer be ignored. And that's the third stage of a change movement, diffusion. And in that stage, you can no longer operate in the underground. You have been visible enough to create so much change in the organization that it becomes a new normal, a new way of thinking, a new way of working. But let's spend a little bit more time on these stages, starting with ignition. When I was a little girl, I would fall in love daily with the stars in the night sky, with the softness of my favorite pillow, with the sand falling through my fingers in playgrounds. I fell in love with charming ladybugs and mysterious caterpillars, with my magic yellow crayon that would always draw the sun with my one-armed teddy bear who never won. I had a heart twice the size of my body, and I gave out pieces of it, and I shared it gladly. I would fall in love with the taste of French toast on Sunday mornings, and I would sprinkle my toes with powdered sugar. I even fell in love with the dragon trapping the princess. But I was still not sure if I liked the prince. After all, he was a boy. When I was a little girl, I would sing daily. I would sing myself in armor and sing myself superpowers, sing myself stronger for every hour. My voice got bigger and my words got bolder, but I was told, you'll stop this when you grow older. But I would just serenade the monsters under my bed to make them smile. I would fearlessly memorize all the lullabies to sing my dolls and my walls to sleep. I would sing in the car, sing on the bus, sing to the trees, sing to the sky that always listened, and the clouds always clapped, and the raindrops would always cheer a little voice who had no fear. Now, all grown up, I understand that fear eventually catches up. We may not notice when it happens because we don't know it's fear. We just think we're busy. We're all so busy. So busy that we forget to tell each other stories. So busy that we observe the world behind closed doors hoping for change. So busy that newspaper headlines build homes and our heavy brows, and we forget that what truly matters is right now. And I admit, there are too many tired days that hold us back. Days where your inbox is overflowing with gentle reminders. Days with bosses determined to test the limits of your patience. And don't get me started on that one colleague who always calls to check if you've read that email he just sent a minute ago. Now, all grown up, I understand that being the change you want to see is hard work, but necessary. Just thinking about it is movement. Talking about it makes it grow. And working together towards something that will make you forget just how busy you are is creating community. So let's talk about the uncomfortable and the unfair. I promise you that the silent tongue has gone out of style. I promise it's worth your while to let your words tumble free. Let us do better by building playgrounds and workplaces to spark ideas that defy borders. By making sure that our time together becomes a story worth telling. By not growing up so much we actually forget to grow. Now, all grown up, I finally understand that the reason why I write poetry for endless hours is to hold on and never let go of my childhood superpowers. Talk about sparking and ambition. Thanks, Sarah. We have spoken about igniting a movement. And thanks to Sarah, I hope you understand that a spark isn't ignited in your head. It's ignited in your heart. So what is important in this stage of ignition? It's important to co-create together with other people what the ambition you have is so that the energy can rally around that ambition together. You also need to be clear on what are you moving away from and what are you moving towards. And lastly, you need a trigger moment to set free that energy that you have now created. And when that energy is there, we enter the next stage of a change movement, the emergence. And I have spoken to three organizations that have been on this journey, that have experimented, that have started movements. And so, add Tony's Chocolonies, you set out to disrupt an entire industry by creating a movement. So you could argue that it started as an external movement and then was translated into an internal change. How did you do that? Well, by being slightly outspoken, slightly willful, a little bit hard-headed and very skeptical about how things were going until then. We were not hindered by any former knowledge of the chocolate industry and simply launched a company not to become a chocolate company, but to become an impact company. So you've grown tremendously over the past 15 years. How has this bold external approach shaped your internal culture? Could you share a few examples? We work on a very serious subject on a day-to-day basis. So we tried to make that work as fun as possible. And when I was head of people and culture, I always used to tell my team, you know, this is the one team that doesn't work in the company, but that works on the company. How can we grow as a company, but at the same time still remain flexible and fun without too many procedures and processes? We changed our contract into a one-page ticket of trust, which has no competition clauses anymore in it because we're convinced that if anybody wants to do what we're doing at a different company, then go for it, right? Because in the end, it's about a movement of change for everybody. Now, over to you, Vivek. You are obviously working for a much larger company, Denfoss, and you talk about these three elements, structures, processes, and mindset and behavior. Could you elaborate a bit more on how you use these elements in self-managed teams? From a structure point of view, what we did was we were actually inspired from holacracy and sociocracy and we changed our traditional hierarchical structure to a decentralized circle structure. From a process point of view, we really worked with performance feedback in teams and actually set up 360 feedbacks with process guidelines and tools and templates. And thirdly, from a mindset and behaviors point of view, we invested in the team by training them in doing conflict resolution in teams and how to handle conflicts. You talk a lot about self-managed teams and you've obviously implemented that. And the one question I get a lot from leaders is, what is my role? Am I not going to be made redundant? And so, I am curious, Vivek, if you could elaborate a bit more on how are you spending your day? What is your role as a leader? Yeah, you know, I think that's a very pertinent question. I think a lot of people are sitting with that kind of, I think, a misconception. In my viewpoint, self-management requires more leadership from all than no leadership. I