A 4-ingredient approach to organizational transformation

Transformation in troubled times
In a world already defined by constant change, the pandemic acted as an accelerant for the adaptation of technology. In a matter of months, companies advanced their digitization by the equivalent of several years, according to previous plans. Technological advancements aside, people were also forced to work in new ways, incorporating a greater focus on agility, remote work, and the need to find and adopt new business models. Regardless of size and industry, almost all businesses faced these common challenges – but unfortunately, none were easy to overcome.
A leaders’ approach to managing change must evolve to fit the company’s pace and needs. Knowing that the traditional separation between managing day-to-day activity and managing change is non-existent, leaders must learn at forced speeds, and acknowledge that no normal activity is immune to change.
As a result, it’s critical for leaders to rethink how they drive and manage change in organizations. The idea of change as a period of transition amid stability clashes with reality on a daily basis, as traditional investment-based transformation schemes and long-term planning are overcome by the uncertainty and complexity of the current environment. The world is, and will remain, in a state of constant change and adaption.
Rather than managing organizational change, shouldn’t we change organizational management to enable this rapid and continuous adaptation? It’s time to move on to organizational transformation.
Basic rules for a new approach to transformation
When it comes to making the best transformation cocktail, it depends on the specific tastes of each company. Knowing that there’s no single magic recipe, there are some basic rules that can help companies determine the best approach:
- Replace long-term plans with vision
What’s the point of drawing up long-term plans when you know that you can’t follow through? Instead, start by agreeing on a vision or image of where you would like to be in a few months, a year, or two years. Use this vision as the compass that points all of your daily efforts towards true North. Reinforce this vision among all people, customers, and suppliers, so they feel like they are a part of it too. - Provide certainty in the process
This communication rule can help provide structure in any uncertain context. When an outcome is uncertain, create a clear structure around the responsibilities and stages of the journey. “Work out loud”: let everyone know what is being worked on, by whom and around which dates. The basic techniques for achieving this are:- Timeboxing: specific and short periods of time, during which a task needs to be completed
- Prioritization: only doing tasks that will make it possible to make effective decisions and learn
- Include everyone
There is no single change or transformation; there are as many changes as there are people enduring them.
Each person lives their own version of change, as levels of focus, interest, and motivation vary by each level of the organization. Therefore, a change, which from the point of view of someone at a strategic level is urgent, may be viewed by someone at the team-level as a loss of quality. Much inevitable resistance will arise from these differences in perception.
Therefore, listen. Play an active role for all people in change, ensuring that problems receive solutions. Combine everyone’s view into the best solution, without losing sight of your true North – the vision that you want to achieve – and collaborate so that the solution is adapted to all levels of need. Seek ways to create an environment in which such collaboration and diversity of though is possible; generate a continuous conversation around the vision to keep everyone on the same page. - Go from time to market to time to learn
Time is the most precious resource in periods of accelerated change, and how you spend what little you have on will determine your ability to adapt. Invest in your efforts to maximize learning, and in the process, apply the law of minimum effort to building the best solution, step-by-step.
Experiment with the hypotheses you are proposing, and look for ways to confirm or reject them with minimal impact to the organization.
Finally, dare to change! Organizational change and transformation, for each and every member of the team, begins with you.
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In the 1990s, Business Process Reengineering (BPR) was the Big Bet. Companies launched tightly controlled pilot programs with hand-picked teams, custom software, and executive backing. The results dazzled on paper.
But when it came time to scale? Reality hit. People weren’t ready. Systems didn’t connect. Budgets dried up. The pilot became a cautionary tale, not a blueprint.
We’ve seen this before with Lean, Agile, even digital transformations. Now it’s happening again with AI, only this time, the stakes are different. Because we’re not just implementing a new solution, we’re building into a future that’s unfolding. Technology is evolving faster than most organizations can learn, govern, or adapt right now. That uncertainty doesn’t make transformation impossible, but it does make it easier to get wrong.
And the dysfunction is already showing up, just in two very different forms.
Two roads to the same cliff
Today, we see organizations falling into two extremes. Most companies are either overdoing the control or letting AI run wild.
