The courage to change

I: THE ‘DAY ONE’ PROBLEM

As we kick off 2025, here’s a question: 

Does your business feel as optimistic, hungry, and adaptable as it did on day one?

As you consider your answer, it might be helpful to examine why it matters.

In the beginning, all businesses are rebellions. The targets of these rebellions can be anything – from bad pizza to poor quality consulting, from expensive air travel to unwanted body odour. The point is that, in the mind of the leader, something has to change. 

It’s a brilliant thing, to want to improve the lives of others by bringing radical ideas to life.

Because changing anything is hard work, it stands to reason that certain conditions are necessary to get things moving. All rebellions need optimism: the belief that things can and will get better. They need hunger: the insatiable desire for change at all costs. And they need adaptability: the ability to respond fast to however the world decides that it’s going to respond.

But, for reasons we’ll examine, these conditions are hard to maintain. As a result, rebellions tend to achieve one of three outcomes. Some fail. Some find a way to survive on the margins – perhaps, if they’re lucky or enterprising enough, influencing their industries for the better. More often, those who survive settle into something else: a more mainstream, less vital form of existence, embracing mediocrity before slowly wasting away.

But there are exceptions. A minority of businesses never lose their fighting spirit. They remain optimistic, hungry and adaptable. They find the next thing that needs changing, and they change it. They stay relentless in pursuit of a brighter future for the people and ideals they serve. They become extraordinary, and achieve extraordinary things.

You don’t have to be Apple, Patagonia or Berkshire Hathaway to achieve this. You might consider Mailchimp, rebelling against SaaS industry norms. As its founder told the FT, “I kind of feel like I had my head down, tweaking things, improving things, and then I looked up and bam, it’s a $12bn company”. Or Hays Travel, a business that continued focusing on what others tend to regard as their lowest priority employee group – apprentices – and became the first independent in its industry to pass £1bn in sales. (Its co-founder Dame Irene Hays: “these are the people who we have built the business on. These people are extraordinary.”)

Your business was born of a rebellion – a belief in better.

And if it’s not feeling quite so optimistic, hungry and adaptable these days, here’s another question: at what point did you decide that this was okay?

II. A TRUE STORY (UNIVERSAL EDITION)

There are many versions of the following tale, but its plot points tend to follow a similar pattern.

Your business gets going, and you feel good. Your vision is clear. The market’s response is encouraging. Investors have their wallets open.

You decide to grow. You take external money. Investor pressures mean that you have limited time to deliver results. You’re fine with that, at first. You believe that if you work hard enough, for long enough, the numbers will take care of themselves. The combination of your entrepreneurial drive and external narratives reinforce this belief.

Your tenacity ensures that things stay on track, and the business starts to scale. This brings with it the need for more capacity and new capabilities. You start hiring. Two things occur. First, speed and inexperience mean that your recruitment processes – always a huge challenge to get right – lack diligence. Second, the increasing size of your company starts to diminish employee connectivity.

What used to be a small organisation becomes more complex. Plus, your people don’t know each other quite so well now, and everything’s moving so fast. Warning signs start flashing – in your working relationships, in your numbers. Coping with the chaos starts to become your primary occupation. You improvise fixes with your team. They are quick and smart-looking. You feel good about them.

But, in one unexpected turn after another, the quick fixes over here slow down progress over there. More warning signs appear. Running the business starts to feel like a game of Whack-a-mole. Fast becomes furious. The lights on the dashboard are really flashing now. Your team starts to disagree about what to do. And, because most of us are hard-wired to fear and avoid conflict, constructive discussion about all this feels difficult.

Frustrated, people start to leave – including some of your earliest hires and brightest talent. Progress feels harder than ever. Blind to their contribution to the problems, your investors give you a hard time. You start to wonder how you ended up here. You hire some consultants. They talk about working ‘smarter not harder’ and suggest some superficial improvements. You start making all-hands presentations about topics like ‘reconnecting to our vision’.

