Nine leaders. Nine industries. Three global regions. One constant: change.
This spring, Impact chaired a webinar series for industry leaders in learning development, change management and human centred leadership. Google, IBM, Zurich, Bloomberg… the brands speak for themselves. The goal was to take the pulse of change across our global economy, not just through data, but through dialogue and personal perspectives that take you between the lines. Now it’s time to share insights and lessons about the state of change from nine of the world's biggest brands:
Cristi Burrill, Sr. Manager at Oshkosh captured its ubiquity:
“Change is everywhere. Everything that you’re experiencing is essentially some kind of change.”
Danielle Pigni, APAC Talent Insights and Strategy Lead at Google its power and speed:
“I don’t see change as an initiative you launch as an organisation or as something you do. It’s a bigger force to reckon with… Your life changes in a second.”
The pace of change has crossed a line
Change might have always been part of the human experience, but in the last 12 months change has accelerated to a degree where we’d struggle to believe you if you said you hadn’t struggled with the increasing pace of change. As Sarmista Mondol, Impact Accelerator Leader at IBM put it:
“Change is a constant companion. But is it an easy one? No, it’s not.”
Stability is breaking down into something more human
From the economy to geopolitics and technology, old expectations of stability and a rules-based order are being swept aside, structures are breaking down into something more… unpredictable, emotional… more human?
Thoughts were never far from the year's biggest story in tech, and increasingly across the rest of our lives: AI driven change. What’s AI but a story about computers becoming more human: more thinking, more biased, more creative, more error prone? Tech is becoming more like us, and our panellists had a lot to say about the opportunities and tensions this creates:
“AI is a potential amplifier for humans… AI is changing the way we learn, work and live. The pace of change is unprecedented, and no one is ready for what’s ahead - so conversations like this one are very important.”
Dilan Perera, Chief Artificial Intelligence (AI) Officer at Bendigo Kangan Institute
AI isn’t changing work - it’s just changing us
One potential tension is that responding to the reality of more human centred tech might involve us learning to be more and do more. Not challenging what we know so much as challenging us to implement what we already know we should be doing. Spencer MacDonald, Asst. VP Leadership Development at Zurich shared one use case for AI that is helping people challenge the fear they have over initiating feedback conversations:
“Potentially AI is a role-playing solution for people to practice in a safe environment, get real-time feedback, and allow us to see if the needle is moving on that specific skill.”
The real work of change is emotional, not technical
So, if AI driven change involves us becoming better, braver human beings, then responding to more change than ever before means becoming more human. That happens through learning. And what stood out across these conversations was how often leaders described learning not as something to be delivered, but as something people have to experience together if it's going to stick.
Impact’s path towards liberating the human potential in organisations been through 45-years of world leading experiential learning, helping our participants to recognise the content of their own experiences and grow from them. It’s the type of work our panellist’s echoed when they emphasised how the way we experience the emotional, human heart of change, is often a more significant factor in the success of a change process than its technical aspects:
“What interest me the most about change is the tension between equipping leaders with the right tools and frameworks to navigate it, while also recognising change is deeply human. If we focus only on the processes, the outcomes, we risk overlooking the emotional and psychological experience of those going through it. The real interest in change work lies in helping leaders manage both.”
Fabiola Aniton, Lead, Global Leadership and Talent Development, Bloomberg
Change isn’t linear - it’s a rollercoaster
Lynne Walker, Director of Primark Cares, expressed the turbulent emotional reality of the change people are living in one powerful image:
“Change is a roller-coaster, it goes up and down, side to side and sometimes it’s on fire. It’s not linear, it’s rarely a to b. That’s the excitement, the challenge and the energy that’s needed to drive change.”
Organisations fail on change by being scared to share the ups and downs of this rollercoaster, or only acknowledging where the ride tops out:
“Organisations only tend to celebrate reaching the last peak, the absolute peak of the range, and that’s such a shame. I recall an organisation that had a cost-saving goal of a billion dollars in a year. Thousands of people contributed to that, but as an organisation they only celebrated the billion dollars. How does the average person connect what they did to that? Because the small steps that produced that saving weren’t celebrated.”
Clive Smith, VP of Organisation Effectiveness, Global Payments x Worldpay
Partnership is a path through the challenges and complexities of change
The goal of a well-managed change process might be small incremental improvements, with people empowered to make the small changes that matter; but the paradox of change is that the smallest changes often involve a radical mindset shift. Sometimes you need to zoom out, re-examine relationships, rethink norms - all the things you don’t see because they are so immediate, all the things invisibly holding up change – that can take a trusted partner to step in and tell you what they’re seeing:
“Even without major changes, in complex organisations, we are pulled in so many directions every day. And the larger the organisation becomes the more you’re pulled in different directions, and most of the time in opposing ones, so even finding balance becomes quite an endeavour.”
Danielle Pigni, Talent Insights and Strategy Lead APAC at Google
Answering change fatigue
Impact is grateful for all the speakers and attendees who partnered with us to make a space for these conversations on change. Those conversations are more important to have than ever because there’s more change than ever before, but if anything, they’re getting harder to have. Because another truth our leaders put their finger on is that we’re all becoming tired of change:
“Resistance to change… often comes from change fatigue, just the sheer volume of change, and maybe a lack of empathy for what people might be experiencing there.”
Cristi Burrill, Sr. Manager at Oshkosh
Are we too tired to feel like we can stop and gain perspective on our challenges because they’re too pressing, too immediate? Too tired to ask for help? Too tired to reinvest in conversations like the ones we’ve had over the course of this webinar series? Fatigue doesn’t only come from the volume of change - it comes from feeling like there’s no space left to pause, breathe or make sense of what’s happening. But it’s precisely because change is hard that we need to make space for dialogue about change and the kind of insights that can emerge from shared experiences:
“If you’re just learning from your organisation or your sector even, you’re missing a number of different tricks. The focus should be broader than that. It should be on sectors that are outside your own sector, thinking multinational, thinking global. If you're looking to find, early, indicators of what good looks like, it certainly should be far, far broader than your organisation, let alone your sector.”
Dilan Perera, Chief Artificial Intelligence (AI) Officer at Bendigo Kangan Institute
Keep talking. Keep listening. Keep making space
Change isn’t slowing down, or shrinking – but neither is our capacity to learn, adapt and support each other through it. If there is one thing these conversations showed us, it’s that none of us are facing change alone. By coming together we show that there is a North Star to change. However different everyone’s path to it might be, collaboration draws us together from different contexts, challenges and callings. So let’s keep talking. Let’s keep listening across industries, borders and experiences. Let’s keep making space for the human side of change to flourish.
This is why Impact will continue its work to facilitate change through the world’s best experiential learning. Because we believe change has to be more than a strategic intent – if it is to transform people, culture and business results it must be lived. And one way we can all contribute to that is through shared dialogue, the basic component for shared experiences and shared solutions:
“The biggest accelerator of change is dialogue. Nothing makes it go quicker than that.”
Clive Smith, VP of Organisation Effectiveness, Global Payments x Worldpay
If you want to start living the change, if you want to explore how to thrive through it, a simple step you can take today is to sign up to be part of our next conversation. Start listening in, start speaking up. Shape what’s next.
Relentless, awe-inspiring, isolating, connected, strange, powerful, global.
But also, human.