After a project that lasted several months, I got a ride home with a business owner. She was smiling as she told me everything that was changing in her company. For the better.
I asked my usual question:
“Tell me: what was the most important thing about this work for you?”
“I started enjoying what I do again. I love being an entrepreneur, but I was discouraged. Almost selling the company. You gave us back the will to wake up and go there.”
My heart was full. And I took a lesson: the project wasn’t about mindset or change management. It was about strategic marketing.
But how do you change strategy without changing the way you see your business? How do you change your surroundings without changing yourself?
A very wise woman once told me:
“There is only one way to change. By changing.“
It sounds obvious. It isn’t.
One idea has stayed with me since I read Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations: we have more than one “brain” (head, heart and gut, each with its own neurons), and science took decades to look at that again. He suggests we were slow to see it because our way of thinking about organizations was hierarchical: one boss, one brain.
Take that to your company. Many leaders see themselves as the single brain coordinating everything. It’s expensive. It’s tiring. And it wastes what the rest of the team does better.
The invitation:
- let whoever is best suited do each task;
- keep the dialogue going to understand what really needs to be done;
- share resources and benefits;
- and let people feel more responsible and confident about what is theirs.
It’s called distributed intelligence. Start today, start small.
And if it’s hard to do alone, talk to someone from the outside who can accompany the process.
Where, in your company, is there still “only one brain”?
Is there a decision weighing on you? Sometimes what’s missing isn’t an answer, it’s a good conversation with someone from the outside. If it makes sense, let’s talk. No script, no strings.