Accelerating Transformation with Roy van Griensven

Roy van Griensven: I have been with LANXESS a little over a year and a half, leading commercial excellence and also our global business transformations. Before that, a long history with Philips — about seventeen years across healthcare and lighting, in marketing, business development and digital, always in transformational roles — then AkzoNobel, and around five years with Mitsubishi Chemical.

Jesse Hopps: We met when you were at Mitsubishi. You were signing off on the contracts I was sending. And we had a meeting in Detroit. What was your understanding of what Demand Metric did at that point?

Roy: I remember they said we are going to have Jesse there as well, and my first interpretation was: right, that is the person whose invoices I have been signing off for the tools and templates and playbooks. I saw the practicality of them — we did not have to go to large consulting firms to buy them inside a big program, and people seemed genuinely interested in using them.

What I recall is that our discussion did not go at all about a tool or a framework or a template. It evolved very quickly into: but how do you now actually get people to start adopting and working in a different way? How does change and transformation actually happen? I remember going away from Detroit thinking, that is interesting — they are selling us licences for templates, and the dialogue was not about templates at all.

Jesse Hopps: For twenty years we supplied playbooks, tools, templates. And it always bothered me that almost every client at the end of the year would say the same thing: I wish our people would use them more often.

Then I started working with Ron, head of marketing globally for Mitsubishi Chemical, doing workshops with these tools. We customized the playbooks. Sessions that were not lectures and theory but getting people to actually develop growth strategies and commit to plans. I did twenty-five or thirty of those. Highly rated. Feedback was good. The company kept investing.

I had a personal breaking point when my wife told me one Saturday morning, when I was catching up on email after being away all week — Charlotte, Düsseldorf, wherever. She said: are you going to work all morning? And I said, I just have to catch up, I have been out all week. And she said, this is not what I signed up for. When we decided to live in Canada and I left my family back in Colombia, I was not expecting to raise the girls by myself in a new country.

And I said, I feel like I am at the peak of my career. I built this great playbooks business, I am working on transformation with Fortune 500 companies, I need to be on the road. And she said: if you are going to be out on the road, then you can be out on the road on your own.

So I had to really think about whether the work I was doing was impactful and meaningful enough to be worth that kind of sacrifice. And in the back of my mind — a lot of workshops and activity were happening, but I did not feel the learning or the change in behavior was taking root.

Jesse Hopps: On the inside of that, what was your sense of what was going on? Were people adapting and changing their behavior, or checking boxes and complying with the training?

Roy van Griensven: While you are in the middle of it, it is difficult to recognize. But in hindsight, and after more than two decades of these programs, there is a very clear pattern. It always starts with enthusiasm — people like to join the workshop, something new, exciting.

What I started to notice is that I never got the feeling this was something that was really going to stick. You get the sense that there is energy, but the energy is because they like being away from their job for two days, or they got to travel to the city, or spend some time with colleagues. The real excitement of — this is what I want to be doing going forward for the coming years — that was never really there. That is the red thread through all of them. High excitement at the start, dropping very quickly after.

Jesse Hopps: I think training is necessary. I just do not think it is sufficient to get people to fundamentally change how they think and act on a daily basis. Would you agree?

Roy van Griensven: Training is still valid, but it is very situationally dependent. If you want to bring someone into a job they have never done, there is an element of training that gives them a base level of information. If you are introducing a new product, you can train people on its benefits and value positioning. If people lack certain soft skills, there is an element of training you can provide.

I try to keep it simple. Training is what you use if you want to improve something — if there is a base level and you want to lift it slightly. Where it fundamentally misses the point is when you start using training in transformation and change management, because there it is completely off. Training doesn't change anyone. You can't train someone to act very differently. You can't train someone to have a different mindset. You can't train someone to change their beliefs and be intrinsically motivated about something.

Jesse Hopps: Look around your commercial organization. How many people would you say are in world-class fitness and health — the ones following the routines any doctor would recommend? It is probably below ten percent. And what is more important to someone than their health? We can train people on diets and exercise routines and what they should do. It does not mean they will do it.

There is a reason that if you go and work at McDonald's and have to learn to make the hamburger in thirty seconds, training works. It is a process. You train people to mimic exactly that behavior, no judgment calls, no uncertainty, follow this routine. Training is very effective for that.

