The world of work is no different. But, in this instance, I often get a sense from talking to people just how many have made their compromises unconsciously.  They started out perfectly sanguine about what was required from them and what unwritten contract they made with themselves. Before they know it, they have fallen into a routine of long hours, commuting, endless unproductive meetings, bureaucracy, and hierarchies.  Work has, for many, become a straight-jacket from which it is difficult to escape until, that is, a way has been found to exist without money.  Until then, the need to pay mortgages, school fees and holidays provides a constant reminder to keep working.  It is a necessary evil although, as C S Lewis reminded us, we should never mistake necessary evils for good.

Businesses also incentivise people to stay.  That can only be a good thing, right?  Well, I see so many people who continue to postpone what they really want to do until their long term incentives pay out.  These LTIPs or CNCL (crap now, cash later) as I call them, have the effect of rewarding the wrong behaviour. The famous Marshmallow Test experiment of Walter Mischel tried to test whether a child’s ability to defer gratification (one marshmallow now versus three later) could predict the strength of their willpower.  These long term incentives, rather than spawning improved performance, have a habit of encouraging people to keep their heads down and stay past their sell-by date. I also see people who have stayed so long that they’ve forgotten what it is that they made those compromises for in the first place.  It’s a bit like the reverse of Wilde’s Dorian Grey.  In this instance, they’ve grown grey and gaunt after a lifetime of work and now barely recognise the portrait in their loft of them as a young, thrusting person with an ambition for life.

All this occurred to me as I recently read the latest Julian Barnes’ novel, The Noise of Time.  It’s a quasi-biographical novel about the life of the Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich.  It is fascinating and can be read on many levels.  But it is essentially about the compromises that Shostakovich makes, both personally and artistically, in order to survive in Stalin’s Russia.  As Barnes said: “If you saved yourself, you might also save those around you. And since you would do anything in the world to save those you loved, you did anything in the world to save yourself.”  Of course, I am not in any way trying to compare corporate life with the heinous Stalinist regime, but this is, I feel, as good an insight as any into the nature of compromise.  People at work do, consciously and unconsciously, make sacrifices that eat into their very nature.  And so much so that they move inexorably away from being the person that they used to be.  Again, as Barnes says in the novel: “…one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.”

Staying true to our dreams and ambitions is tough, because life does require us to make compromises.  Life can never be a straight line.  But having a sense of one’s non-negotiables – those values and needs that we will not forgo – can help us enormously to navigate our way through life.  It is important for us to be conscious of those decisions rather than let them sink below the surface only to re-emerge when it’s possibly too late.  And that requires a high degree of bravery.  As e e cummings said; “it takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”

Perhaps the starting point is the difficulty that many of us have with our understanding of nationhood.  In Sapiens, one of the seminal books of the past few years, Yuval Noah Harari reminded us that nation states don’t actually exist.  They are myths entirely created by humans.  Boundaries are artificial and have changed regularly throughout history.  The existential crisis facing Europe as its borders crumple under the weight of refugees and economic migrants is a case in point.  And even when the borders are fixed it does not follow that everyone inside is onside.  The very essence of being, for instance, British or American can vary substantially from one part of the country or, indeed, from one part of a City.  For me, my interpretations of British values as being fair play, free speech, a love of literature, crosswords, Jermyn St, the English choral tradition, and irony may not ring true with everyone else.  That is because rather than nationhood, it is the shared values of our tribes that sustain us.  Whether we like it or not, we are all the same; but we make sense of that sameness by finding tribes of people like us.  We carry around with us multiple tribal loyalties that help us make sense of the world. For instance, the worldwide cadre of rugby supporters are a tribe of like-minded people, passionate about their country and the game.  And within that stratum there are sub-strata of club loyalties, towns, professions, politics, religions. Our multiple personalities are important to us in different ways at different times.  Europe is therefore only one of many identities that play to our sense of self, but unlike with Tesco we don’t necessarily carry around a loyalty card to prove it.

Given the complexity of identity it can be problematic for those trying to whip up interest in a subject of only passing interest to most people.  And it is here that the politicians are failing.  Their approach to the debate has the effect of turning more people off than on.  This is because they are communicating in entirely the wrong way. The debate is currently entirely rational and factual.  Both sides have bucket loads of facts at their disposal and each have their captains of industry and celebrities lined up.  Like Newton’s 3^rd law of motion, every argument is met with a counter argument of equal force.  The effect in this case is white noise.  Faced with this cacophony, most people just switch off.  Politicians may be shouting at the top of their voice but we have them on mute.  And of the small number who are engaged in the debate, most are likely to be suffering from confirmation bias, seeking out arguments that confirm their existing prejudices and ignore anything that conflicts.

Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind may have felt that facts alone are wanted in life, but the reality is more complex.  And here business leaders have the edge.  They are becoming better at understanding how to frame a story.  They know that few people jump out of bed in order to increase shareholder value.  Rather, they appreciate that they need to communicate in a way that tugs at the emotional heart strings. Employees need a narrative that shows how they can prosper in an organisation that cares for them and where they can thrive in a mutually-supportive environment.  Picture painting and storytelling along these lines can be highly effective in helping people adapt to changing circumstances. Likewise, negative messages, precisely because they also hit our emotions, can also be equally forceful.  This is why so much of political campaigning tends to be negative.  They know that most people don’t like change and are risk averse.  Hence, the focus on what a scary world we live in.  It may be a negative vision, but it works precisely because it is firmly grounded in emotions and not data.

Which brings me to my own view of Brexit.  The truth is that whatever the rational arguments that the facts and data purport to show, no-body can possibly know what’s in everyone’s best interests.  There is no precedent for either staying or going and so both decisions are equally fraught with opportunity and danger.  The future is, we’re always told, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous and so any decision will be risky. Therefore, perhaps the best option is to continue to huddle together to stay warm rather than leave the camp and set out alone.  As Belloc said: “Always keep ahold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse.”  And that is perhaps the best example of a negative emotional image that you’ll find.

I did not know Wogan (although I did bump into him a couple of times) but his passing did give me pause for thought. However, it is worth stating that, like all previous posts, this is a blog about leadership, coaching and communications.  But the point is that Terry Wogan presents a remarkable case study. He may not have recognised it, but he was an extraordinary leader with millions of followers who loved and admired him.  He was also, it seems, universally liked by everyone who worked with him and he treated all his teams with the utmost respect.  Let’s be honest, there are very few CEOs who could claim a legacy anything like that.  And so we need to ask ourselves why that was the case and what others can learn.

Wogan’s style was warm and gentle.  He was unthreatening.  He told stories and he treated all equally. He possessed, it seems, the most extraordinary gift of putting other people first.  And he was genuine.  There was only one side to him.  He himself made the point that there could only be one Wogan because in order to be successful on the radio you had to be yourself and that meant being yourself when you were off-air as well.  As CEOs and leaders search for authenticity they could learn a lot from people like him.

But enough of him, where do I come in? The truth is that I always used to think of Wogan as rather naff.  I never listened to Radio 2 because it was naff. Blankety Blank was naff, Children in Need was super naff, and the Eurovision was the acme of naff (before, of course, becoming post-ironic).  It therefore took me a long time to recognise just how good he was, and how hard he worked to make it all seem effortless. He never took himself seriously nor his audience for granted.  And when these elements of his projected personality came through I realised that there was more to admire in that man then in most so-called leaders.  And so to the legions of leadership qualities perhaps we can add those Wogan traits: story-telling, self-deprecating, hubris-free, light-hearted, generous of spirit, genuine of mind, and always putting others first. These, for me, are the characteristics of true leadership.  After all, as Mark Twain said: “Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”

We’re all guilty of not changing our mind.  We’re slaves to confirmation bias where we seek out information that confirm our views and ignore facts that don’t comply.  We let our hot cognition dominate our executive functions; we favour fast thinking over slow; and we’re too often swayed by emotions over logic.  To be fair, it’s not just that we’re stubborn.  The paradox of choice means that the more things there are to consider the more anxiety we feel about the decision-making. So it’s often far better to stick to what we know rather than venturing out into an uncertain world.

Political affiliation often produces fixed thinking.  As WS Gilbert’s First Lord of the Admiralty sings in HMS Pinafore: “I always voted at my party’s call and never thought of thinking for myself at all.” Slavish adherence to ideological positions may make for more efficient party management but it doesn’t encourage independent thinking.  On the other hand, the debate on Europe that is just kicking off in the UK provides an interesting case study of what happens when a degree of latitude is allowed.  Stayers and leavers are found across the whole political spectrum.  The right is as likely to be split on the issue as the left.  And how are we to make up our minds?  Both sides have their supporters (eminence gris, academics, economists, business leaders, and celebrities).  Each side is able to lay out irrefutable evidence in the form of facts. If confirmation bias doesn’t get us first we’ll all probably either be using our fast thinking or we’ll take the easy option and opt out altogether.

