Most transformation programs change the strategy. Almost none change the people fast enough to execute it.

I was working with a team recently. Twenty people, hand-picked from across the organization, tasked with turning their company into an “AI-first” organization. Smart people. Motivated people. People who had voluntarily raised their hands for what they knew was a career-level bet.

I gave them a simple creative task. Using future job cards developed by a futurist colleague, each person pulled a card at random: quantum mechanic, bee counter, microbiome hacker, things like that. Then I put them into teams of three and asked them to come up with a scenario where their three roles would collaborate to solve a problem.

But guess what?

Out of twenty people who are supposed to be leading AI transformation for their organization, exactly one used AI to work on the task. One person pushed for it, and in the final presentation let AI narrate a story in which the different jobs collaborated.

One out of twenty.

These are the people charged with building the AI future. Yet they are still being in the old ways.

The strategy existed. The mandate was clear. The budget was allocated. And yet, in the moment where it mattered, where creativity and initiative were required, nineteen out of twenty defaulted to the familiar.

This is the gap nobody is talking about.

It’s Not a Skills Gap. It’s a Capability Gap.

Everyone is talking about upskilling. Prompt engineering workshops. AI literacy programs. Tool trainings. Certification badges.

And most of it isn’t working. Completion rates look good. Behavior change is minimal. Adoption stalls.

Not because the content is bad. But because it addresses the wrong problem. Training people on how to use tools is horizontal development. It adds new skills to the same person.

The Capability Gap is vertical. It’s about who your people see themselves to be.

The distinction matters more than most leaders realize.

A skills gap says: your people don’t know how to do something.

A capability gap says: your people haven’t become the kind of people yet who would naturally do it.

Think about the AI team I described. They all knew how to use AI tools. They had access. They had been trained. But in a moment that called for initiative and creative risk, they defaulted to what felt safe. Because their underlying operating system, their sense of who they are as professionals, hadn’t shifted.

They had been given new tools. But they were still running old identities.

Why Most Transformations Quietly Die

BCG’s analysis of over 850 companies found that only 35% of digital transformations reach their stated goals. McKinsey puts the success rate at roughly 30%. And the situation may be getting worse: Bain’s 2024 analysis found that 88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions.

But the number I think indicates what is most overlooked: According to BCG’s research, approximately 70% of AI implementation challenges stem from people and process issues. Only 10% involve the AI algorithms themselves. The technology works. The people aren’t ready.

Not because they lack intelligence or resist change on principle. But because there is a distance between what the organization is trying to become and what the people in it are currently capable of being.

That distance is the Capability Gap.

And it is where most transformations quietly die. Not with a dramatic failure or a board-level crisis. But with a slow, almost invisible erosion of ambition, as the new strategy gradually gets absorbed back into old patterns. The decks get filed. The pilots get abandoned. The language changes, but nothing else does.

And quietly, the leader who championed the initiative watches their credibility erode alongside it.

You can probably feel it, right?

The Real Shift: From Employee to Intrapreneur

As Abraham Maslow once wrote: “What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.”

This is the hinge. The reason training programs don’t stick isn’t that the content is wrong. It’s that the person on the receiving end hasn’t shifted who they understand themselves to be.

Most people in most organizations still operate from the system they were trained in. Call it the employee operating system: I am here to execute. I follow processes. I wait for instructions. I minimize risk. My value comes from doing what I’m told, reliably.

That identity was functional for a complicated world. It is catastrophic in a complex one.

The identity your transformation actually requires is something closer to the intrapreneur: I am a source of value creation. I see opportunities. I take initiative. I experiment. I relate to AI as a collaborator, not a threat. My value comes from what I create, not what I execute. These will be the hyper-learners that are more enabled than ever to create outcomes.

This is not a personality difference. It’s a developmental shift. And it doesn’t happen through a two-day workshop.

It happens when people are given real challenges to work on, supported by the right developmental environment, and invited to relate to themselves in a fundamentally new way. It happens in the doing, not in the learning about.

Training informs people. Development changes who they are in relation to their work. That distinction is everything.