Transformation means you are fundamentally doing something differently than you are doing now — which means you probably do not have a dialled-in proven process yet. It is open to interpretation, there are judgment calls, new behaviors being tested. Harvard research calls these technical versus adaptive challenges. Technical challenges are where training is good. Adaptive challenges are much more human, where people need to think and act differently. We are misdiagnosing the problem.

Roy van Griensven: I realized this working in a Japanese culture and a Japanese company — there is a massive difference between ratio and emotion. You can educate, you can train, you can explain exactly why it is good and why we need to operate differently.

I vividly recall conversations with Japanese colleagues where they were nodding and saying: yes, it makes sense. Perfectly. Fully agree. Absolutely, this is what we need to do. And then we say, okay, so let us go tomorrow. No.

Why not? Because you touch the head, not the heart. So you have logically explained to me, and rationally I understand this might be the right thing to do, but I do not feel it. I am not comfortable with it yet, and nothing is going to move.

That was my biggest epiphany moment. In all Western companies we have designed transformation exactly that way — we are just explaining why it is good for people. And we have not addressed at all whether people feel motivated. The emotion is not there.

For technical challenges you can explain with logic: instead of flipping the burger once, do it twice. Okay, I get it. But if you want people to adapt to changes that require interpretation and judgment, where you cannot prescribe how to act — companies put entrepreneurial behavior in their values. What does that mean? You cannot explain that with logic alone. That whole learning made me realize we have our transformations designed completely the wrong way round.

Jesse Hopps: Most buying decisions are emotional and justified rationally. I wanted to buy an Aston Martin when I was thirty and my wife was pregnant with our first. I had seen one at a car show in Vancouver when the company was two months old — two hundred calls a day, no money, sleeping on futons in a loft. I told the friend helping me get the business off the ground: one day I am going to buy that car.

So the minute I had the resources, I came up with all the justifications. One owner, low kilometres, going to make money on it at some point. Those were not the reasons. I just wanted it. We accept that about buying behavior — and transformation work is getting people to buy new behaviors.

Jesse Hopps: The traditional doctrine is to explain what is in it for them — not just for the company. Why does that not work?

Roy van Griensven: It is very human, and it has nothing to do with a specific culture. Transformations are designed by corporate, with the help of a big consulting firm, which employs people who have never actually done that job.

So the moment I am in a commercial role and I am not involved in designing it, it is very human to look at it and think: you are coming to tell me how to do my job without asking me. And you are doing it based on what people tell me who have never done my job — a consultant with three years of experience and a big logo on top of it. You tick certain boxes that trigger a very human resistance.

If that resistance is active, you can deal with it, you can have a dialogue. But in most cases it is passive. People say: I know the decisions have been taken, the board and leadership are already there. So me opening my mouth to say I do not agree is a career-limiting comment. So let us not do that.

What by default we design in transformation is passive resistance — because we are not involving, we are not asking, we are not engaging the people who actually need to change and do something different.

Of course you cannot ask everybody their opinion and come to consensus, and yes, there might be people who do not have a clue how to change. But most companies actually have people who know perfectly well what needs to be done. I do not think there is any big company that only has people with no clue.

It is very human that if you do not build it on intrinsic motivation, if you do not involve people in the change, if you do not let them have a voice, then you are not sustainable. That is also why transformations typically have a tipping point in the second year towards the third. The first year is always excitement — people join the workshops. The second year motivation drops: I have seen it now, I do not want to go to the next one. And in the third year the passive resistance turns into: forget about what we were talking about, let us go back to what we have always done. Very typical.

Jesse Hopps: And then around that time the leadership changes and they do it all over again.

Roy van Griensven: And we start again — because the previous leadership got it wrong.

Jesse Hopps: You took the role at LANXESS, and you asked the CEO whether he wanted incremental improvement or transformation. But there is a balance between destroying everything that was built before you arrived and being additive.

Roy van Griensven: It is not that complex. The content and the scope of commercial excellence is not different across companies or industries — it is always the same topics. It is always a balance between getting some quick evidence of impact, which you typically address in pricing because that is where you see the immediate effect, and then the fundamental things that might be missing. Customer segmentation not in place, so you cannot differentiate or reallocate resources. Capability gaps — we are not good yet at hunting for new customers, or at value selling. How much of each varies; the topics are always more or less the same.