Anyway, the point of all this is that last week I changed my mind.  There’s an issue on which I’ve moved from being implacably opposed to being implacably curious to being implacably contemplative.   The issue is that of a universal basic income.  I’ve always thought that the whole idea was rather silly.  I thought that such an idea went against all my principles of self-resilience; that it would encourage the wrong behaviours (including free riders) and that it couldn’t work. And then the Royal Society of Arts (disclosure: I’ve been a fellow for 20yrs) produced a very thoughtful report.  The idea has supporters (and detractors) from across the political spectrum, so rather than picking a response off the shelf I had to do my own thinking.  My journey from closed mind to potential advocate allowed me the opportunity to challenge my thinking about welfare, self-motivation, fairness, the nature of work, and of citizenship.  I’m still thinking, but the more that I think and read about it, the closer I become to changing my mind. [You can read the RSA report here http://bit.ly/1PwyDJ1 together with a blog from @RSAMatthew http://bit.ly/1OkrLgQ]

So how about, as a New Year’s resolution, a bit less fixed thinking and a bit more recognition of the benefits of changing one’s mind.  It can all be rather refreshing.  Out with the old and in with the new.  As Isaac Asimov once said: ”Your assumptions are your windows on the world.  Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”

And so it was that two things caught my eye this week. The first was a report, which appeared on Quartz.com, of a Canadian academic study which claimed to have found a proven link that shows that people who buy into pseudo-scientific quotes are less intelligent.  As they say: “Those more receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.” (http://bit.ly/1XMAb6W)

The second thing I read was a line someone posted on the benefit of motivational quotes which stated that miserable people produce miserable results.  This point was, I felt, not only devoid of any factual underpinning but completely fatuous.  It certainly scored high on my bullshit barometer. To imply that only happy people can produce good (happy?) work is naïve.  Think of the great artists who have struggled with varying degrees of melancholy and depression: Blake, Conrad, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Gaugin, Van Goth, et al, and not forgetting the self-portraits of Rembrandt, works that seemingly penetrate the very soul of the human condition. Personally I find the PPP leadership model (Perpetual Polyanna Personality) irritating.  Excessive and, often, contrived positivity can be draining. Similarly, I once wrote about the downside of open-plan offices and extrovert-driven brainstorms.  The reality being that it is often the quiet, focused, pragmatic, realistic, introverts who are most effective.  The endlessly positive motivators miss the point of both true leadership and of the human condition.  One of my favourite writers, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, has written extensively about how foolish the pursuit of happiness is.  He describes it as being wildly unrealistic and unconsciously destructive.  Realism and unhappiness are as important to our sanity as happiness which, he says, should be a side effect.

So where does this leave the workplace happiness industry?  For me happiness in business should be, like employee engagement, a consequence of doing the basics well.  Rather than focus on initiatives to address (un)happiness, the attention should be on what really matters: being well-paid, well-respected, involved (agents of change not objects of change), and with the time and the tools to achieve realistic goals.  In other words, a pragmatic, realistic and grown-up approach to the workplace in place of the ra-ra focus on endlessly uplifting motivation.

And where does this leave motivational quotes? How about this one from AA Milne, creator of that famous curmudgeon Eeyore: “A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself.”

The UK General Election in May 2015 produced a result that few had expected.  One of the outcomes was the virtual disappearance of the LibDems.  At the time I predicted that it could mark the re-emergence of a new political force based on the original Social Democratic Party of the mid 1980’s (the fact that there are no signs of life to date is yet another example of my lack of prowess as a soothsayer).  My premise was based on the fact that all political parties are coalitions and that as the right and the left inexorably move to take up more polarised positions, there will always be fertile ground in the centre.  Some rightly say that the Conservative party has moved to take much of that ground, although recent events in the Labour Party, together with the forthcoming referendum on Europe, leave me fairly confident that my prediction has a fighting chance of becoming reality.