Upleveling, not just upskilling. That is what closes the Capability Gap.

How to Close the Gap: Catalysts, Not Programs

You will not close the Capability Gap by training everyone at once. That is the old model: roll out a program, measure completion rates, check the box. It produces compliance, not transformation.

Instead, start where the energy already is.

In any organization, there are people who are already leaning forward. They are the ones who used AI in that exercise, not because they were told to, but because it was obvious to them. They are your transformation catalysts. And you need four kinds:

1. Navigators who create strategic clarity, align leadership, and build decision frameworks for the organization to follow.
2. Guides who hold the emotional and relational space that transformation requires, reducing overwhelm and building trust through the uncertainty.
3. Intrapreneurs who experiment, prototype, and create early proof points that the new way of working actually delivers value.
4. Stewards who ensure governance, accountability, and operational integrity as the organization evolves.

Find them. Develop them. Let them lead from within (I have written more about this here)

The innovation adoption curve applies here. You don’t need everyone. Research consistently shows that a committed minority, somewhere between 10 and 25%, can tip a system into a new norm. Your catalysts are the 3–5% who see clearly. Their job is to find and equip the next 15%, who then carry the shift across the organization (more on how to use the Coalition of the Willing to shift your culture here)

Transformation spreads like mycelium, not through a memo.

The Choice in Front of You

“When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to lift the entire system to a higher order.” — Ilya Prigogine

You probably already see that gap. You feel the distance between the transformation your organization has announced and the transformation your people are actually living.

This awareness is your invitation.

The question is what you do with it.

You can keep investing in skills programs and hoping that behavior follows. You can keep rolling out tools and wondering why adoption stalls. You can keep changing the strategy and watching it get absorbed by the old culture.

Or you can address the actual gap. The one between who your people are being and who they get to become.

This is what we do at LUMAN.

We build the organizational capability your transformation actually requires. We run cohort-based development programs where your people work on real challenges while fundamentally shifting how they relate to themselves, each other, and the future they are building. We identify and develop your transformation catalysts so they can carry the shift organically through your organization.

In a program we co-designed with Siemens over a decade, reaching nearly 1,000 people across 40+ countries, an internal study found that one participant on average impacted ten people around them in how they work. Not through presentations. Through being. That is what scalable, sustained behavior change looks like.

Because at the end of the day, your strategy is only as good as the people executing it. And those people are only as capable as the identity they are operating from.

Close the Capability Gap. The future is waiting.

Ready to address the real bottleneck in your transformation? Connect with me on LinkedIn, explore philiphorvath.com, or reach out to LUMAN directly. Let’s build what wants to emerge.

The Capability Gap was originally published in LUMAN.IO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You could see it before anyone said a word.

NBC on one side of the table. Universal on the other. The swag said it all: coffee cups, branded notepads, each carrying the old logo. Six months into a merger that had already been declared complete on every dashboard, they were still two tribes in a negotiation that hadn’t ended.

I was there on the systems integration side. By every metric available to the program, things were on track. Org charts redrawn. Due diligence complete. Culture had its checkmark. Systems integrating.

But the room showed something different.

We and you. Us and them. The language of people who had not yet become one company, however the org chart described them. And not just in the words, in the posture. In the physical act of sitting on opposite sides of a table.

The structure said: one company.

The interior said: two tribes.

That gap was invisible to every dashboard, every project tracker, every executive update. And it was the only thing in the room that actually mattered.

That day, twenty years ago, I stopped pretending the two halves of my work were unrelated. Enterprise strategy during the day. Art, philosophy, psychology, interior work in the evenings. The split wasn’t in me. It was in the environment. And I keep seeing the same split in my clients now: performing in systems by day, living a human life on the evenings and weekends.

Systemic transformation is always also human transformation.

So I’ve been wondering: why does the field keep treating them as two different jobs?

The Problem Isn’t the Strategy

Most transformations don’t fail dramatically. There is no board-level crisis, no visible collapse.

They fail slowly, invisibly, as the new strategy gets absorbed back into old patterns. The decks get filed. The pilots get abandoned. The language changes. And little else really does.

