For me, development starts with a desire to understand. To ask questions, explore perspectives and take what we discover seriously.
Explore.
Experiment.
Implement.
I had a colleague who would always add “and the right music!” whenever someone said “it takes two to tango”. In all organisational development, structure and culture are the dance partners. Both lead and both follow. The music comes from a curious question: what does it take in our organisation to build a business that continually earns its customers’ trust and its employees’ wholehearted engagement?
In change, curiosity means genuinely listening to the people doing the work, examining what we take for granted and staying with questions that have no easy answers. But curiosity needs to lead somewhere: to shared choices, clear responsibilities and action we can follow up on.
We assess the current situation. We need to understand the problem at its roots. That means peeling back the layers to get to the heart of the matter.
What is the underlying problem? What do we need to understand better to make a decision?
A direction becomes useful when it helps us set priorities. What needs more attention? What should we stop doing? And what must we, as a leadership team, be fully aligned on?
What choices do we need to make? What do we need to deprioritise to deliver on what matters most?
How we listen, explore different views and make decisions shapes what we can achieve. We need to work on both the issues facing the organisation and how we work with them.
How do we become a powerful enabler for the organisation? How does our collaboration help us take even greater responsibility for the whole?
A plan can point the way, but development happens through what we do every day. The next step needs to be concrete enough to try, review and adapt.
What will we do differently when we leave the room?
Being open to other perspectives also means being willing to reconsider our own. We need to ask uncomfortable questions while taking individual and shared responsibility for moving forward.
Which questions are we avoiding, and what are the consequences?
Continue the conversation