Political parties are good examples of silos.  They are rigid, tribal, hierarchical, and self-reaffirming.  They encourage collective thought, group think and, as a result, confirmation bias.  In a Manichean way, they divide between their position, good; and that of others, bad.  They preach to the converted, see what they want to see, and hear what they want to hear.  Not only are they disenfranchising people who see them as of growing irrelevance to their day-to-day lives, but, more importantly, they’re not very effective.  As Christopher Hitchen said: “The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has – from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.”

The world that we live in is both complex and ambiguous. Issues that affect us have a habit of being inter-twined and often intractable.  Our small island faces challenges that are supra-national, long-term, expensive and existential.  Many of these challenges defy traditional ideological compartmentalisation.  And yet despite huge advances in technology and methods of organising, we’re still using a political process designed in the 18^th Century.  Our political parties are organised to have non-negotiable positions which they put to those in the electorate who can be bothered to vote.  The party with a winning mandate (based on first-past-the-post in 650 unequally sized constituencies) try and manage their response to these complex issues through a party machine.  It does seem as if we are using old tools to fix new problems.

The business world is waking up to similar challenges.  In a global, disruptive, Uber world, corporations are facing threats to their very existence.  The models that they have used to organise and manage their affairs are having to be rethought.  In fact, the very idea of organisational design is being put to the test. We may have thought that specialisation and organisation was the way to success but now we’re having to reconsider whether what we gain in efficiency we lose in effectiveness (Gillian Tett’s book, “The Silo Effect” is an excellent read on the whole subject). Social technology is slowly seeing the end of hierarchy, command and control leadership, and vertical silos.  The best companies recognise that the route to success is paved with curiosity, collaboration, challenge, dissent, and action.  Solutions are created most effectively by groups of inter-linked people who come together specifically to solve issues.  Having teams for the sake of having leadership team meetings doesn’t work any longer.  They may have the responsibility but the power left long ago.

We no longer benefit from silo thinking and silo organisations and, indeed, we no longer need to.  Social technology can provide us with far more effective ways to come together to solve complex problems.  What this means for business is becoming clearer (non-hierarchical, self-organising, social teams).  What it means for politics is far less clear.  However, what is certain is that we could all benefit from taking a look at all issues from outside whatever social or political silo we find ourselves in.  As Bertrand Russell said: “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”

Self-limiting assumptions

We’ve all been guilty of saying that we can’t do something.  And we’ve all felt rather glum when someone far less capable gets up instead of us and does it anyway. It is surprising how many of us create reasons for limiting our own brilliance.  As Herminia Ibarra says in her excellent new book Act like a leader, think like a leader: “No one pigeonholes us better than we do ourselves.”  We sit in our self-imposed silos waiting for permission.  Sometimes it is because we can’t see a way out; but, more often than not, it is because we are reluctant to feel the pain that comes with leaving our uncomfortable comfort zone.  Nietzsche said that we have a choice between: “…either as little displeasure as possible…or as much displeasure as possible”.  The road to success is paved with difficulties and obstacles.  Perhaps that is why people prefer to stay where they are and be grumpy rather than risk the real pain that is required to reach the top of their personal mountain.

Bad habits and lazy thinking

“Alas” as Ovid said “I suffer wounds made by my own arrows.”  I came across that quote in Montaigne’s essays and it struck me as a powerful reminder of how often we sabotage our own brilliance through bad habits and poor thinking.  Montaigne added “In the past, when Cretans wished to curse someone, they prayed the gods to make him catch a bad habit.”  These bad habits can be both behavioural and attitudinal. Sometimes we allocate our personal resources to things which perpetuate the current situation rather than help us get to where we want to go.  Likewise, our attitudes can become fixed, repeating the norms of the past rather than moving with the present.  For instance, if we wish to reinvent ourselves for future success then we may need to invest in new skills, new networks, and new attitudes.

Gnothi seauton

One of the many reasons that I like Ibarra’s book so much is that she is counter-cultural in her thinking.  So many of today’s management books talk about leadership and authenticity and yet she neatly, and not before time, turns it on its head.  Leadership, she says, doesn’t come from authentic self-knowledge; rather, it comes from self-action.  Too many inward journeys lead to nowhere in particular, whereas you become a leader through acting like one.  As she says: “When we are looking to change our game, authenticity is an anchor that easily keeps us from sailing forth.” This is a marvellous kick up the behind for those of us who have been focusing too much on personal values at the expense of living them.  Quite rightly, she reminds us that it is through doing that we become who are.