BCG’s analysis of over 850 companies found that only 35% of digital transformations reach their stated goals. McKinsey puts it at roughly 30%. Bain’s 2024 research suggests 88% fail to achieve their original ambitions. And across these studies, approximately 70% of failures trace back not to technology or strategy. They trace back to people and culture.

Let that sink in.

You already know this. You’ve probably cited it in a steering committee.

The question nobody seems to be asking (or perhaps avoiding, since the big consulting firms profit from selling the same playbook yet again): why does the field keep producing the same results, year after year, with ever more sophisticated methodology?

The answer is that the map is incomplete.

Most change management helps people understand, accept, and implement change. That matters. But transformation asks for more than acceptance. It asks people to operate from a larger identity, under greater ambiguity, in relationships and systems that no longer behave as before. That is not a communication problem or a skills problem alone. It is a developmental demand. And when that demand is ignored, transformation may launch, but it does not stick.

Transformation rewrites the rules people have built their identity around. The role they thought they were good at. The relationships they trusted. The rhythms that made them feel competent. When that ground moves, the body moves first. Reactivity. Compliance theater. Retreat into the old role. Quiet refusal disguised as cooperation.

Communication and training create awareness. They do not create capacity. Development does. It builds the ability to stay present, make meaning differently, experiment in real time, and sustain new ways of operating when the pressure rises. This is why human development is what allows change to stick.

How We Got Here

These tools were built for a different era. And for their era, they were brilliant.

John Kotter’s Leading Change came out of Harvard in 1996, built on case studies from the 1980s. Prosci’s ADKAR emerged in the mid-1990s. McKinsey’s 7S framework goes back even further. All were designed for a world with a somewhat knowable future, a clear end state, and enough time to execute a planned sequence.

The toolkit fit the problem: communicate the vision, provide training, reinforce new behaviors, anchor the change in culture. Complicated, in the Cynefin sense. The work could be mapped and managed once you understood it well enough.

We are no longer in the complicated era. We are in complex. The system itself shifts as you act on it. The transformations you are leading today don’t have clear end states. The technology shifts while you are writing the roadmap. Multiple transformations run simultaneously. And the people you are asking to change are exhausted by change and doing so without the psychological safety of stable ground beneath them.

The field grew up solving a different problem. It has not yet caught up to ours. Not a failure of the discipline. A gap created by the acceleration of time.

The maps are not wrong. They are incomplete. And so is every transformation strategy still navigating by the same toolkit. Because the field itself is incomplete.

These models do address the human side. They treat it as adoption, alignment, communication, reinforcement, behavior change. What they were not built to produce is vertical development, embodied responses to uncertainty, or the relational conditions adult transformation requires. Those take sustained reflective practice, social learning, and relational safety. The toolkit was designed for a different problem.

The Map Most Transformations Are Working From

Every transformation requires work along two dimensions:

• The first dimension is where the work is aimed: at the System or at the Human. System work targets the organization: its structures, processes, technology, governance, culture as a set of shared agreements. Human work targets the people: their identity, development, behavior, and capacity to grow into what the transformation actually demands of them.
• The second dimension is what kind of work is being done: Expanding into the new, or Holding what is emerging. Expanding means pushing the frontier: creating new direction, new strategy, new behaviors, new possibilities. Holding means creating the container: sustaining integrity, anchoring meaning, building the ground that allows expansion to take root.

Those two dimensions then produce four types of work. And every transformation needs all four.

• System + Expand: new strategies, operating models, technology stacks, structural redesigns
• System + Hold: governance, metrics, decision rights, compliance, incentives, budgeting
• Human + Expand: prototyping and experimentation, stretch roles, cross-boundary collaborations
• Human + Hold: developmental spaces, coaching, peer reflection, conflict processing, meaning-making, identity transition support

Most programs invest heavily in System work, both expanding (new strategies, new structures, new technology) and holding (governance, compliance, standards, process). That side of the map is well-covered. Often very well-covered.