Road 1: The free-for-all
Everyone’s experimenting. Product teams are building bots, prompting, using copilots. Finance is trying automated reporting. HR has a feedback chatbot in the works. Some experiments are exciting. Most are disconnected. There's no shared vision, no scaling pathway, and no learning across the enterprise. It’s innovation by coincidence.
Road 2: The forced march
Leadership declares an AI strategy. Use cases are approved centrally. Governance is tight. Risk is managed. But the result? An impressive PowerPoint, a sanctioned use case, and very little broad adoption. Innovation is constrained before it ever reaches the front lines.
Two very different environments. Same outcome: localized wins, system-wide inertia.
The real problem: Building for optics, not for scale
Whether you’re over-governing or under-coordinating, the root issue is the same: designing efforts that look good but aren’t built to scale.
Here’s the common pattern:
- A team builds something clever.
- It works in their context.
- Others try to adopt it.
- It doesn’t stick.
- Momentum dies. Energy scatters. Or worse, compliance says no.
Sound familiar?
It’s not that the ideas are flawed. It’s that they’re built in isolation with no plan for others to adopt, adapt, or scale them. There’s no mechanism for transfer, no feedback loops for iteration, and no connection to how people actually work across the organization.
So, what starts as a promising AI breakthrough (a smart bot, a helpful copilot, a detailed series of prompts, a slick automation) quietly runs out of road. It works for one team or solves one problem, but without a handoff or playbook, there’s no way for others to plug in. The system stays the same, and the promise of momentum fades, lost in the gap between what’s possible and what’s repeatable.
We’ve seen this before
These aren’t new problems. From BPR to Agile, we’ve learned (and re-learned) that:
- Experiments are not strategies. Experiments show potential, not readiness for adoption. Without a plan to scale, they become isolated wins; interesting, but not transformative.
- Culture is the operating system. If the beliefs, behaviors, and incentives underneath aren’t aligned, the system breaks, no matter how advanced the tools.
- Managers matter. Without their ownership and support, change stalls.
- Behavior beats code. Tools don’t transform companies. People do.
Design thinking promised to bridge this gap with user-driven iteration and empathy. But in practice? Most efforts skip the hard parts. We tinker, test, and move on, without ever building the conditions for adoption.
AI and the new architecture of work
Many organizations treat AI like an add-on—as if it’s something to bolt onto existing systems to boost efficiency. But AI isn’t just a project or a tool; it changes the rules of how decisions are made, how value is created, and what roles even exist. It’s an inflection point that forces companies to rethink how work gets done.
Companies making real progress aren’t just chasing use cases. They’re rethinking how their organizations operate, end to end. They’re asking:
- Have we prepared people to reimagine how they work with AI, not just how to use it?
- Are we redesigning workflows, decision rights, and interactions—not just layering new tech onto old routines?
- Do we know what success looks like when it’s scaled and sustained, not just when it dazzles?
If the answer is no, whether you’re too loose or too locked down, you’re not ready.
The mindset shift AI demands
AI isn’t just a tech rollout. It’s a mindset shift that asks leaders to reimagine how value gets created, how teams operate, and how people grow. But that reimagination isn’t about the tools. The tools will change—rapidly. It starts with new assumptions, new stances, and a new internal leader compass.
Here are three essential mindset shifts every leader must make, not just to keep up with AI but to stay relevant in a world being reshaped by it:
1. From automation to amplification
Old mindset: AI automates tasks and cuts costs.
New mindset: AI expands and amplifies human potential, enhancing our ability to think strategically, learn rapidly, and act boldly. The question isn’t what AI can do instead of us, but what it can do through us—helping people make better decisions, move faster, and focus on higher-value work.
2. From efficiency to reimagination
Old mindset: How can we use AI to make current processes more efficient?
New mindset: What would this process look like if we started from zero with AI as our co-creator, not a bolt-on?
3. From implementation to opportunity building
Old mindset: Roll out the tool. Train everybody. Check the box.
New mindset: AI fluency is a core human capability that creates new realms of curiosity, sophistication in judgment, and opportunity thinking. Soon, AI won’t be a one-time training. It will be part of how we define leadership, collaboration, and value creation.
From sparkles to scale
In most organizations, the spark isn’t the problem. Good ideas are everywhere. What’s missing is the ability to translate those isolated wins into something durable, repeatable, and enterprise-wide.