can spend less time on operations and day-to-day part and spend more time on the strategic thinking and looking ahead. I think a lot of my fellow leaders would complain today that they wish they had time to spend on the strategy and the long-term thinking because their calendars are booked in with many operational decisions that they need to take. And that's where I would welcome them to let go of those decisions and say, okay, which of those decisions do they really need to make? I can tell you, just to give an example, as with everybody during Corona periods, you know, we had to consider cost restrictions. And while my peers were, you know, sitting in the corner with their finance controllers and making the cost calculations and the planning, you know, actually I handed over to the team that, you know, this is the goal that we have to deliver. And actually it was one of our project managers who assembled the team together and came up with the list and said, this is the, this is the final savings list. I actually was not in agreement with some of the items that were on the list, you know, but they said, you know, Vivek, we know the business more than you. So, so please go ahead and this is the commitment from East Earring on the savings that we had. Now that's really important to highlight. The fact that even though you didn't agree with your project manager, you trusted him, right? Because he's much closer to the problem for him to take that decision. A lot of people use the word, or especially a lot of fellow leaders say, you know, I have empowered my teams, but, but I would challenge them if they cannot show some decisions that their teams executed on, which they did not agree on. That's real empowerment. Otherwise, it's approval. You cannot say my team is empowered to take decisions, but, you know, when it comes to this decision, you know, I agree to all of them. If you agree to all of them, that's an approval, not empowerment. Lena, I'm curious about your approach to unleashing the creative potential of your organization being so many employees at Unilever. You know, firstly, you've got to believe that valuing and unleashing human contribution is far better than wasting human contribution. You've got to believe that as leaders, that it is important that our people are engaged and aligned and they are getting 100% of their selves to work. The other thing you have to do is give a venue for people to contribute, you know, create much less bureaucracy, allowing people to bring their ideas on how to make the world better to each other and to teams that are working on it. Could you elaborate a bit more specifically on how you create that space so that the ideas aren't sitting on the shelf collecting dust? Let's say you discover your passion for plastic. You really want to work on plastic and make sure plastic in this world is a lot less. We have a platform called Flex, which is our internal marketplace tool where you can put your hand up and say, hey, I have capacity. I want to work on plastic. That's what my purpose is. And people who have stuff to do in plastic can say, hey, I'm working on some interesting projects to recycle and reuse plastic. If you have capacity, would you like to come and work with me? And I'm happy to report that 10,000 people have discovered through this Flex platform stuff they're passionate about. Some of them do it full time. Some of them do it on top of what they're doing. Some of them do it for part of their time. But 10,000 such matches have happened. Now, over to all of you, what advice do you have to change makers, other activists that are sitting in organizations right now with an idea for change? How do you get started? Inzo, what about you? I would say there's two angles there. One is the realization that you're never too small to make a difference. Never, ever. Right? The second answer would be focus on your team. I'm convinced you can only reach that humongous goal in our case of 100% slave-free chocolate by having the most committed, engaged, inspired, and energetic team you can imagine. Really focus on having the right people in there, enabling them to make that change and having a lot of fun along the way. And Vivek, what about you? I think start with getting started yourself, right? So start to change with yourself. When I interact with a lot of my fellow peers inside and outside the company, I think I can sense this, if only the CEO decided to change the organization or if only the divisional president decided to do this X, Y, Z. and honestly, most people and my peers, they have enough flexibility and decision-making authority to change their department, their teams. And the question is why don't they do that? Why don't they start with their teams and themselves? Exactly. And Lena, how do we get started? You can't sit in the old mindset, in the old leadership, in the old ways of thinking and expect to lead for a new world. You've got to shift your mindset. You've got to shift your leadership style. You've got to shift your beliefs about how to make change happen for you to lead in this new world. Thank you so much, everyone. So with the help of Insel, Vivek and Lena, I hope that you've come to realize that there are multiple ways to do this. We just have to get started. That's when change will emerge based on the ambition that you've set out. So in this stage of emergence in a change movement, what is important for you to keep in mind? It's important to stay open to new ideas, new perspectives, new ways to solve this problem that you have set out to solve. It's equally important, as Lena was referring to, to have a platform for people to share and come together and exchange, so that the experiments that you might be running don't stay isolated incidents in different pockets of your organization. And lastly, it is important to create visibility through stories. Tell the stories. Go out there and take the time to talk to other people of what you are doing. And if you do that enough, you actually reach the tipping point, which is the last stage, diffusion. And I'm super excited to talk to Zahed from Lego and Otti from ING of how they scaled the movement in their organizations. Thank you. welcome to our panel discussion. We have with us Zahed from London and Otti from Amsterdam. So thank you very much for joining me in this short conversation together. Pleasure. I would love to start with you, Zahed, with a short question to start us off with. We've now heard about the notion of starting a movement, sparking an ambition, really getting together to create that narrative, co-creating an ambition that we're striving towards, experimenting in