So blowing up what is there does not make sense at all, because it is the same agenda anyway. What matters tactically is focused acceleration of evidence of impact, quickly, because that builds credibility and buys you time. It buys time for people to trust that we have seen evidence already, so let us give it a bit longer for the next evidence to come. If that evidence takes longer than twelve months, forget it. You are out of the game already.

And what counts as evidence depends on what the company wants. If we install commercial excellence because we need improvement, it is going to be about top line and bottom line — EBITDA, growth rate, conversion rate in the pipeline, cost of sales. If the answer is that we need to fundamentally transform, then the top and bottom line say far less about whether you are actually transforming. Then the dialogue has to be about what gives evidence, what builds trust that we are sustainably changing — and whether the board believes those things, if they happen, would unlock sustainable growth.

Jesse Hopps: It is like getting on the scale every day. If you are trying to transform your body, weight is not the right measurement — you might be gaining muscle while you are leaning out. Focus on the process, not the outcome. Am I walking ten thousand steps? Am I reducing my stress? Those are the leading indicators.

Jesse Hopps: Let us talk about credit, because this is a paradox in commercial excellence. The business units usually fund the function, so who takes credit for the wins? I get leaders who say we cannot invest in a program unless there is proof it will make this impact over here. How do you think about giving credit versus justifying the investment?

Roy van Griensven: Very simple. The only place where you can claim credit is where the P&L is. Unless you have a commercial excellence P&L — and in most cases you do not, because that is not where the profit is made — you can never claim a specific amount.

What works is servant leadership. It is not about you as a commercial excellence leader claiming credit. It is the businesses that need to be able to show they are improving. And on causation or correlation, for me there is only one word: contribution.

The moment you have a dialogue with business unit leaders and ask what we can contribute so you get as close as possible to your target, and they say — these are the three things I need help with — they are perfectly happy afterwards to say we reached this, we had this win, through our collaboration and the contribution of what these people did. From experience that is far better evidence of credit and credibility for a board, a CEO or a CFO than anything you artificially create in KPI reports. Otherwise it leads to: great, you are claiming this amount, but I do not see it in the P&L.

It is very easy to do a project and report that you measured the KPI, and in most cases a business unit head or a CFO will sign off on the number just so you get out of the way and they can go back to what they always did. It is far more credible when they say: here is evidence of things that have transformed us, because now we are doing things we were never able to do before.

Jesse Hopps: This is contrarian, because a lot of commercial excellence leaders feel that without clear attribution they get viewed as a cost center. Marketing has lived with that for twenty years.

Roy van Griensven: I do not know how many billions have been spent calculating marketing ROI. What is more important? The sales leader saying: can we please not cut the marketing budget, because what they are doing is so much helping us reach our goals. That is far more credible than any marketing ROI calculation. If the sales leader is not buying into the number, people still do not believe it.

I am not saying you should not measure. If you do growth account management, monitor whether you are actually growing with the accounts you identified as having potential. But it is not to deduct a number that links to my personal contribution — it still goes into the P&L of the businesses.

And the best evidence for a board is pull. If the businesses are asking, can you help me, because I have a target I need to reach — that is evidence. The moment the board looks at their business leaders and says, are you pulling for help, or are you just trying to get them out of your way? That is evidence as well.

Jesse Hopps: When you got the role at LANXESS you called and said you had an upskilling program and needed content and facilitation. I accepted the contract — and then I had a conversation with my wife, and she said, does that mean you are going to be gone for the next two years? And I said no. But we had to find a better way to drive behavioral change that would stick.

You set the constraints. One: whatever it is, intrinsic motivation is the main principle. Two: no one-size-fits-all off-the-shelf playbooks — the program has to be adapted to each business unit, their maturity, what they see as their priorities. Three: do not lecture about what should happen in a perfect world, facilitate reflection. Those were the three you gave me, and I had no idea how to solve for them.

So we talked to Kurt Friedmann about how adults actually learn, and to Dr. Paul Stoltz about adversity quotient and grit — how to get people harnessing adversity rather than seeing difficulty as a threat. And you ended up with the model the Academy runs on: mindset, skillset, toolset. How did you arrive at that?

Roy van Griensven: LANXESS already had the idea that we needed to build capabilities and do training — which is good. But the traditional model of lecturing at people was not going to work.

