REHEARSAL
ISSUE #1
Welcome to my fresh, new, 2-year late newsletter! Kind of feels a bit like a time capsule, an echo of all things change in April 2024, but bear with me, I’ve been sort of busy just getting the whole SubTonique adventure going. The upside is, I now have an additional two years to add to my grab bag of experience. So, welcome to this newsletter and thrilled to be sharing this first one.
Quiet here, does not mean quiet. If you have been following along on LinkedIn (and if that is how you found this place, welcome), I am not going anywhere. Sure, the platform is fairly useful despite its quirks, and if you could just filter out the flood of AI-slop-content-ouroboros. But anything I post there, well, becomes kind of theirs. We need to play by their rules, gets surfaced when their algorithm feels like it. Here? My site. Content to come all mine. What I write is a straight dialogue with the reader. I like to think of it as owning your home, as opposed to being a renter of a small apartment in a cool neighbourhood. A homeowner can pretty much do what they want.
My background is diverse. Different roles over the years, different industries, supporting financial services at one end to healthcare at the other, sprinkle a dash of agriculture somewhere in the middle, and voilà. But throughout, there has always been one thing that is my single focus, every single time. People! You see, we’re a complex lot, and when things change, we react: be it well, terribly, with elation, with anger, with creativity, or by doubling down on routine…we’re complex. And that is where my focus has been. To me, working in change is all about that: working with people to succeed – perhaps even thrive – in workplace changes they face. Of course, I never lose sight of something critical: behind every change, there was an idea, an idea that had to go through hoops to get funded, and that funding, that investment, must be protected. The math could not be any more simple: no investment, no change. Period.
This brings me back to LinkedIn. Have you been following any of the conversations there? If so, you’re more than aware of the volume. Plenty of voices saying plenty of similar things to plenty of the same people. Spend enough time in it and you start mistaking – dare I say echo chamber – for consensus. For the people actually living through change in their organisations (not the practitioners writing about it), that noise is more numbing than useful. So the audience that could benefit most, tunes out. Yet another post about transformation. Yet another framework that solves it all. Meanwhile, the real problems pile up. And in a time of AI, severe geopolitical disruptions, growing climate-related challenges, and just the flood of daily content all point to a collective perception that change is now something thrust at us multiple times a day, always.
But enough about that space. This is not the purpose today. There will be plenty of time for that later. Today, I celebrate turning this thing on and getting this machine going. So glad you could join me.
So, pull up a seat, come by for a coffee, or if you want to really get to connect, a nice scotch. But most of all, let’s exchange ideas. I’ll share a thought or two. May be off base, but this is my place. If I cannot express myself here, where can I. There is more to come, and I am glad you are here for it.