small units, starting to feel change happening in the organization. And you've been on that journey with the leadership playground, which is, if I may rephrase what the leadership playground is, a fundamental change in how you think about leadership in Lego, in the Lego group. So you've been on that broad journey and now you're really pushing into scale. What are the next steps for you to take on that path of a bottom-up change process? Yeah, no, great question. Thank you very much. And you're right, I think the way you've articulated is spot on. One of the key instruments in helping us to embed this leadership playground within the organization has been our use of a movement. In our case, we called the people within the movement Leadership Playground Builders or Builders just for short. And we chose those on a basis of volunteers. And at the end of the process three years ago, we managed to recruit nearly 1,000-plus volunteers from all across the business, from both our salaried organizations, but also our production and also our retail stores. People who were volunteering, who were ready, who were influencers in their own way, but ultimately they were passionate about creating change within the organization. They formed with us to help us spread the new behavior framework across the organization. And so that's been running in three years. We're now into year four. And one of the things that we're thinking about is how do we continue to fuel that movement? What do we need to now do to ensure that it continues to be successful? Even though it is without control, so a movement that has existed for us is not done by direct supervision or direct management. We let it grow organically, but we do accept that actually we need to stay around the edges and we need to do a few interventions once in a while to make sure that the movement continues to have energy. So in that spirit, there's three things we're working on this year. One is we need to maintain momentum, energy. So we do a refresh process of that movement every year, right? We accept that folks within the movement may grow busy, tired, leave the business. We do need to overhaul membership every so often, but we want to make that, we want to give that choice back into the community themselves. So they get the option to what we call stick or twist. And when they twist, they hand the baton to somebody else that they choose to do. So they own that process. Secondly, we recognize we need to continually augment the purpose of the movement year on year. When it started three years ago, it was all about creating momentum and energy, right? There was no other purpose other than go out there and talk with a lot of energy, a lot of personal impact. But this year around, or this time around, we're now focused on what is the intent of this group now? What is the problem to solve? So we're very specific this year. And then thirdly, this is new for this year, we want to give back. So we recognize over the last three years, we've been getting a lot of great help on a volunteer basis. And we recognize that actually in order to continue to help playground builders to feel that they are getting something else from this experience, we've been thinking a little bit about what could we offer them this year. So we're hopefully spending a little bit of time to upscale them, build capability, so that actually joining the community, you are, yes, part of a change movement, but also you are getting something tangible in return for your time that you invest in the community. So being part of a movement, meaning that you're actually investing time, but gaining personal development, you're gaining network, you're gaining access to people you probably would have never had the chance to work with, but also gaining new skills that will make you more relevant to the organization and to the professional job market as a whole probably. Completely, completely. So you do get a sense that if you've invested time in this community, you walk away not only having created or helped spearhead change within your own sphere of influence, but actually you walk away actually better for your experience. That's the whole thing. That sounds very interesting and I'm intrigued to follow along how those three new acupuncture points that you've picked to expand that movement, how they play out in the next couple of months' time. Now over to you, Ati. You've been part of a long journey on agile transformation within ING, but also have been studying and really observing a lot of movements and how change unfolds. I'm curious to your perspective of when we really talk about bottom up change, so change that is not driven top down, it's not forced into the organization, but it's done by people, with people. What are the major challenges you've seen? Brilliant question and Zahid, very insightful. So I think what we are talking about is really nurturing that energy that Zahid and the team described, that they've been able to conjure up, so to speak, and mold that into something which is not only bottom up, I would suggest it's top down and bottom up, but more important, it's owning the changes, ever adaptive. And I think in what I've seen, acknowledge some phases in the build up. And for me, the first one was always building the community. And I think Zahid describes that also. You cannot do that only top down, you need to do it also bottom up. You need to create connections, people need to start to get to know each other. So we had a volunteer movement which we called the Musketeers, for 300 to 400 people across countries who were doing the same, purpose, engagement and learning, in order to connect people. The second stage on the journey, I think, is around collaboration. So you turn these connections into meaningful kind of working together systematically so that people know who to call and who to talk with in order to harness the power and the energy across people. And that requires, as Bill Torbert is always saying, if you want to have learning at scale, you require both order and freedom. So you need to install some means to frame that. And I think Vivek talked about structures. So you're looking at taking the formal authority of the pyramid and putting it into more flexible team-based structures like holacracy or sociocracy and so on. But you need to do that because otherwise it's going to become a blocker. And secondly, I think you need to invest in routines and rituals and the skills of the people to enable what we call generative dialogue. And that implies that people need to listen to each other, learn from each other, but also challenge each other. Conflict management, when so