The Human side is where the map goes blank. The expanding work with people: prototyping new behaviors, making new decisions, creating visible proof that a different way of operating is actually possible, is funded sporadically if at all. And the holding work with people: creating sustained developmental space where individuals can process uncertainty, cross identity thresholds, and grow into a genuinely new sense of self. This work is almost never on the program budget.

This is not a people problem. It’s a map problem.

The field built much of its methodology around system design, rollout, and adoption, then often treated that as complete. ADKAR, Kotter, Prosci are all brilliant tools (I have used them myself for years), but they are mostly aimed at the system and a functional, not developmental, view of humans. They were not designed to develop the human. That doesn’t make them wrong. It reveals a limitation in what the field has historically prioritized.

Who Is in the Room, and Who Isn’t

The fastest way to diagnose your transformation is to look at who you have assembled to lead it.

Transformations require four types of catalysts. But typically, organizations only deploy two:

• Navigators expand the system. They are your strategists: the ones who map the journey, align leadership, build decision frameworks, and ensure the transformation doesn’t descend into chaos. Most programs have Navigators. They’re often running the program.
• Stewards hold the system. They anchor change into the organization’s actual fabric: ensuring new ways of working embed in metrics, standards, shared values and practice. Stewards don’t just enforce governance. They hold the institutional memory of what the organization is becoming.
• Intrapreneurs expand the human. They are the behavioral experimenters: the ones who prototype new ways of working, make new decisions, and create visible proof that a different way of operating is actually possible. Without Intrapreneurs, behavioral change stays theoretical. Someone has to be the prototype of new behaviors (which then inspires others).
• Guides hold the human. They hold the developmental and emotional space that transformation requires. They create the conditions for people to process uncertainty, cross identity thresholds, and grow into a genuinely new sense of self. They understand that resistance to change is rarely rational. It is all too often existential.

Now look at your transformation team.

How many Navigators? How many Stewards?

How many Guides? How many Intrapreneurs?

In most programs, the first two are well-represented. (And culture is often treated as a thing: a communication campaign or two should do the trick, right?)

The second two are absent, or survive only informally, in the exceptional leader who cares about people despite the culture, in the maverick who experiments around the edges rather than through the center.

System side: covered. Human side: mostly empty. Half the map. And we are surprised when half the results arrive.

Where the Map Goes Blank

The Guide’s domain is where most transformation programs have the least investment and the greatest need.

This is the domain of development. Not training. Not upskilling. Not learning a new tool. Development. From the Old French développer: to unfold, to unwrap. The slow process by which a person comes to see themselves differently, to hold more complexity, to act from a deeper and more resilient center.

As I explored in The Capability Gap: the distance between what an organization is trying to become and what its people are currently capable of being is not a skills problem. It is a vertical development problem. Training is horizontal: it adds new skills to the same person. Development is vertical: it expands who that person is in relation to their work.

And it goes all the way down to the individual level.

When people are treated as functions in an org chart (roles to be retrained, not human beings to be developed) only one dimension of their humanity is engaged. The rational part. The capacity for information processing and skill acquisition.

But human beings are not primarily rational. We have bodies that carry the physical tension of uncertainty. We have nervous systems that respond to ambiguity with stress and reactivity. We have relational fields that determine whether we trust the people sitting across the table from us. We have a need for meaning, not just for instruction.

Ignore those dimensions and you produce exactly what most transformation programs produce: people who might be able to recite the new strategy, but continue behaving in the old ways. People who, six months into a merger, still reach for the coffee cup with the old company’s logo.

Why the Interior Is So Hard to Reach

Look at what actually happens in a human nervous system in the liminal space of transformation.

Uncertainty and ambiguity trigger the amygdala, the part in our brain looking out for danger. This activates the sympathetic nervous system. Cortisol rises. Attention narrows, along with the cognitive capacity needed for reflection, integration, and flexible response.

No wonder many communications don’t land.

You can deliver the most beautiful townhall you have ever designed. But if the room is full of people whose nervous systems are quietly screaming, your efforts will be in vain. They will nod. They might clap. They might even rate the session favorably (while making anonymous comments in the chat). But nothing will move. Because information rarely integrates when the body is in a protective state.

