Welcome to our panel of discussion. And we have with us Zahed from London and Otty 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 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 it 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, Ryan, or this time around, we're now focused on, you know, 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, right? 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 hopefully that gives you a better idea. Absolutely. I think 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, you know, those three new, I would say like 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 know, 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. And 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 Zahida, 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, you 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 then 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 in 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. Yeah. But it's a super point. And it is a really fundamental point. I mean, we are, we're 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, big, 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 side. 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? 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? Otty, 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 Oti 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. But 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're champions of this way of working, this way of thinking, we permit, and we accept. Right? And that's, they're not explicit terms, 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 been 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. It was a pleasure. Take good care. Thanks.