In an era of unprecedented complexity, we are driving change; but it isn’t fast enough, it isn’t innovative enough and we are losing people along the way.
If we flip the script from doing less harm to doing more good—regenerating the system rather than taking from it—this would be a more inspiring way to lead our organisations. Enter Xynteo’s Leadership Vanguard programme—empowering business leaders to shift from harm reduction to active regeneration, fostering innovation and collaboration to create positive systemic change.
Business has been on quite the journey over the last two centuries, the industrial revolution kicking off rapid scaling with the merging of local small enterprises into the globe-spanning powerhouses of industry, mills, textiles and shipbuilders we see today. In 1913, Fordian principles started creating advanced processes to ramp up production in the US, and since then, we have become obsessed with efficiency in business. The environmental, social and governance (ESG) landscape has been on a similar path of cutting waste, reducing excess and squeezing every drop out of the business, slowly crawling towards net zero. But we are running out of areas to trim and ways to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.
Now, we fundamentally believe that the current system can work better for businesses and society and that leaders can be catalysts of change. And as leaders, we know what we want to be. We want to be more collaborative with our supply chains, our customers, partners, governments, and even our competitors. We want to drive positive change within our businesses, for our colleagues, for our partners, families and communities. We want to move faster, be more agile, more innovative—we want to be more! But we can’t seem to take that step off the curb and actually put words into action.
What holds you back from taking that first step?
The future is not clear and cannot be predicted. Perhaps it could in simpler times when the pace of change in business was sufficiently slow that leaders could extrapolate trends and make a “good enough” guess based on the past. Nowadays, complexity has risen to such a level that no one person can have sufficient knowledge of a system to make the right choice. There is no right answer, just a selection of interconnected options that you try, evaluate and use to move forward.
Of course, just as the world gets more complex, conflicting priorities (short versus long term, or sustainable versus bottom line) and additional stresses attached to our day jobs (such as the rise of AI, shifting generational working patterns and seemingly constant business re-organisation) seem to reduce our scope for failure. Add to that the need to be better parents, partners and citizens, and our stress levels can go through the roof. Working in this sort of uncertainty can be deeply unsettling on a personal level as well as requiring new skills and approaches to navigate a path.
What we do
At Xynteo, we believe in working on the individual and the wider system together. Our 1:1 coaching helps leaders understand themselves and ipso facto develop the confidence and psychological safety to have a tangible, regenerative and positive impact on the wider system. By working on the two simultaneously, you can see internal and external progress, which is bound to reinforce impact.
In our experience, there are a few things that leaders need to have in order to take this first step that will, ultimately, help them transform their businesses:
- A shift in mindset, approaches and skills to address long-term, constantly evolving and almost unknowably large, complex problems
- Inspiring examples of people, businesses and organisations delivering change to provide an example of success
- Peer support with other organisations going through similar changes that provides perspective and camaraderie (that leaders often lack and yearn for)
- Help understanding themselves better to create the internal confidence to be bold and challenge the status quo
- Support matching concrete short-term steps to longer-term strategic goals
- Business-driven approaches to making positive people and planet decisions that are not only financially sound, but a way to drive innovation and competitive advantage.
How we do it
The Leadership Vanguard, now in its ninth year, is a four-month programme that helps leaders take these crucial steps to change themselves and their organisations. We believe that getting out there, experiencing different perspectives and hearing from people on the frontier of change lends itself much more to learning than if you sit behind a desk, looking at a model. Through our two week-long immersions (in London and Mumbai), we peer into the activities, motivations and successes (and failures) of leaders from corporate organisations, NGOs, activists and real people affected positively and negatively by our current system. We also provide you with new ways of thinking and tools to address these challenges and put them into action.
This year, our participants will work on big knotty business challenges for themselves and their companies around the following:
- Driving innovation and collaboration internally within their own organisation, shifting the culture from short-term, siloed focus to long-term outcomes
- Positioning an organisation as a leader in its space by shifting from a reactive business-as-usual model to proactively driving a positive agenda
- Establishing self-sustaining partnerships and coalitions that can address systemic problems earlier to prevent harm, rather than mitigate it
We don’t know all the answers to these challenges, but we do have the experience to know where to start and how to get to a solution that you can employ at your organisation. We will work with our catalysts—you—on live business problems, selected by them using a toolkit of methodologies and approaches. In addition to immersions, individual coaching and peer group-led action learning sessions, we will introduce future thinking tools, systems thinking and systems mapping tools, multistakeholder models, innovation techniques, storytelling and narrative building to help you understand complex problems, map solutions and identify levers for change, and then drive change within your organisation and the wider system.
We would love to hear about your challenges and invite you to hear more about how we have tackled them (including what worked and what didn’t) as we move forward. Connect with us to know more.
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