many people with different opinions come together, is something really important because conflict is also creative destruction. That's where innovation lies. And very often organizations, that conflict is rather suppressed and put under the carpet, so to speak, rather than being harnessed in order to spark innovation and new thinking. And then I think there comes the element of going from collaboration to co-creation. And co-creation is more painful because people give up something of their own, their resources or their ideas to create something for the common good, create something together. And for me, that is mainly a question of culture. So you really need to spark interdependency in the culture where people kind of subject, so voluntarily limit their own freedom for the purpose of the good. And I think starting with psychological safety, but also investing in kind of the active caring for others and triggering vulnerability and trust is really important. And of course, I think Lina talked about leadership. In that phase, it's critically important that we have leaders who can let go of their desire to control and rule and actually start to hold the space for this emergence. Because one of the other key challenges to your question is also that very often what I've observed in agile transformations is people don't acknowledge that leadership becomes a lot more difficult. And it's about kind of holding the space in a responsible fashion. It doesn't mean dropping all of your accountability on day one. You need to nurture that agency to self-learn and collectively learn inside the organization. And then consecutively, so to speak, let go of that power and hand it over to the teams. So those three things I would say. Building the community, establishing the collaboration framework, and then creating a culture that really drives co-creation. Yeah. Thanks, Otty. You know, you mentioned learning as a key element. And Zahed, you've also already alluded to upskilling as a key element of, you know, developing people, but also creating almost like a return of investment to them joining the movement and being ambassadors of that. What role, generally speaking, does learning play in a transformative movement, such as the one that you are currently undergoing? No, I guess the question is to me, Susan. But it's a super point, and it is a really fundamental point. I mean, we are attempting to change the organization's culture, not through smoke and mirrors, right? This isn't just a group of people running around, doing things that they want. There is purpose to them. There is intention to the group as well. So there's two things that we look at, right? One, it's a recognition that it's important to, you know, my phrase is to arm your movement with something substantive other than positive energy. So this is where the upskilling comes in. And the upskilling relates specifically to what is your intent with this group, right? What do you want them to achieve? You know, for us, we had several, we had several aims all kind of chunked down over the various years. But in one of our recent years, we wanted to help embed this notion of experimentation. Or, you know, in its more simplest form, we wanted people to be more curious. We wanted people to learn more. We wanted people to accept mistakes, accept failure, and to kind of build on those as well. And then we felt that actually the practice would be experimentation. So that became the aim of this movement. So this movement was tasked to go and spread this, evangelize this message, if you will. So we invested heavily within this group, within the organization, with upskilling, with upskilling programs to talk a little bit about, you know, what's the 101 on experimentations? How do you take a concept so big, and how do you make it digestible by the organization that large? And the other point to remember here is that although, you know, learning is a critical factor here, but we're not talking about, in this instance, learning deep. We're talking about learning at a very shallow level. But at a very broad level across the organization, right? It's kind of marginal gains theory in that sense, that if we can get everyone across the organization to do one experiment, more than they did any time before, then that's 10,000, 20,000 experiments that are happening in the organization. Net-net, that's a positive, really big impact for the organization. So learning, I think, to keep it short, learning plays a big, big part in what we're trying to do. And coupled very quickly with this notion of support from the leader, right? There is another element to this as well. You know, what role does the leader play in terms of learning to support the person in the community, their leader? We've coined the phrase in Lego what we call the power of two, recognizing that actually the playground builder is often a person who is without line authority influence. they need the backing of the leader. But as Oti kind of referred to a little bit, there is a evolution at play in terms of leaders' role in this context. You know, what is that traditional role of the leader in this context and what does it need to be? We're finding and we're spending a lot more time upskilling leaders as well to support the movement. So not just people within the movement, but leaders outside of the movement, how do they support and feed and fuel their people who are part of this to be more successful? So someone stepping down, letting go, and someone else stepping up and sort of jointly co-creating at a similar step on a ladder if we're going from a very hierarchical thinking. I love that. That's very beautiful. Thanks for sharing that, Saeed. You're welcome. I would love to, at the end here, just get your viewpoint on a question I've been sitting with a lot. So if we are encouraging in organizations more change from the fringes, you know, as we call, I think there's someone describing it as positive deviance. Something that, you know, we have to let go of or challenge or change, but it's not happening at the center. It's not happening at the top. It's happening somewhere in the organization. How do we best pick up those signals and amplify them, give them space, hold the space, Otty, like you were describing? describing. How do we best do that? What are ways for us to nurture, to respond to the sensing of those signals in the organization? Otty, what's your viewpoint on that? Again, a very interesting question because by definition you don't know what's going on. And I think, again, kind of going to how do we actually understand something is happening? I think the first thing is the energy changes. People