Too many pilots are built to impress, not to endure. They dazzle in one corner of the business but aren’t designed for others to adopt, adapt, or sustain. The result? Innovation that stays stuck in the lab—or dies.
Designing for scale means thinking beyond the “what” to the “how”:
- How will this spread?
- What behaviors and systems need to change?
- Can this live in our whole world, not just my sandbox?
It’s not about chasing the next use case. It’s about setting up the conditions that allow innovation to take root, grow, and multiply, without starting from scratch every time.
Here’s how to make that shift:
1. Test in the wild, not just in the lab
Skip the polished demo. Put your solution in the hands of real users, in real conditions, with all the friction that comes with it. Use messy data. Invite resistance. That’s where the insights live, and where scale begins. If it only works in ideal settings, it doesn’t work.
2. Mobilize managers
Executives sponsor. Front lines experiment. But it’s team leaders who connect and spread. Equip them as translators and expediters, not blockers. Every leader is a change leader.
3. Hardwire behaviors, not just tools
The biggest unlock in AI is not the model—it’s the muscle. Invest in shared language, habits, and peer learning that support new ways of working. Focus on developing behaviors that scale, such as:
- Change readiness: the ability to spot opportunity, turn obstacles into possibilities, and help teams pivot.
- Coaching: getting the best out of your AI “co-workers” just like human ones.
- Critical thinking: applying human judgment where it matters most—context, nuance, and ethics.
4. Align to a future-state vision
To scale beyond one-off wins, people need a shared sense of where they’re headed. A clear future-state vision acts as an enduring focus, allowing everyone to innovate in concert. That alignment doesn’t stifle innovation. It multiplies it, turning a thousand disconnected pilots into a coherent transformation.
5. Track adoption, not just “wins”
Don’t mistake a shiny, clever prompt for progress. A great experiment means nothing if it can’t be repeated by many people. From day one, design with scale in mind: Can this be adopted elsewhere? What would need to change for it to work across teams, roles, or regions? Build for transfer, not just applause.
The real opportunity
AI will not fail because the tech wasn’t good enough. It will fail because we mistook experiments for solutions, or because we governed innovation into paralysis.
You don’t need more control. You don’t need more chaos. You need design for scale, not just scale in hindsight.
Let’s stop chasing sparkles. Let’s build systems that spread.

How AI is accelerating leadership development by enabling more practice
In today’s fast-paced business world, developing leaders who can navigate complexity, inspire teams, and deliver results is more critical than ever. Yet, traditional training methods often fall short in addressing the scale, personalization, and immediacy required to create lasting change. AI-powered practice bots are emerging as a transformative solution, offering leaders unparalleled opportunities to practice, grow, and improve—faster and more effectively than ever before.
Feedback with precision and accessibility
Feedback is the cornerstone of leadership development. However, research from Gallup reveals that only 26% of employees strongly agree that the feedback they receive improves their performance. Feedback all too often misses the mark, because it is too vague, infrequent and not relevant to the job at hand. AI practice bots address this gap by providing instant, objective, and actionable feedback through simulated conversations. Well trained practice bots, armed with leading-edge, business-specific knowledge on the critical skills needed for leaders, offer the most valuable simulated conversations, and the most accurate feedback.
These bots mimic real-world scenarios such as performance reviews, stakeholder negotiations, and high-stakes presentations. Leaders gain immediate insights into their communication style, areas for improvement, and actionable next steps—all without the need for scheduled coaching sessions.
Moreover, AI expands access to high-quality feedback across all levels of leadership. No longer confined by time, geography, or resource constraints, organizations can now equip every leader with the tools they need to grow. This scalability ensures consistent, equitable development opportunities while fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
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Limitless practice for deeper growth
Behavioral change is built through deliberate practice, yet many traditional training programs provide limited opportunities for leaders to apply what they’ve learned. A study from the American Psychological Association (APA) highlights that repetitive, focused practice is essential for mastering new skills.
AI bots remove barriers to practice by offering leaders unlimited chances to rehearse critical conversations, test new approaches, and refine their strategies. Whether delivering constructive feedback, managing conflict, or influencing stakeholders, leaders can practice important conversations without fear of judgment or failure.