New behaviors get learned through co-regulation, not just through instruction. The nervous system learns safety from other nervous systems. Psychological safety and relational context are required for integration. Instruction matters, but new behaviors are far more likely to take root when people experience sufficient safety, reinforcement, and social modeling. This is also why the Guides in your organization matter more than your training decks.

And developmental change, the vertical move that actually shifts who people are, requires something the standard toolkit was not built to create: a sustained container of safety in which identity can be examined, loosened, and re-authored. That is not happening in a one time event. That takes practice.

Insight alone rarely shifts a nervous system state. You cannot communicate your way into one that is protected against you. And you cannot roadmap your way into a new identity.

The current transformation toolkit is incomplete. It is missing the layer where humans actually live.

Transformation sticks when organizational design, social context, and individual development reinforce one another. Most programs invest in the first and underinvest in the latter two.

What Developmental Change Actually Looks Like

Human development is a broad category. It does not mean generic soft-skills training. In the context of organizational transformation, it means expanding people’s capacity to handle complexity, uncertainty, conflict, feedback, customer proximity, cross-functional collaboration, identity shift, and new forms of agency. It involves changes in how people make meaning, not only in what they know.

We worked with Siemens over the last decade on their Intrapreneurs Bootcamp. What made it different (and what made it a “zero regret” investment for them) is that they realized early on it’s not just about methods and tools.

The methods and tools were the anchor. Over 14 weeks we moved people through the typical innovation toolkit: topic and stakeholder maps, persona profiles, value proposition design, business model canvas, prototyping, testing, pitching. But Siemens also understood the human dimension.

Alongside the project and ecosystem tracks, the program had a designated people track. That’s where we turned employees into intrapreneurs. The developmental work that gave participants a new sense of self and identity.

A quarter long. Weekly cadence. Sessions on authenticity, psychological safety, agreements, feedback, care, even purpose. We held space for them to ease into new behaviors inside a safe container. Through spaced repetition and a curriculum that built on itself, new ways of being became habitual.

Most of them met with customers for the first time in their lives. Even seasoned engineers, decades into their careers. Normally, engineers do not call customers. That is usually seen as the domain of sales (or of customer support after things have gone wrong). For the identity of an engineer, it was not an available action.

But they picked up the phone. They called. They interviewed. With preparation, with account reps in the loop where it made sense. Still: a bit of a rogue action for “normal” corporate employees.

For many of them, this simple act was life-changing.

And for many, for the first time at work, they were seen as whole humans, not just job functions.

I loved the moment when an engineer came up to me and said: “You know, I knew I was very good at thinking. You have shown me: I am good at feeling, too.”

That is not a new skill. That is a developmental shift that only became available because of a new identity.

Behavior change is the visible surface. Development is the deeper shift in meaning-making, identity, and capacity that makes those behaviors durable under pressure.

Engineers initiating customer conversations. Teams working across silos. People learning to tolerate ambiguity rather than escalating or jumping to premature solutions. Conflict engaged directly rather than routed through politics. The difficult conversations actually happening. All of that was the outcome as participants moved from employee compliance to intrapreneurial authorship.

Multiply that by a hundred. Then by a thousand. Across multiple cohorts, over several years, participants moved into roles with greater responsibility. They started initiatives that did not exist in the org chart. Some of them became Guides and Intrapreneurs of their business units, carrying the new behaviors into meetings that no training program had reached.

This is developmental change. It is personal, human, and not easily captured by a dashboard. It produces ripples across the organization. An internal study showed that on average, each bootcamp participant influenced about 10 colleagues in their home department to adopt these new behaviors. This outlasted everything else in the program, because it changed who the people were, not just what they knew.

The work that makes transformation stick is almost never the work that shows up first on the steering committee report. It is the work happening in hallways, in one-to-one conversations, in the rewiring of identity.

I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillaries. — William James, The Will to Believe

That is the level at which transformation actually moves.

Done carelessly, this kind of identity-level work can also be manipulative or destabilizing. That is precisely why it must be approached consciously and responsibly.