don't blame each other anymore behind their backs. They start to take care of each other. And I think Ben Zander once suggested that the only true measure of leadership is shiny eyes. The sparkle in people's eyes, that's really what we want to evoke. And not only for the purpose of the mission, but also to give people meaning and an ability to do something important in their lives. And I think having the connections between people, but also maybe fostered through knowledge management systems or kind of peer-to-peer coaching communities and so on, we can certainly bring out those ideas that come from the fringes, like you say, and bring them into this mechanism that Zahid described. Right? So we have experimentation, but at some stage we need to figure out are there some good things here? Exactly. Are there things that we should stop? And then scale those things. So we need a process for that in a also relatively kind of rapid fashion. So I think combining those two is indeed important. The other thing, again, I want to go back to this notion of nurturing from a leadership standpoint, as Zahid already described it. I think in this kind of enabling all of the teams to become leaders themselves, an organization which has many CEOs, so to speak, where agency becomes activism requires much more sensitivity and also vulnerability on behalf of the leaders to be at the sides of those teams rather than imposing solution and certainly continuously understand what is needed next in order to develop that agency and also kind of ensure that people have the development that they personally and individually require in order to become part of a whole. And this individualistic notion that we sometimes find in organizations is something that we really need to look at because at the end of the day we want people to co-create out of their own voluntary desire to do so. Yeah. And Zahid, in the last 30 seconds here, what is your response to sensing and nurturing those signals that people are sending? What would you say? Yeah, no, I have a very similar response to what Otty talked about. And just to be additive in this question, I think there's two aspects that we look at, right? You know, sensing. Is it sensing to enable change or is it sensing to control change? If it's the latter, then there is an acceptance that I think leadership and organizations need to kind of get attuned to is that actually the more you do to control, the less likely you will actually achieve what you were trying to achieve. So the signals specifically that we're looking for, you know, one of the things that we do is ensure that the leadership of the organization, the board, are sending clear signals that actually we are champions of this way of working, this way of thinking, we permit and we accept. And that's they're not explicit to us, but by their actions, they're enabling the organization to go do. And that's the important thing. And then what we're looking for from the organization, from this community and this extended community are signals of self-direction. Where is that self-organization happening? There are lots of examples of where, you know, where it got to a phase where an idea was generated, then it stopped because it needed approval. We're now starting to see that dissipate. So actually ideas all the way through implementation or within that community. And then the last thing, and I'll close off, is how do we determine success? What signals are we looking for that this is happening? Stories. I talk about stories as our currency of success, our KPI of success. You know, the more stories that have been self-generated and being shared in their own way about this and about their experiences, good or bad, the more likely your movement and this way of thinking is becoming more and more pervasive within the organization. Thank you so much. Thanks, Sahed. Thanks, Otti. Hopefully the listeners here are also encouraged to share more stories based on what you've just described here and have been inspired to think differently about movements and how to scale them and how to nurture them in the organization. So I thank you so much for spending time with me and all of the people here on this event. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks. So we have now taken a deep dive into the three stages of a change movement. You've hopefully gained a better understanding of the steps that you need to take in order to unfold something that you're really passionate about with a group of people into a large movement within your organization. We talked about igniting an ambition, co-creating that spark to then experiment with a small group of people in your environment to see the change emerge in the organization. As you rally that community and make more experiments happen, you will start to see your change diffuse in the organization until it reaches that tipping point of scale. So with those steps in your back pocket, we've asked you, what are you going to be a catalyst about in your organization? What's your passion and purpose? getting started starts with you. It doesn't start with anyone else in the organization. You have to move. You have to do something. And in order to inspire you to see what change is actually possible if you just get started, we're going to go back to Bjarke Engels, the architect behind the company of BIG, to see his passion for the topic that he has brought to life in his work. But before we do that, we're going to give you a little break. You might need some refreshments, coffee, water, whatever it is. So we'll give you some time for that. And as you're going into that break, I would love for you to reflect on one question. What is the one thing that you can do to get started? See you soon. How rises? On e***g, We have to experience Woj M Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome aboard. Thank you. And thank you for having me in this beautiful ferry. My pleasure. Do you have any idea what we're going to talk about? I have some ideas. I think we're going to reenact a conversation we had six months ago. That's right. When the weather was for being above deck. We're going to have a conversation that actually origins back six months and where you shared your dream about a master plan for the planet. You can say the big thing that's going to happen in a biological time scale. I think people's eyes glaze over. I think people's eyes glaze over when they talk about 2050 because it feels like it's quite far into the future. But it's kind of funny. We're doing a project for the master plan for the Smithsonian. And the whole project rollout is more than 25 years. So we're going to be