It goes back to needing to build the foundation of adaptive capacity first. In very simple terms, that is what is missing if a person is unable and unwilling and not ready to take on anything new. By addressing the mindset you open people up — I do not have to be a victim of Chinese material being dumped, of difficult market circumstances. There is still something I can influence, something I can do to change the situation. If you do not start there, nothing you give people in terms of skillset and toolset is going to stick.

Jesse Hopps: The real problem was never providing the right information or the right tools. It was getting people to want to do new things and stick to them. Which meant forming new habits — and most people are terrible at forming habits or breaking bad ones. Habits come from beliefs. Your thoughts shape your actions, your actions shape your habits, your habits shape your character. So how do you fix the thoughts part?

Roy van Griensven: In corporate organizations where people have been around a long time, they have seen things come by a few times, they have tried it, they have seen it fail. At a certain point they get stuck. They recognize the same pattern and think: we have tried this three times before, it will not work.

There is massive potential in any corporate organization to get less stuck. If a percentage of people stop stopping — not saying here we failed last time so we will not continue, but instead, does it have to be the place where I get stuck, or is there something else I can do — that is enormous. And the better people understand why they get stuck and that they do not have to, the more optimism there is about what is possible, and the more likely it is that something really changes.

Jesse Hopps: We found a McKinsey Health Institute paper on adaptive leadership. Four factors converging: psychological safety, organizational support, resilience and adaptability — and where they came together, roughly six times the innovation and engagement. Two of them a company can influence directly. But how do you make someone more adaptable? I had no idea how to answer that. And the research said around seventy-seven percent of people do not feel highly resilient and adaptable — while you are the change guy with dozens of projects running. How did you react to that?

Roy van Griensven: Two conflicting thoughts. First, in a German chemical industry organization that is not used to any form of change because it never really had to — not because of bad people, it was simply never required — if it has not been necessary for thirty years, it is very difficult to suddenly start. That worried me.

On the other hand, another thought kept running: it is actually not that difficult. Because if you break it down to any individual — if I am just being asked, and I get some support to deal with the biggest challenge I have in my day-to-day job, and I am genuinely asked, then all of a sudden it is not change. You are not being forced to change. You are not being transformed. People respond with: finally, someone is listening to me and asking my opinion. And by the way, I also get support.

So the only thing required is making sure that what people say needs to change is going in a direction that helps the company's strategy.

Jesse Hopps: My daughters are gymnasts. They cannot go to a weekend workshop and learn a back tuck — it is months of failure and practice and watching the film. Getting an organization to sell on value rather than price is the commercial equivalent. Why project-based learning with on-the-job coaching?

Roy van Griensven: A combination of factors. The seventy-twenty-ten logic has been there for decades — roughly seventy percent of learning comes from applying it in your daily job — and we still put most of the effort into the ten percent at the front, teaching the concepts. So I was well past the point of thinking it had to be tangible and applied on the job.

The second thing is human behavior and the fact that one-size-fits-all does not work. If you have a hundred commercial people, they are all individual human beings with their own place in their career, their own experience, ambitions, development needs and characters. It is impossible to design one training that fits everyone.

So instead we guide. If we say we feel these four or five capabilities are going to be critically important for LANXESS in future — do you agree? — then ninety-nine or a hundred percent say yes. It is not offensive; it does not say you do a bad job. It just asks whether we agree these are the things that matter going forward. That frames the space within which we talk about building capabilities.

Then the fundamental thing is intrinsic motivation. Pushing someone into applying a capability they see no value in, do not recognize and feel no need for will not work. If you tell your daughter you want her to do a backflip, how well is that going to work? So you let people select the one thing that matters most to them, tie it back to them being successful individually, and if individuals succeed, that accumulates into company performance.

The controversial part is that the sum of that means certain capabilities rise faster in some areas than others. That is a fundamental design problem corporate organizations have — we want to raise the bar at everything at the same speed and the same level. I have not seen a single company homogeneous enough for that to be true. It is uncomfortable, because you are not controlling and telling people what to do, you let them choose. But as long as it sits within the guidance of what matters for the future, over time capabilities rise across the board.

And it would be interesting to ask people whether they feel they are being changed today. I do not think that is the case. They feel: I am just working on things that matter and I am developing, we are not doing a major change program, nobody is forcing us to transform. But if you look back, we are already in a very different position than a year ago.

Jesse Hopps: We called them Growth Projects for two reasons — grow the business, grow your own skills. General Electric did project-based work at Crotonville; a lot of Six Sigma is project-based. When you do something you retain it; when you teach it you retain most of it; when you are told something you forget ninety percent within a week. How does the Growth Project mechanism build those four factors?