Available 24/7, these bots integrate development into daily routines, accelerating skill acquisition and embedding new behaviors. The result is not only faster growth but also greater confidence and readiness to tackle complex challenges.
Amplifying human insight through AI
AI bots enhance leadership development not by replacing human expertise but by amplifying it. They excel at handling repetitive, data-driven tasks such as providing feedback and tracking performance trends. However, the role of human insight—through coaching, mentorship, and relationship building—remains irreplaceable.
According to Deloitte, organizations that combine AI-powered tools with human-led learning experiences see a 33% increase in effectiveness. AI provides the structure and scalability to ensure consistent development, while human experts bring empathy, context, and nuance to guide leaders on their unique journeys.
This synergy between technology and human insight accelerates individual growth while creating a ripple effect across organizations. Leaders not only develop the skills they need to excel but also inspire their teams and drive meaningful cultural change.
Transforming leadership development with AI practice bots
AI practice bots enhance leadership development by:
- Delivering precise, personalized feedback: Instant insights empower leaders to grow faster and with greater clarity.
- Offering unlimited opportunities to practice: Leaders can refine critical skills anytime, embedding growth into their daily routines.
- Providing data-driven insights: Bots analyze performance trends across leaders within an organization to inform targeted training strategies.
- Scaling impactful learning: Accessible to leaders across geographies and roles, AI ensures consistent and equitable development opportunities.
By enabling leaders to practice more, grow faster, and lead with confidence, AI-powered bots are transforming leadership development—one conversation at a time.
Discover how AI practice bots can enhance your leadership strategy and deliver lasting results.

E-learning designers are still catching up to what brand differentiation experts have known for a long time. Experience matters.
Consider Bubly, a maker of sparkling water, recently purchased by PepsiCo. Bubly doesn’t try to differentiate at the product level: in a blind taste test between Bubly and LaCroix, participants were unable to tell one from the other. Instead, Bubly focuses on the consumer’s experience of the product.
To begin, there’s the enthusiastic welcome: each can features a pull-tab greeting that mimics text messages – “hey u,” “hiii,” or “yo,” – simulating the kind of playful rapport you might have with friends and family. Next, the product’s peach, pineapple, and grapefruit-toned cans and smiling logo work together to convey positivity, creating a look and feel that aligns seamlessly with its slogan: “no calories. no sweeteners. all smiles.” Finally, Bubly gamifies buying. As writer Elizabeth Demolat points out, no store stocks all twelve flavors at any one time, leading to online and in-person buzz about where to find specific flavors. This strategy, along with the release of a variety of limited-edition flavors, has essentially turned “the act of purchasing a product into a treasure hunt.”
Bubly’s brand differentiation leverages enthusiasm, emotion, and excitement—experiential elements that echo the design pillars of best-in-class e-learning. Here’s how to incorporate each.
- Enthusiasm
Find new ways to breath energy into the experience. Take, for example, a short, animated video that uses action film motifs to explore emotional awareness in the workplace.
The sequence begins with an establishing shot of a manager providing constructive feedback to an employee. The action moves quickly into the employee’s brain, which is set up as a command center. A group of intelligence agents, straight out of Mission Impossible, look on with alarm. One more word from the manager on “areas for improvement,” and the emotion-regulating amygdala will be triggered, hijacking the employee’s normal reasoning processes. The intelligence agents strategize, introducing different tools and techniques that can be used to regain perspective, and the learning journey begins to take shape.
Greeted with a fresh, playful take on a critical workplace competency, learners are primed to go deeper.
- Emotion
How do you get beyond the rational regions of your brain – the ones that “control language, but not decision-making” – to tap into feelings and emotions? One particularly creative course on human anatomy leverages powerful visuals to reach learners on that deeper level.
Participants begin by learning that there are more nerve cells in the brain than stars in the Milky Way, observing a close-up of the brain’s circuitry dissolving into tiny specks lighting up the night sky. Because the underlying anatomy remains hidden, medical-aesthetics practitioners learn that they will essentially be working in the dark. The stars fade out slowly, one by one, until there’s nothing left on screen but total darkness—a strange, slightly unnerving experience that drives home the importance of understanding anatomical structures on a visceral level.