You’ve always done your best, and you continue to do so. But try as you might, the problems keep coming, a pitiless, relentless pile-on, until dealing with them becomes your sole focus. In the end, everything evens out into a sort of unhappy, sludgy stasis. One of the outcomes we discussed earlier – failure, obscurity or mediocrity – beckons. 

But you’re a human being so you’re great at rationalisation. You’re still making money. You’re still here. In fact, relative to many businesses, you’ve done well. 

And if your business is not quite as optimistic, hungry, and adaptable as it once was, that’s fine, isn’t it? So what if your job doesn’t feel like playing to win so much as playing not to lose? 

“It is what it is,” you say.

There’s just one problem, and it won’t go away. Indeed, even years after a version of this story played out in your own business, it might still be needling at you.

In your heart of hearts, you know that you’ve not achieved what you set out to do.

III: THE COURAGE TO CHANGE

Does your business feel as optimistic, hungry, and adaptable as it did on day one?

If the answer to this question is ‘no’, I’m going to ask you to imagine that this is the year when you fix that – for good.

How?

The answer starts with a frog.

You already know the analogy of the boiling frog. A frog immersed in a pan of cold water, which is then gradually heated up, will stay put and die. A frog immersed in boiling water will immediately jump out. Consultants and commentators like to use this story as a grisly metaphor for human behaviour. It illustrates that our tendency is for stasis, even against our own interests, and that only a crisis is shocking enough to make us act.

There’s just one problem with this story. It’s nonsense – a complete inversion of fact. Indeed, many nineteenth century scientists wasted their time slaughtering innocent frogs in pointless attempts at proving it to be true. A frog lobbed into boiling water does not jump out of the pan. Stunned, it dies. And a frog which sits in gradually warming water will leap out into the unknown when the temperature gets to about 25ºC.

Real-life frogs, it seems, have one up on the received wisdom about human nature: they will hop out of the water before it’s too late. And in this they have something to teach us.

You can get out of the water whenever you want.

IV. ALL PROBLEMS ARE LEADERSHIP PROBLEMS

Let’s look again at our story. There was a lot going on: hiring issues, relationship problems, an inability to navigate conflict, team Whack-a-mole, and so on.

But if we look again, it becomes possible to discern the real problem. Let’s consider the business as a complex system. Like all systems, it is producing the precise outcomes that it was designed to do. The problem is that the system is not fit for purpose, which means that the outcomes are suboptimal. And no-one is fixing the system in the right way. This means that the problems kept recurring, metastasising, and compounding one another. Ultimately, everyone engaged in solving the problems isn’t being led in a way that enables the system to change for good.

The liberating truth is that the answers to every issue that you are experiencing already exist within your business. Your people do not lack talent, insight or ideas. And the optimism, hunger, and adaptability that are necessary to uncover these answers (and which in turn are fuelled by them) also exist in latent abundance. This is because as human beings we are hardwired to contribute, to improve, and to grow. 

So how do you unlock all this? As a start point, it might be worth considering your conception of leadership. As my friend Steve Hearsum and I write in a piece about the myth of ‘heroic leadership’ (out later this month), it is not the job of the leader to have all the answers. It’s the job of the leader to enable the answers to be found. The task of improving the system is the work of everyone involved in it. But the leadership required to enable a sufficient focus and quality of work can only come from the top.

This is a matter of perspective. As leaders it is our role – indeed our responsibility – to survey the system in totality. We then need to create the conditions in which the entire organisation can collaborate to improve it, and direct the efforts of our people to this end.

Your people joined your business because they wanted to do something rebellious and brilliant: to improve the lives of others by bringing radical ideas to life. Together, they are capable of excellence; to achieve it they just need a bit of organising. As a leader, it is your job, and yours alone, to step up and do this.

Like I said, you can get out of the water any time you want. You just need to be sensitive to its temperature, and willing to make a simple decision: that things would be better if you jumped out of the slowly warming water.

