Skip to main content

Adventure awaits for courageous leaders and teams

Change programs succeed and fail because of leadership.

It’s proven that People Leaders, or direct managers, are the most trusted source of information and influence to team members – so they play a spectacularly important role in change.

And yet, while there’s so much expected of them, leaders are rarely invested in – to bolster their capabilities and resilience and to care for themselves and their teams during change.

Preparing for the peaks

It’s like preparing to summit Mount Everest. Adventurers like leaders need to build confidence, capability and readiness for navigating to the highest heights and to lead others along with them.

Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first climbers to reach this summit in 1953 and stand at the top of the world. And yet the success of their journey was an accumulation of the training and experience, the proper approach to their peak adventure and getting everyone back to base camp safely.

Acclimatising

Their preparation and planning at base camp was vital. What was the expedition route? What equipment and tools were needed? What mental and physical readiness was optimal? All their work leading into the mission was vital. “It was 33-year-old beekeeper Edmund Hillary’s fourth Himalayan expedition in just over two years and he was at the peak of fitness,” said George Band, who was one of the party.

Getting ready

Tenzing Norgay was the best-known Sherpa climber and mountaineer and he lent invaluable insight to defining the mission and sizing up the climb. The team including 150 porters who left Kathmandu for Mount Everest on 10 March, followed by 200 porters on 11 March, where they all commenced altitude training. This expedition was a matter of life and death.

Make it happen

The team worked together, backing each other, setting up a series of camps to slowly advance up the mountain. The teams would work in pairs taking turns to look ahead, checking that they were staying the course and continuously making progress up the mountain.

It was Tenzing and Edmund who set out for the highest peak at 9am on May 29. It was not without incident – there was a rocky spur that loomed 12 metres before the summit and it was a perilous climb over ice and rock to the peak. They reached the highest point at 11.30am. There they shook hands and lingered for only 15 minutes to enjoy the moment before beginning their descent.  Arguably, the most important part of their expedition was just beginning.

Descending

Two British climbers had vanished near the peak, so the two adventurers knew the risks and concerns in descending the mountain and that it would demand relentless focus. Their success could not be celebrated if they didn’t make it back to base camp.

Reviving

Their fame was spreading even before they made it back. And yet amongst the excitement, their physical and mental debriefing, and taking stock of the adventure, was vitally important.

The Change Expedition for Leaders

The highest peaks of Everest loom over business environments in today’s world, but rather than rock and ice, it’s major cultural change, costly technology changes and complex and competitive environments. And while failure doesn’t equal death, if companies don’t respond and lead well in changing environments –the death knell of companies has become a more likely scenario. We only have to look at Kodak, Blockbuster and BlackBerry.

That’s why Blue Seed has developed the ‘Change Intelligence for Change Makers’ program. It’s a practical, experiential training program that spans a 2-month period.  And it powers up leadership capability and a transformational mindset for People Leaders, of every level, who are responsible for change outcomes.

In a rapidly changing and complex environment, your change leadership capability must stay in step. What got your organisation to where it is, won’t get it to where it must go.

Learn and apply techniques to lift Change Intelligence

Change intelligence is the ability to lead through disruption –

  • applying a unique way of thinking – wisdom and curiosity
  • acting – strategic, practical and sustainable
  • and being – adaptable, inclusive, courageous

Here’s a short video to explain it all

The Program is grounded in a Change Expedition theme that describes phases, actions and reactions during the process of change. And CQ is proving to turn people leaders into change makers, equipping them to lead themselves and their teams confidently through constant change.

In each workshop, a relevant, engaging and immersive experience is created so participants work together to ‘practise’ the skills in a way that is explicitly linked to their working world and can be applied immediately. Activities, Concepts and Tools are introduced and applied to develop specific change making skills.  And most importantly, the learning is applied to the current change context in a safe workshop space, and then applied back in the workplace with support from weekly Action Prompts and Coaching.

 


Our purpose is to make transformational change achievable and create a lasting capability for our clients. Our unique approach empowers organisations to create the best return on investment for their change efforts.

We’ve seen that the sooner an organisation is willing to identify and address its (human) change capability needs and gaps in detail, the quicker it will be likely to reap the rewards.

Contact us to learn more about how we can help lift the change intelligence of your people