Is change a corporate or personal issue?

Partners in professional firms are part of a long tradition that embraces a business model, a motivation and a focus on delivering expertise. Everything about this is now being challenged. The business model has now split into multiple versions from corporate to online solo. The expertise idea is threatened by AI. Societal norms challenge the status of professionalism and trust in experts.

Change is not only fast but accelerating. Change is also happening across many aspects of life, so it's hard to stay balanced.

At the organisational level, the consulting firm McKinsey has recently written about the four kinds of change we are faced with, and the need for organisations to address 'reinvention'. As I wrote in my LInkedIn post, these are not terms to be thrown around lightly. The implications for everyone involved when an organisation sets about reinvention are profound. In this post, I'm just reflecting a bit more on the implications of the article for my clients. 

While the focus of the McKinsey article is on how leaders need to drive reinvention, I was struck by how much employees are caught in the turbulence. I'm not sure where the authors stand on the question of personal growth - or at least whether everyone can or should be part of reinvention.

On one hand the question is whether each individual is ready for or capable of 'reinvention', when the instigation is external rather than intrinsic to their personal growth. Even 'leaders' have trouble with this. Becoming not only someone better at their job but someone different is very hard work that many people simply don't tackle. The implication is that reinvention is necessary for survival, meaning in the business context more growth. 

Yet continuous exponential growth is a ground zero reason for our planetary problems.

Can 'reinvention' not also mean realigning our personal and business expectations to the need for non-exponential equilibrium? Without war, for example, existing resources could better guarantee global health. 

For professionals, the adaptation to AI, social media and changes in the environment may demand reinvention. Reinvention means changing your self-concept. For example, reinventing an expert to become a servant. Reinvention from being a consumer - with a pile of stuff every week to be dumped in landfill - to a custodian. Reinvention from chasing status to living humbly. 

I know some react with terror to the idea that we need to radically change our lifestyle. Yet we can't take it all with us, so what is our excessive consumption for? Radical change to keep growing frantically, to accelerate consumption, is what the McKinsey article implicitly assumes.

What does this article stir in you about your career? Because the driving force for it is the depth and tempo of change on a global scale that we are immersed in. Changes arising from human activity. We have still to experience the radical global changes that climate change will bring - at the trivial end, the cost of coffee, at the significant end the reversal of the North Atlantic currents. 

I am of the view that reinvention is one way of saying, 'we can't - I can't - go on like this.'

This is my original Linkedin post HERE

This is the McKinsey article on change.