True leadership

As regular readers will know, I often write about how, when it comes to leadership, so many people seem to have got the wrong end of the stick.  Leadership, as promulgated by business schools, the media, and head-hunters, seems to consist mainly of colossuses who bestride the world acting as decision- makers in chief. This myth helps sustain large hierarchical bureaucracies but has little to do with the real world.  It is important that we re-appraise what we mean by leadership if we are to live out Ibarra’s maxim and act like a leader.  Leadership is not about making decisions: it is about creating the environment in which decisions are made.  Leadership is not about being the most important person in the room: it is about making everyone else feel that they are the most important.  Leadership is not about what you say: it is all about what you do.  And, finally, you do not have to have people to be a leader.  A 13-yr old girl who is the sole carer for her disabled mother shows more leadership skills than many CEOs.  Leadership is about personal behaviour and attitude.  Make those changes to your own life and people will gravitate towards you.  Ibarra tells us to spend more time doing leadership.  And rather than wait, she says: “Start now. Act now”.

The first thought I had was about the nature of school itself and two issues came to mind.  The first is that we streamline children from an early age in to specialisation, and that specialisation tends to be replicated by a silo mentality in later life.  The second issue is that schools tend to focus less on encouraging children to think and feel, and place more emphasis on teaching them to pass exams.  This has a number of consequences.  Whilst Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times felt that “Facts alone are wanted in life”, most people recognise the value in letting people learn to think for themselves.  Information is not the same as knowledge, any more than knowledge is not the same as wisdom.  Specialising on certain topics and focusing on the information needed to pass exams is not what education is supposed to be about.  Perhaps that is why so many people in later life feel something missing, almost as if the treadmill of their life has led them to the wrong destination. As Paul Merton said: “My school days were the happiest days of my life, which should give you some indication of the misery I’ve endured over the past 25 years.”

A number of books recently made me think about how wide our thinking and behaviour can be were it not for early specialisation. One was Do no harm, a memoir by the neurosurgeon Henry March.  He worked as an orderly in a psychiatric hospital, and took a degree in politics and philosophy before training first as a doctor and then as a neurosurgeon.  His book is a wonderful collection of observations and studies collected over his career. But one feels that the richness of his life puts him at odds with today’s medical intake of straight A students.  Surely it is not only the depth of his experience and skill but the breadth of his knowledge that brings his humanity to his patients.  Think also of the number of our political leaders who have gone straight from university in to political research and activism, and then straight into Westminster politics.

The other book was On the Move, the autobiography of the late, great Oliver Sacks. On the surface, one could say simply that Sacks was a neurologist.  But he was much more than that.  Rather than specialising in only one aspect he was a polymath neurologist, switching his focus from sleeping sickness, to Parkinson’s disease, to migraines, to epilepsy, to music, and countless other neurological conditions and illnesses.  He refused to be pinned down and allowed his professional curiosity to wander at will.

Then there was the book by the Canadian bibliophile Alberto Manguel called, appropriately, Curiosity. It made me think of how many people see education and learning as something they’ve left behind at school and college.  Curiosity is one of the most under-rated human characteristics.  When we stop asking, why we lose much of the connection with our place in the world.  The explored life needs to be one of continuous learning, seeking afresh new ideas and new insights; challenging old thinking and following our nose to find new and rich seams of knowledge. To be fair, our lives and our upbringing are stacked against us.  The academic streamlining that we suffered at school (science and maths on the left, language and history on the right, and music and art in the middle) have morphed into streamlined careers.  At any social function, count how long it takes before someone asks you what it is that you do.  And even at work, we’re often stuck in departmental or functional silos, each with its own KPIs and objectives.

So this September I would recommend taking the opportunity to revisit your own curiosity.  If you feel a sense of being stuck in a rut or of being too comfortable in your surroundings, rather than moan or blame your schooldays, revel in the September back to school feeling and revisit your dreams and aspirations.  It is good to check in with one’s real self to see if one is leading the fulfilled life that one wanted all those years ago before the treadmill took on its own momentum.  Curiosity is a good starting point.  Be curious as to what you really think and feel, and what your true ambitions are.  And then, who knows, perhaps you’ll become curious as to what a leap of faith looks like.