V: BACK TO THE FUTURE

If you’re keen to get your business feeling like it did on day one, here are a few questions that might be useful for you to consider. (There are many others.)

1. Do I need a different perspective?

Unlocking optimism, hunger and adaptability at scale is a system-wide challenge. This means you need a system-wide view.

The author Caroline Myss has a useful analogy for the level of insight we have into our circumstances: she compares it to an apartment block.

Someone on the ground floor has an intense sense of connection with everything that is going on in the immediate area. But they also endure noise, traffic, and fumes, while being unable to get any sense of the life that’s occurring in the city as a whole. Way up in the penthouse, all those distractions drop away, and a city-wide perspective is possible. But someone’s connection to reality might suffer.

The challenge is to retain a sense of proximity to what’s occurring on the ground while ensuring that you can appraise the flow of the city as a whole. 

2. What am I not seeing?

Longstanding problems can sometimes be difficult to discern. It is human nature to reach a conclusion on issues (whether or not we tell others that we’ve done so), and to fit subsequent data to the argument we have already settled in our heads. This makes objective enquiry difficult. Each of us also has our blind spots.

So you might consider asking yourself: what I am not willing or able to look at, which might be holding the business back? Where necessary, consider engaging external help to get to answers. Good quality coaching and consulting can be valuable, as can a robust and diverse Board. 

You might not always like what this question uncovers. Then again, if you’re still reading this article, you don’t much like the way your business is running either. 

3. Where might I be lacking courage?

System-wide problems often exist because leaders can’t find the courage to tackle them. And people are bright: if they see that their leaders aren’t taking difficult decisions, they lose confidence, and optimism, hunger and agility suffers.

True story: I once worked with a business whose CEO felt unable to tackle some serious and long-standing problems with the performance of his COO. These problems had rumbled on for years, having a huge knock-on impact on results. I suggested that together we started totalling up their cost. 

The CEO asked that we stop counting when we reached £12M. (That’s not a typo.)

Unlike our proverbial frog, despite the fact that the water had kept getting warmer and warmer, he hadn’t made the decision to hop out. The conditions might have been slowly killing his company’s morale and performance. But they represented a known form of discomfort, as opposed to the unknown (and therefore more worrying) future that a difficult conversation might open up.

We can all be guilty of not doing the work to face difficult situations. I know I have been. But a lack of courage can be an expensive luxury – potentially a crippling one. Are you willing to keep indulging in it?

4. Am I walking my talk on ‘empowerment’?

I once worked with a company that had ‘empowerment’ as one of its values. Despite this, its CEO was demanding daily reports on the progress of almost all business activities.

“I don’t understand why they won’t all just be empowered,” he yelled in my direction one day. 

Empowering people, and ensuring that people understand their level of empowerment, can be tough, technocratic work. This is partly because it is context-dependent: what is appropriate in one situation might not be in another. It is also because any level of empowerment must bring with it a degree of tolerance for risk. People are going to make mistakes. The question is whether not allowing them to do so runs the risk of doing greater harm to the organisation.

If you’re not sure, when it comes to empowerment, whether your people are clear about where they have agency, ask them. They will tell you.

5. Am I ready?

Does your business feel as optimistic, hungry, and adaptable as it did on day one?

Imagine for a moment that it does. Imagine what you would achieve with the talent, the intelligence and the energy that already surrounds you. Imagine how far that spirit of rebellion could still carry you, and those around you.

It’s possible. And you’ve already proven it. Back in the day, a radical idea sparked your business into life: something has to change. That same radical thinking still holds the key. But, instead of applying it to your marketplace, might it be time to apply it to yourself and your leadership?

As leaders, it’s liberating to know that we can often solve even the most complex problems through a shift in our own behaviour. The only real choice we face is whether to step up and do so.

One final question, then. As 2025 begins, are you ready to make a change?

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