Incumbents rarely fail because they did not see it coming. They fail because seeing it coming is not the same as being able to move.

This talk is about the gap between those two things, in organisations and in people.

What the talk covers

• Why incumbents fail. The pattern is boringly consistent: the thing that made you successful becomes the thing you cannot put down.
• What reinvention costs. Not the strategy. The status, the certainty and the identity that go with the old way of working.
• Reinvention stories. Including my own, which is a project delivery career being rebuilt around AI in public, with the numbers and the mess visible.
• What leaders can actually do on Monday. The small structural moves that make a team able to change, rather than merely willing.

Why me on this

I am not describing reinvention from the outside. I am running a firm through one right now and publishing what breaks, which means the examples are current and some of them are unflattering.

Before that, eighteen years of operational delivery in mining, energy, ICT and professional services, which is where you learn that most change programmes fail at the point where people have to do their jobs differently on a Tuesday.

Format

• 45 to 60 minutes, with time for questions that get honest
• Conferences, leadership offsites, year-openers and strategy days
• Tailored to your sector after a conversation about what your people are actually facing