Listening is fast becoming a lost art.  Conversations, whether during business meetings or dinner parties, are too often one-way exchanges of information.  People rarely talk with each other; rather, they talk at each other when it’s their turn.  Other people are so pleased with the sound of their own voice that they rarely, if ever, let the other person get a word in.  When they do pause it is simply to reload. Being on transmit-only is endemic in the business world, with so-called leaders spending their time telling people what to do and what to think.  The clichés of communication being a two-way activity and of using our one mouth and two ears in proportion tends to fall on, well, deaf ears.  There are a number of reasons for this.

The first reason, it seems to me, is the sheer volume of noise in our everyday life. Rather than respond to this constant cacophony by being quiet, we seem, instead, to simply talk louder.  Noise generates more noise.  Look at the number of people on public transport and walking in the street who are on headphones. Their response to the general hullabaloo of the modern city is to replace it with other sounds.  It’s a veritable arms race of discord.

The second reason is the speed at which we live our lives.  Everything happens at such a breakneck pace that it affords little time to invest in listening. Slow listening is much more difficult than fast talking.  Listening is hard work.  It requires taking the trouble to want to be part of the narrative that is being shared.  Real listening involves using not just one’s ears but one’s eyes and whole body.  It is more than being merely interested.  And real listening is more than hearing.  Hearing is being aware of groups of words and sentences. Listening is an altogether deeper experience where sometimes the true meaning comes in the silence of words that remain unspoken.

The third reason that I think we’ve all become such poor listeners is due to a collective sense that we have to have a point of view.  Our egos seem to need to constantly demonstrate their importance by having things to say.  One organisation I know says that they don’t mind what you think, only that you have a view point.  To be fair, they take that position as a way of encouraging dialogue. However, the collective egos of modern society demand that we all have views on the causes and the solution of everything from the Greek debt crisis, Ukraine, European migration, and every other micro and macro issue around.  The result is that our egos encourage us to talk and talk rather than stop and listen.  When I catch myself pontificating on subjects beyond my ken I get a little tap on the shoulder from Wittgenstein reminding me that whereof one cannot speak thereof one must remain silent.  And my new muse is Montaigne, who said – and I think we could all benefit from having this as our motto – “Que sais-je?”

Stopping to listen brings enormous rewards.  It also is an act of generosity, allowing people to tell their story.  And it is always good to give the ego a dose of humility by reminding it that there is much to learn from other people.  However, like all things that are worth doing, listening is a skill that requires practice. As the great Raquel Welch once said: “You can’t fake listening. It shows.”

2,500 years ago the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said “There is nothing permanent except change.” In doing so he rather unintentionally launched the School of business-speak clichés. Also permanently with us, it seems, is the change management industry.  Businesses need help, apparently, in finding ways to monetise content in an age of free, or bricks and mortar in an online world.  Everyone needs help in rightsizing or in creating new business models that take account of globalisation, sustainability, and increased competition.  The solution, it appears, is to call in the change consultants.

Scratch the surface of change management and you’ll find a whole eco-system buzzing with buzz words, and a methodology for every madness. Everywhere you look there are solutions looking for problems. There are the big consultancy firms who arrive with pantechnicons piled high with partners and associates, ready to fill you with awe at their intelligence and to make you dependent on their systems.  There are the experiential experts who want to help you bring your brand and values to life by co-imagining a future state.  Then there are the organisational designers, with their reporting lines, the programme managers with their Gantt charts and Excell sheets, the HR experts with new processes and procedures to replace the old processes and procedures, the communication experts with their engagement and leadership visibility programmes, and the behavioural psychologists…and on it goes providing Dante with enough new material for another circle of hell.

I exaggerate, of course, to make a point.  But here are some serious tips.  Firstly, whatever you do, approach change as a natural, evolutionary process and not as a programme. And never give it a name as to do so will only serve to remind people that there were programmes before and, more likely than not, there will be programmes afterwards.  Secondly, you can’t create change (although you can create disruption) but you can create the climate in which change happens.  And this leads to the most important point: change comes from within.  Given the right circumstances changes can occur spontaneously and straightforwardly.  In order for this to happen a new approach to leadership is required, one that sees its role not as that of making decisions but one of creating the environment in which decisions can be taken.  It also requires a style of leadership that recognises that words are a poor proxy for behaviour.  Rather than telling people what the new behaviours are, success comes from living them.  Change starts and finishes with the self.  Get that bit right and you sow the seeds for sustainable change. As Tolstoy put it: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”