- Excitement
Give people something they’ve never experienced before by challenging the norms of typical training.
Data-protection policies, for instance, are critical safeguards wherever they’re in place, but existing e-learning on the subject is almost always designed as a passive, one-way transmission of information. One exceptional data-protection course takes a different approach, using live-action video and a dramatic soundtrack to depict a privacy breach occurring in real time.
While this can get gimmicky, immersing learners in a volatile environment with uncertain outcomes builds tension, a key lever for creating buy-in.
So, how can we help clients build better learning experiences?
Many clients see digital learning as a product, one that looks a lot like what’s already out there: didactic, uninspired, dull. By nudging clients toward digital learning courses that mirror what they already know about branding, we might just be able to help them build experiences that stand out in a crowd.
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You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”
Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.
‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’
A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.
Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:
- Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
- Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
- Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
- Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
- Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
- Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
- Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
- Merger integration.
Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.
The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs
Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context? When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.
10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations
With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:
- Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
- Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
- Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
- Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
- Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
- Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
- User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
- Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
- Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
- Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.
Better Results, Faster
Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.
Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination
Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.
Putting Business Simulations to Work
Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.
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I recently read an HBR article discussing why the traditional approach to leadership development doesn’t always work.
It stated that instead of traditional methods, the best way to identify, grow and retain leaders to meet today’s demands is to “Let them innovate, let them improvise and let them actually lead.”
Over the past 30 years, as we’ve partnered with clients facing a vast range of challenges, we’ve seen the truth behind this – that people learn best by actually doing. That’s why business simulations are such a powerful tool: they allow people to do and lead within a risk-free environment, and condense years of on-the-job learning experience into a few days, or even hours.
We also know that learning is not just a “one and done” situation – it is a continuous experience. In many cases, a learning journey, which blends a variety of learning methodologies and tools over time, is the most powerful means of shifting mindsets, building capabilities and driving sustained, effective results.What a learning journey looks like depends entirely on the context of your organization. What challenges are you addressing? What results are you driving for? What does great leadership look like for your organization?

To bring this to life, imagine the following approach to a blended learning journey for aligning and developing leaders – in this scenario, within a financial services firm: Financial technology has “transformed the way money is managed. It affects almost every financial activity, from banking to payments to wealth management. Startups are re-imagining financial services processes, while incumbent financial services firms are following suit with new products of their own.”
For a leading financial services company, this disruption has led to a massive technology transformation. With tens of thousands of employees in the current technology and operations group, the company will be making massive reductions to headcount over the next five years as a result of automation, robotics and other technology advances.
This personnel reduction and increased use of technology is both a massive shift for the business as well as a huge change in the scope of responsibility that the remaining leaders are being asked to take on moving forward. As such, the CEO of the business unit recognizes the need to align 175 senior leaders in the unit to the strategy and the future direction of the business, and give them the capabilities that they need to effectively execute moving forward.
To achieve these goals, BTS would build an innovative design for this initiative: a six-month blended experience, incorporating in-person events, individual and cohort-based coaching sessions, virtual assessments and more. Throughout the journey, data would be captured and analyzed to provide top leadership with information about the participants’ progress – and skill gaps – on both an individual and cohort level, thus setting up future development initiatives for optimal success.
The journey would begin with a two-day live conference event for the 175 person target audience, incorporating leader-led presentations about the strategy. The event would not just be talking heads and PowerPoint slides, but rather would leverage the BTS Pulse digital event technology to increase engagement and create a two-way, interactive dialogue that captures the participants’ ideas and suggestions. Participants also would use the technology to experience a moments-based leadership simulation that develops critical communications, innovation and change leadership capabilities, among other skills.
romAfter the event, participants would return to the job to apply their new learnings. On the job, each participant would continue their journey with four one-on-one performance coaching sessions, in addition to a series of peer coaching sessions shared with four to five colleagues. They also would use 60-90 minute virtual Practice with an Expert sessions to develop specific skill areas in short learning bursts, and then practice those skills with a live virtual coach. Throughout the journey, participants would access online, self-paced modules that contain “go-do activities” to reinforce and encourage application of the innovation leadership and other skills learned during the program.