done with that project. So in that sense, as an architect and a master planner, you are used to actually working in those timescales. So suddenly we were thinking, OK, maybe this idea of making a master plan for the planet could be a useful tool to take all of the necessary actions and basically think about all of Earth as a single entity. And we were thinking maybe this could be a productive tool that we could somehow give to the world. And similarly, for the master plan, we were thinking if we could really make the master plan for the whole planet by collecting all of the existing technologies, all of the existing strategies that we all know exist. And then basically organize it so that we have a single blueprint for the whole planet where we can show that if you do this, if you invest not an infinite amount of money, but exactly this much money, you're going to get exactly this return. And you're going to reach carbon neutrality. It's going to require a lot of work. But if we start now and we follow these phases, we can get there. And simply by sort of taking that almost like pragmatic and utopian idea and starting to work on it, we suddenly started seeing that it started generating a feeling of, you know, we can totally do this. I always thought of myself and of Big as being brave in a way that we were not afraid to do things differently or to ask different questions or more difficult questions. But in a certain way, we have always been traditional architects in the sense that we were waiting for someone to ask us to solve a specific problem or design a specific building. And then once we had that invitation, we would use that invitation to bring in a little bit of our agenda. But we were somehow always relying on someone else's initiative. And also at first when we started saying like sort of, shouldn't we just try to apply architectural thinking and master planning at the scale of the planet? And we said, oh yeah, we could see that there would be some use for it. But then our first thought, OK, let's apply for a grant for someone to pay us to do it. Because that's how we think. And then we just realized, actually, let's just try it a little bit for, you know, on our own to see if there's any merit to it. And the amazing thing that I feel it has done for us is that it generates a lot of insight already. And it also generates a kind of certainty in our smaller project or like in our other projects that like in a way we've sort of said that everything we do has to be consistent with the master planet. Because if it's not consistent with the master planet, then it's not creating the future we need. And I think that the ultimate reframing is to zoom out. So even if you're doing a small building or a little master plan for a neighborhood, it has to somehow also be part of this bigger holistic thinking. Like sometimes you say that, you know, the act of making science fiction by writers or filmmakers imagining the future in fantasy or in fiction, they end up actually inspiring engineers and entrepreneurs to make those fantasies into reality. I think one thing that has happened in my mind is that when we started out, you know, we came up with the idea of pragmatic utopia, but it was probably more pragmatic than utopia in the sense that we thought, you know, each project has to happen on the conditions of this is how the world is. And then within that framework, we try to tweak certain things. So there's a tiny glimpse of utopia or a different kind of world within a framework of how things are. I think today, maybe I believe a little bit more in the fact that the future will be radically different and will be transformed by these technologies. Like for instance, in that sense, the last couple of years, we've been working with NASA on designing the first building on the moon and looking at making a habitat on Mars. And of course, like five years ago, I would talk about that as a fantasy. But having spent so much time thinking about real world problems of building on the moon with melted or sintered moon dust, suddenly you start seeing yourself in a reality that involves these things. So I think in that sense, more than ever, at least we have the confidence that the world actually becomes what we make it. Thank you, Bjarke. A real pleasure. It was a pleasure. Thank you for playing along. It was actually nice to connect back to that talk. I can imagine. It was super inspiring. And I think his infinite perspective inspired me. I mean, very rarely do we have a 25-year time horizon as leaders. That was inspiring. And also the turn from being reactive to proactive, stopping by waiting, you know, some impulse from the outside. Just acting. But what about yourself? What did it do to you? I mean, I wasn't part of the conversation. But just listening to him and that vision. He talked about pragmatic utopia. Yeah. It's hard to imagine, but thinking about Bjarke, one man, thinking about putting a house on Mars, I'm kind of left with this feeling of, shouldn't I be a little bit bolder and more daring in my life? You know, I don't have to go to the moon, but I'm sure there's plenty of chances for me where, you know, I go into a meeting or I go into a conversation and I dare a bit more and I'm a bit more courageous. And, you know, thanks, Bjarke. Thanks for inspiring me to think like that. And if you were bolder, you know, if you were a bit more daring, what would you do differently based on that conversation? I don't know. I mean, I called Bjarke immediately after. Yeah, I did. Because I want to be a part of that. Right. Yeah, and I want to implement to be part of that. So it created that spark in me. Really, it did. So he's just one man. You're one guy. So you can be two. If we're two, I mean, we're going to save the planet, right? So two guys, I guess it's a minimum. So that was what it did. Yeah. In a moment, we'll have another rebel with us. Francesca Gino is going to be our second thought leader. And together with Susan, she's going to unpack how do I connect to and own my inner rebel? How do I get to that? Good. Thank you. Thank you. Francesca, it's so nice to see you. Even though we are not able to sit physically together, I'm really excited to talk to you. Same here. Thank you so much for having me, Susan. So we have now spent time unraveling some of the biggest worthwhile problems solving. We've talked about change as a movement and how we can become catalysts in our organization to solve them with a different approach to change management. But if you look back, we've talked a lot about society, organizations, less so about us as individuals. And that's really where the change needs to happen. So