How to Drive Purposeful Change

We are in a period of time where businesses need to be more emergent, innovative and adaptive, so leadership must become more about empowering, empathizing, encouraging interconnections, innovation, learning, reciprocating partnerships and engage in an active network of feedback. As such, the aim of leaders becomes more focused on nurturing conditions to be able to unlock its creative potential, learn and flourish in a purposeful and coherent way.

In today’s article, we look at a few tips on driving a purposeful change within the organization.

1.Communication: To commune with others, really listen and share with our peers and stakeholders within and beyond the organization by creating collaborative networks that do more than just brainstorm by having the remit to prototype the future.

2.Innovation: Within the organization ‘accelerator skunkworks,’ ‘incubators’ or ‘innovation hubs’ operate like cocoons in stealth mode (Google X, for instance) where bright, out-of-the-box innovators across the organization can engage in entrepreneurial explorations, with the support of the organization to invest in these prototypes, testing them out before the activities are either spun off or integrated into the main business.

3.Diversity in the boardroom: Yes, we need more diversity and inclusiveness in terms of age, gender and race – yet also in our ways of thinking – by bringing in non-conformists that provoke and cajole with different perspectives and insights. This can be achieved through inviting a wider range of non-executive directors, diverse stakeholder representatives, and a greater variety of external advisers, and utilizing forward-thinking consultants and coaches beyond the traditional mainstream consultancies.

4.Sense of purpose: As Paul Polman has said, as leaders we need to cultivate our inner compass, develop our own coherence within ourselves, taking time and energy to embark on a process of ‘knowing thyself’ so as to understand our deeper sense of purpose beyond our ego-personas and acculturated masks. When we align our outer actions with our inner sense of purpose, we allow a deeper creative impulse and authenticity to flow through our work. Ditto for our teams and stakeholders. And when our organizational sense of purpose resonates with our personal purpose, truly extraordinary things spark – we develop what living-systems scientists refer to as ‘super-coherence.’

5.Time and space: Taking personal responsibility for our work schedules and recognizing that the continual busyness and stress actually undermines our ability to think out-of-the-box and sense our inner compass. Each of us can be more effective at managing our diaries, creating blocks in our schedule for ‘systemic thinking’ where we can reflect, pause and learn to tune-in to our more intuitive awareness and authentic, soulful selves.

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