As a capstone, six months after the journey has begun, every participant would go through a live, virtual assessment conducted via the BTS Pulse platform. In three to four hours, these virtual assessments allow live assessors to evaluate each leader’s learnings from the overall journey and identify any remaining skill gaps. The individual and cohort assessment data would then lead to and govern the design of future learning interventions that would continue to ensure the leaders are capable of implementing the strategy.
As you can see, this journey design leverages a range of tools and learning methodologies to create a holistic, impactful solution. It’s not just a standalone event – each step of the journey ties into the one before, and the data gathered throughout can be used well into the future in order to shape the next initiative .
Great journeys or experiences like this can take many forms. In addition to live classroom and virtual experiences, there is an ecosystem of activities, such as performance coaching, peer coaching, practice with an expert, go-dos, self-paced learning modules, and more, that truly engage leaders and ensure that the learnings are being reinforced, built upon, practiced and implemented back on the job. We find that these types of experience rarely look the same for every client. There are many factors that determine which configuration and progression will make the most sense. There is one common theme that we have found throughout these highly contextual experiences, however – that the participant feedback is outstanding and the business impact is profound.

Leading with Purpose, Part 1
Most CEOs I speak with are not 100% at peace with their company’s purpose. As the market, their people and their business evolve, so will their purpose. As some of the best companies of past and present show us, there is strength, and even magic, in a great company purpose. What is also clear, however, is that this magic does not come from just having a “purpose” or “vision,” but rather from how well a company is executing against their purpose.
When Southwest Airlines (which has been profitable for 45 consecutive years, and on FORTUNE’s list of World’s Most Admired Companies for 24 straight years) was first starting out, their mission was to make flying affordable.1 They rallied their people on the idea that a grandmother should be able to affordably buy a ticket, at the drop of a hat, to get on a flight to see her new grandchild. This simple mission led to the “Southwest Effect,” which transformed the airline industry, and continued to be a lens with which the Southwest leadership team made key decisions.
Today, Southwest’s vision has evolved: “To become the world’s most loved, most flown, and most profitable airline.” And they are executing on this vision. They continue to drive superior shareholder returns against all industries on the S&P 500 (as they have for the past 44 years), and in 2018 were named the top low-cost airline in JD Powers customer survey reports for the second year in a row.
As the Southwest example highlights, great company purpose combined with a leadership team who will build the work-flows, culture, processes and metrics to live up to it can be an enormous employee motivator. But we have also experienced, both at BTS and with our global clients, that a good company vision and purpose on their own are not sufficient – employees need them to be even more personal to them as an individual. I remember a lunch I had twelve years ago with a 24-year old new hire who was my direct report. After some small talk he looked at me and said, “Why are you here? Why have you spent seven years with the same company?”
I’ll never forget that lunch. It was the first time I had been asked the question, and it was the beginning of a new decade where our employees were much louder and more active about wanting to reflect and spend time on our mission and purpose, linking it to their personal values and the impact they strived to have in the world. Luke, that 24-year old new hire, has made me and our company better as a result of his question.
In the last decade, there has been a growing emphasis in the business world on finding a deeper motivation to unlock greater meaning at work. For some this may sound ‘fluffy,’ or as one executive we spoke to commented, “Is this just the next version of the pursuit of vision and values? It sounds great on paper but too often makes little real difference as it tends to stay on the wall, rather than live in your heart.”
Yet your people spend the majority of their life at work and with colleagues. At its best, a sense of purpose is a way of bringing meaning to their work and understanding the contributions they are making to the company, as well as greater society. It makes sense, then, that employees who are clear on their personal and professional purpose end their work day invigorated and proud of what they’re doing instead of exhausted by mindless work that is bereft of real meaning.
According to a recent PWC study, 79% of business leaders believe that purpose is central to business success – but only 34% use their organization’s purpose as a guidepost for their leadership team’s decision-making. Signs that your workplace may be lacking organizational purpose are distracted employees and a lack of comradery. These are significant factors – so why don’t more organizations devote time to developing clear purpose and values? Well, developing organizational purpose is no easy task, and much of it starts with your own personal purpose. If you’re unsure of what exactly your own personal purpose is, have no fear – in the next two installments of this blog series, we will offer simple steps to help you uncover your personal and organizational purposes and get closer to leading through the lens of purpose.