Roy van Griensven: It fits like a puzzle piece, and we did not design it to tick the four boxes. We bring people into a safe environment where we ask for their personal motivation. They reflect and share and talk without leadership in the room. They choose the one topic they want to work on with coaching, without anyone telling them what it should be, and without needing permission from their boss or their boss's boss. We got that question many times in the first cohorts and not any more, because people recognized it is a safe environment where they can genuinely select what they think is needed. Safety, checked.

Organizational support — we had to re-emphasize that you determine your ambition level and what you need. If you can run your Growth Project on your own, nobody is going to force help on you. But we are here with coaches, with commercial excellence resources, with tools. The moment you need it, we will make sure it is provided.

Resilience is the part we designed in with Dr. Paul Stoltz. Every project over ninety days reached a moment where someone said: maybe we need to stop here, we are getting stuck, we are running into an obstacle. Every project. And that is where the coaching on how do you continue, does it have to stop here, what is the one thing you can still do — that was a recurring topic.

Jesse Hopps: How is this coaching different from most coaching?

Roy van Griensven: Good coaching does not provide the answer, it guides the person to find it. As Dr. Paul says: do not give fish, teach people how to fish. What people have given feedback on is that this is not coaching that tells them how to do their job differently. It gives them the insight themselves about how they can structurally and sustainably progress.

And there is a super important side effect we have hardly spoken about. A lot of people come back and say the coaching is not just helping them professionally — it is helping them deal with tough things in their personal life. We have had people say thanks, it is interesting that the company is helping me as a person, not just as a professional. First time they have seen it. That was not the intention upfront, but it is a nice one.

Jesse Hopps: We measured adaptive capacity before and after, and the average improvement was around fifteen percent. How would you describe the value of that?

Roy van Griensven: Think about the simple logic. If we explain to any board member, CEO or CFO: do we believe there is substantial and sustainable value if, in fifteen percent of the cases where people typically get stuck — lose a customer, stop, give up — we are not stopping, we are not giving up, we are finding a solution? In fifteen percent of cases that occur every day. Any board member will say that is massive, because in a company of ten, twenty, a hundred thousand employees you have at least one problem per person per day. More than one.

Can you attribute a top line or bottom line result to AQ? Of course not. But if you ask whether it had a substantial contribution — if we get unstuck in fifteen percent of everyday cases — the answer is that is massive.

Jesse Hopps: What will actually be in the hallways before and after your board presentation? What are the visible signals?

Roy van Griensven: People in board positions look at credible anecdotal evidence from people they know to be trustworthy and typically also critical. You can put the fifteen percent up as a number and it sounds good. The credibility comes the moment someone everybody knows to be incredibly critical of any form of change says that through going through the Academy, we solved something in our Growth Project that we have never been able to solve before in the last twenty years of this company. That happened.

Roy van Griensven: As a company we never really had to operate as one company. We had nine business units running perfectly well on their own — even encouraged to. So sharing information across business units was never really possible, and on top of that our data structures and system landscape were decentralized.

Ask a sales or marketing person whether they have access to information about a customer that sits in another business unit or another system, and the answer is usually no. The visit reports for that account are visible only to the person in that business unit. I can see my own pipeline in CRM. But I do not know the payment terms — and by the way, some customers are also suppliers, so procurement has all the supplier information about the same company, and as a salesperson I have no idea what is being discussed on the supply side.

So one of the Growth Projects ended up saying: by account, we now have the full set of information. Not designed by someone in headquarters, not by a consultant, but by a sales and a marketing person saying this is the information I need to do my job. They created it. They built the dashboard themselves and pulled the different data sources together.

Zero resistance on adoption, because nobody told them this is the information you need to use. They were able to say: I need all of these information sets. The organizational support required was telling the people who control the databases that if this group comes with a request, give them the information. They presented it, and the leadership team said it makes perfect sense — make it available to everyone. Every sales and marketing person had thought we were never going to get to that point, because there were always a thousand reasons why it was not possible. Now they are knocking on the door asking to use it. We do not need a deployment program with training on how to use a dashboard, because they are asking for it.

Jesse Hopps: How did you create pull for tools rather than pushing them at people? Why is toolset last in the sequence rather than first?