you've written a book, you've done a lot of research on the topic of rebels at work. So I would love for you to spend a bit of time on why should we be a bit more rebel at work, Francesca? Absolutely. We often think about these rebels the wrong way. When we close our eyes and we try to picture the rebels in our own organizations, we think of the people who are contrarian. So sometimes we talk about them as people who tend to show off or they're jerks, even worse. But in reality, rebels, at least the rebels that I was interested in studying and understanding better, are people who break the rules, not just for the sake of breaking rules, but they break rules that hold them and others back. And they do so in a way that is positive and constructive. So I'll give you an example that to me was very inspiring. And it's the example of a chef, an Italian chef called Massimo Bottura. He is the owner of a restaurant, Tostria Francescana, that not only is a three Michelin star restaurant, but in 2016 became the best restaurant in the world. Moment of Italian pride, by the way, since it was the first time a restaurant, an Italian restaurant reached the top of the list. But the chef went to traditional Italian dishes and reinvented them. He came up with very innovative spins of these traditional dishes. And if you think about it, that's a very courageous act because as Italians, we truly cherish the recipes that our grandparents and our grandmothers have passed on to us. And they've been doing that for centuries. And there are also lots of rules when it comes to cooking. We might not have lots of rules when it comes to speeding or parking legally. When it comes to cooking, we do have a lot of rules. And so it was very courageous for him to go to that context and start asking a lot of questions. Why is it that we cook dishes this way? Maybe it made sense five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, but not today. And I think it's very refreshing to have this type of mindset. For Bottura, traditions are well-received. Experiments. Let's think about that for a second since that's a powerful quote right there. For him, traditions are built to be rebuilt. And I think there are way too many organizations where we just take the usual ways of working for granted rather than coming in and being curious. And rather than being complacent, we are actors of change. That's what the constructive rebels are all about. Nice. And I totally agree. You know, you hear so often in organizations, that's how we've always done it. This is how things are done around here and nobody really questions. And then you come in with fresh eyes as someone who's just started and you think, but why? Right? And so I would love to poke a few of these excuses or misconceptions I often hear, but I might also have in my head a few times, Francesca. I have to admit, sometimes I'm also the one thinking that. So here comes the first one. My first excuse. What difference will I make? If I'm just one person, I'm small, I don't really matter, I'm insignificant, how can I possibly make a difference in the organization or the team that I work in? I want to answer with a quick story. And it's a story of a leader in a context that is all about not rocking the boat. And in fact, the culture in this organization is highly bureaucratic, very hierarchical, and you actually are supposed to follow the orders. And there is a clear chain of command. So this is a leader in the United States who is part of a group in the Air Force called Squadron 99. And he came to the group three, four years ago and he looked at these people and said, if we really want to achieve our mission, which is to be combat ready, we need to do things differently. We need to embrace our inner rebel, if you will. And the first thing that he did was to define the boundaries. So he asked everyone in the squadron to go and study regulations really carefully. But then he gave them the freedom within those constraints to act, to be curious, to bring in their perspective, to come in with all sorts of ideas. And what I think is beautiful about this leader is that he's behaving very different from many leaders that I've seen across all sorts of organizations where that's the excuse that I hear. I'm one person in a very large organization. I can't make a difference. But if we actually go back to this squadron, if you look at the number of innovations that came out of that group in the last three or four years, amazing. They now have contracting that is similar to the private sector rather than the public sector. Or they have all sorts of apps that the pilots developed developed for their planes so that they can be in the air and do things more safely. And it all started with one person. And other parts of the military and the government more generally are now knocking on their doors because they want to see how is it that he was able to produce such change, such powerful change in such a context. And so to people who say I'm only an N equal to one, I would say let's behave like this leader and get started. Let's not sit and wait for others to make changes. Let's be actors of change ourselves. I love that. The notion of giving freedom but in a context of clear guardrails. What if those guardrails are kind of reinforcing the opposite of what we're actually trying to achieve? So the other excuse I often hear is that our system is just not built for activism. It would actually hurt my career to go out and do something and try to change something. In my performance review it would be a negative point for me to be promoted. That is an excuse that I hear a lot as well. And what I think is behind that is skews. It's the fact that we think of rebels as people who are arrogant and they aren't. One of the ingredients in the rebel that I studied that is really an important one is a perspective. So it's the fact that you're coming to problems or situations not with just one view which is usually our own perspective but with a broad way of thinking. Really looking at the problem from all sorts of angles. and what that means is that when you have an idea or you don't like something about what your organization is doing or a process that is commonly followed rather than going in and say I have a better idea that's trash what's there you come in with respect. We come in with a deep understanding of what's there. if I look at why I find Massimo Bottura to be such an inspiring chef and leader really is because he showed that respect towards traditions. He went and studied them carefully but it's through that understanding that he was then able to suggest something different. But let's not