"To be a part of tomorrow, you need to be a part of the journey!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
An organization will never successfully get to where it needs to go if it doesn't have the full support and understanding of its team - and in some cases, my role is to help to build that support and understanding.
Here's a photo from when I was doing a stage check on Friday in Birmingham, England, before my keynote Saturday for service managers of KwikFit, an automotive services company with hundreds of locations throughout the UK. It was a pretty large crowd, with about 500 of them in the room; my keynote was the closing bit for this short one-day event that the leadership organized, with a message that had an eye to the future.
Many of my keynotes are for senior leadership teams of organizations as they take on the major challenges and trends impacting their industry. And yet, many others are like this event - one where the leadership team thinks that it is important that those 'in the trenches' - the individuals throughout the organization who are interacting with customers, doing the heavy lifting, and undertaking the overall mission of the organization - need to understand how things might change in the future.
In other words, it's important that if they are to be part of tomorrow, they need to be part of the journey - and in fact, will bear much responsibility for the success of that journey. That's why, at the opening of my talk, I challenged them with this observation: "
“Innovation and change is going to invade your life. The big question is - what are you going to do with it?”
In this case, the journey within the automotive services industry promises to be a complex one as we move to EVs, regularly integrate far more technology into the vehicle, and accelerate the skills involved. The leadership team of KwikFit - as with most of my clients - recognizes that it['s pretty important that the vast numbers of managers of all their service locations understand the trends that are coming at them and which will continue to have dramatic impact. One goal of this is to help develop acceptance of those trends - as well, as to help them understand the reason for the many new initiatives and strategies that will be 'coming from corporate' in the months and years to come.
Successful change and alignment to tomorrow don't just come from understanding the trends and defining a strategic path forward - it also involves developing understanding, concurrence, and acceptance of what can sometimes be a very complex and difficult journey.
That's what the management of this particular organization understands, and that's how I found myself on a stage in Birmingham on Saturday - with a message that to the audience that to be a part of this new and complex future, they need to be a part of the journey.
In his 30-year career studying corporate innovation, Jim Carroll has long observed that many initiatives fail because the leadership team fails to get the most critical part of the organization involved. He applauds organizations like KwikFit - one who fully understands the criticality of communicating the totality of the voyage ahead to everyone who will be on the voyage.