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As a coach I have always steered away from ‘change management’, even though it is a huge industry and I would probably have done quite well in it. Intuitively change management has always struck me as unfair or oppressive, even when it was well-intentioned and perfectly rational. It has appeared to me one-sided, often with senior management wanting to enforce a new system or a new way of working, yet were themselves unwilling to change their own habits or behaviours. I even felt this sense of unease when I was a ‘senior manager’ myself! ‘Change management’ renders an air of blame, injecting fear, and when things are not working it’s ‘because the staff are incompetent, or lazy, or otherwise doing things wrong – they need to change’. It is not a genuinely collaborative effort….

We need to talk… There are many talking about the need for organisations to be more responsive to their customers, to their staff, to evolving culture and expectations, to policy, to law, to energy price chaos and resource scarcity, to the need to de-carbonise. The economic paradigm is dysfunctional, the business imperative has been hijacked toward maximising shareholder value instead of serving customers and adding real value for people and…