forget perspective and let's not become arrogant as we're bringing in our idea let's come from a point of respect for what's there. And when we do so we're not going to be judged negatively for our actions. I hear humility in what you're describing right? So coming from a place of humility but offering a different perspective is so crucial in how you're being perceived. The last excuse that I often hear and this is the one where I'm also thinking I fall into a lot is the one that but I'm simply too busy. I have so many different plates to juggle. If I do one more thing I am just going to be completely overwhelmed. So the notion of just feeling like I cannot do one more thing even if I'm passionate about it. When I hear that excuse which again is very common the story that I think of which is the story that I tell in the book is the story of a captain who became famous across the globe for something that is now known as the miracle on the Hudson. So this is Captain Sally Saldemberger who back on a cold evening in 2009 had 208 seconds to make a decision. That's the definition of very little time. So the story is about his plane leaving LaGuardia Airport and just a few seconds into the flight the plane hit a group of geese and he was left with no thrust in the engines and he had to decide what to do and what I can tell you knowing a lot of what the psychology research or even physiology research would suggest is that at a time when he was under a lot of pressure time wise he didn't have a lot of time but also he had 150 passengers on the plane so imagine the level of stress and anxiety that you're feeling rather than doing what most of us would do which is tunnel vision go to the most obvious answer which for him would have been landed the closest airport he kept broadening his view and considering alternatives he was listening to alternatives from the air traffic controller he was working with his first officers in the cockpit with him and he kept considering alternatives removing them quickly but broadening his view and he came up with a very ingenious solution which was ditch the plane in the Hudson River everyone was safe and to me what's really important about this example is that we don't need a lot of time to think creatively about doing things differently but what we do need is this sense of broader perspective when I interviewed Captain Sally Sullenberger because I was truly impressed by his way of reasoning under such time pressure what I discovered is that over the years as he was accumulating lots of expertise and experience he had built a beautiful habit for himself he would walk into the cockpit and ask what do I stand to learn today how is it that today flight could be different he was always thinking not about what should I do but what could I do and by doing that it was quite an experience but also holding on to his humility so for those out there who think I just don't have the time I would say think about Captain Sally Sullenberger it clearly demonstrated that we can embrace our inner rebels even under all sorts of time pressure thank you and you know I think it's a great end statement we don't have to be chefs we don't have to be pilots but we can bring different perspectives we can open and broaden our minds in situations where we don't have a lot of time so in 20 seconds Francesca what would you suggest for those of us that are listening to you speaking here that what is the one thing they could do tomorrow to start being a bit more rebellious at work I would say start by noticing the very processes or ways of working that you're taking for granted and bring in more curiosity start asking questions we were all born that way let's remember when we were little kids and we kept pushing boundaries asking all sorts of questions from that sense of wonder let's go back to that perfect thank you so much for your time I'd love to talk more and thank you for joining us it's such a pleasure thank you Susan we have now spent a couple of hours sharing perspectives on how do we make our organizations fit for humans and fit for the future and us being consultants this might be the time where as the audience would expect that we'd come forward with these are the six steps to happiness that's not going to happen because there are no six steps to future fitting your organization but there is hope though because one thing that we've learned doing transformation for 25 years is the following and that is change starts by changing conversations so therefore instead of six steps to happiness we have a couple of conversation starters that we hope you'll have the courage to use in your organization so let's look at those conversation starters and they might look slightly familiar because actually we've been exploring them together with the first question we would like for to bring back into your organization what is the biggest worthwhile problem we could solve the second question we would like for to take back how can we make change feel more like a movement and lastly where could we be catalysts now Steve said change starts in conversation and conversations happen in organizations so we believe organizations have the power to change the world just a little bit so if you've been inspired whether sit in R&D in engineering finance whether are in a small team or the CEO of the company take these conversation starters to ignite something in your organization to get going and if you've been inspired like us by the people we've spoken to like Camilla Lena Mess Bjarke Inso Otti Vivek Zahed Francesca and Gary then please remember to take that energy to be a little bit more courageous and if have that little bit of extra courage then connect to a worthwhile problem treat change like a movement and be a catalyst so there is no transformation highway we all have to find our own way yes one of the most inspiring proverbs I heard recently and I haven't found a brilliant translation into English but in Spanish it's Caminante no hay camino which which means which means is no path make way by walking it and essentially pave the path by walking it way we have been on a learning journey together and we have one last gift for you in less than a minute you'll be hearing a musical performance by Chorus Grand And if you have anything to give back to us, we would actually like to encourage you to listen, reflect, and write your commitment in the chat. On behalf of everyone in Implement Consulting Group, thank you for spending time with us. See you soon. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. For, for, for, for, it's too common to our nest. But the idea was so insane I shouldn't mention it again.