Roy van Griensven: Because if you follow mindset first and skillset second, the pull and the request for tools always comes. And if you guide and coach it properly, you arrive at standardization and harmonization naturally.

Across the Growth Projects so far, at least ten have been about getting a handle on the opportunity pipeline. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the response would be: let us implement CRM. So by default we said we take that away. We are not going to talk about implementing CRM, we are not going to touch it in these projects. Take a piece of paper, take a spreadsheet, build a dashboard — first work out what you actually need, and install a way of working that supports you in managing your opportunities better.

And throughout the projects they all arrive at a point of saying: we have done this in a spreadsheet, and maybe we should implement the system, because managing this across a team on spreadsheets is getting cumbersome. So they are asking. And because of the guidance, they also say: the challenge is that we looked at what we need from my business perspective, so it might be very specific to my business unit. We have nine business units across four different business models.

And ninety percent of what they arrive at, of what they need from a CRM system, is exactly the same. Instead of someone designing a one-size-fits-all system, people realize that what they defined themselves is ninety percent the same, and the ten percent can be business specific. The more important thing is that they are asking now. Our problem is that we cannot give them the CRM quickly enough — they keep asking when it will be done, because they had to fill in the spreadsheet manually again this month.

Jesse Hopps: Every company massively over-engineers what it wants to collect. I stand up for the field — nobody can fill a hundred and twenty-seven fields after every customer meeting. How lean was the core set that cut across all the business units?

Roy van Griensven: The default problem is that you cannot design a CRM by looking at what people who are not in a sales job want to know from sales. That creates complexity. In all honesty these discussions typically start with: we only need five fields. Fine, let us start there. But it is very tempting to then say, yes, but you also need these fifteen.

The good thing is that in a process of coaching by question, you ask: we do this so that it helps you steer the business you are responsible for. So is it relevant for you to understand how many opportunities you have in a given market segment, where you know there is growth potential? Maybe the first answer is no, I do not need to know it. Fine, then we do not include it. Typically they arrive later at the point that maybe it is relevant.

Win-loss reason — if I have lost a deal, why would I bother filling that in? People need to uncover for themselves that it is actually helpful to have a deliberate review once a month and ask why we are losing these types of deals every time. But you have to be comfortable letting them discover that, and you guide it by asking whether this is a question that is typically relevant to managing their business.

One thing we have not spoken about is the inspire element, which is deliberate. We provide people with practical examples of how other companies deal with the opportunity pipeline — not saying we need to do it that way, just sharing for inspiration. We have a commodity chemical business that never had to do pipeline management, because there was always a queue of customers, a handful of them, known inside out on long-term contracts. That is very different today, with capacity not fully filled. So they are interested in how other companies actually do it. We give examples, and they pull in what is relevant.

Jesse Hopps: The regional operating committees review the results of these ninety-day projects. How does knowing they will present to senior leaders land — as a threat, or as an avenue?

Roy van Griensven: It has evolved. In the first cohorts we designed it that way: remember, you do a presentation, prepare for where you need help if you want to scale this, take it seriously because people are going to look at it. We did that by design.

If I look at the Growth Projects today, they do not require it at all, because they are dealing with the obstacles they run into during the project. We do not design that they need to present to senior leadership any more. Now they ask whether we can organize it, because they want to give visibility to what they achieved. They are proud of it.

Jesse Hopps: For the cohort of very senior leaders, you made presenting optional. What happened?

Roy van Griensven: They all presented. And their presentations were better than the ones where we had told them they had to. Because they were intrinsically motivated about the topics they were working on, and they felt proud of what they achieved. They want to expose the fact that they found a breakthrough. They want to talk about it and share it with colleagues.

Jesse Hopps: Which is about the opposite of passive resistance — excitement to share wins. Any last thought for anyone listening?

Roy van Griensven: There is no one-size-fits-all. It is always situationally dependent: where the company is, the context, the performance, the type of leadership, what has been done before. But on design principles, this applies to every company. First, establish whether the company is actually interested in improvement or transformation. If transformation, design it around creating adaptive capacity and intrinsic motivation, which means involving the people. How you do that can differ a lot with company culture. The principles are very much the same.

And the credibility of the coaches is perceived very differently. I have reflections from very senior leaders in our company who say: finally, not consultants — people who have actually done the job as well. They know the good, the bad and the ugly. They understand the challenges, and they are actually helping to solve real everyday problems.