There is an organizational dimension here too. An organization optimized for its current business model will experience this work as friction, or dismiss it as “soft skills” reserved for when there is some extra budget to burn (meaning pretty much never). But an organization learning to operate as a continuously adapting system will recognize it as the key to making transformation stick.

The question of whether your company treats developmental work as cost or as capability is the question of which kind of organization you are becoming.

If you look at your current portfolio and cannot point to where that work is happening intentionally, with real investment, you have located the gap.

Three Invitations Before Your Next Conversation

Allow yourself this genuine inquiry.

• Map both dimensions honestly. Look at your transformation portfolio against the two axes: System and Human, Expand and Hold. Where is your actual investment? Be specific. A communication campaign is not human work. A training program is not behavioral development. Locate the blank spaces on your own map. They will tell you more than the populated ones.
• Name the specific people doing Guide and Intrapreneur work. Not in theory. In practice, with names. Who is genuinely holding developmental space for people navigating uncertainty and fear? Who is actually experimenting with new behaviors, visibly, so others can follow? If you cannot answer with names, you do not yet have a transformation. You have a project plan.
• Notice what your culture says about the interior. Is identity work, embodied development, the emotional dimension of transformation treated as legitimate business investment? Or as something that happens on personal time, funded when there is surplus? The culture’s answer to that question is its real answer to transformation.

Sit with those three. The answers will tell you more about your transformation’s actual trajectory than any steering committee report.

You’re Not Failing. You Have Half a Map.

Leaders who are carrying the private weight of a transformation that looks good on paper but feels hollow in practice are not doing anything wrong.

They are navigating with an incomplete instrument.

The exterior work is real and necessary. The strategy. The systems. The governance. But on its own, it is incomplete.

You get to build the other half.

Transformation has stuck when new behaviors persist under pressure, spread socially beyond the pilot group, survive leadership attention cycles, and become part of how people actually make decisions together, especially under uncertainty.

What the NBC Universal room clarified for me back then is that the program succeeded at everything it was designed to do. It integrated the exterior. But it left the interior untouched.

And the interior is where people live.

The exterior and the interior are not two separate programs. They are two halves of one transformation. Complete the map. Complete the work.

If this map has named something you have been carrying privately: the gap between what looks good on the slides and what you feel in the room, then that recognition is already beginning.

The next step is completing the design.

LUMAN works with transformation leaders ready to build across both dimensions: the external strategy that structures change, and the human development that makes it stick. If that is where you are, let’s talk.

Connect at philiphorvath.com or luman.io.

The Half-Map: Why Most Transformation Programs Work From an Incomplete Map was originally published in LUMAN.IO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a leader, your job is to innovate.

Unless, of course, you’re merely managing predefined, repeatable processes. In that case, AI can, and soon will replace you.

Leadership is not about maintenance. It’s about emergence.

Something will exist as a result of your leadership that didn’t exist before: Maybe it’s a new product, a project, a new way of working, a new business, or even an entire ecosystem of organizations collaborating to deliver real value. Ultimately, that’s what leadership is: the capacity to midwife the future into being.

And that future? It’s all about outcomes. Tangible value. Real-world results.

Lead From the Future, Act in the Now

Your job is to lead the way into a future where that value has already been realized, and then ship the results back into this timeline.

That starts with one thing: leading yourself.

SELF: The Inner Work of Leadership

Leadership begins with awareness. Who do you need to become to meet the moment? Who will that future version of you have become? What must you release or take on to authentically own the next version of yourself?

Leadership isn’t about titles. It’s about transformation.

This is your opportunity to stretch into new responsibility, lean into discomfort, and embody the identity of the leader this future needs. Begin to be this person now. Define who you choose to be. Align your actions with that identity. And commit to outcomes that matter, with a clear purpose, engaging vision, a committed portfolio, and measurable progress indicators to stay on track.

TEAM: Coherence is the New Efficiency

Then, it’s about your team. Meeting them authentically, and keeping them aligned around a shared purpose.

Meet your people where they are. Support their own expansion and growth as leaders (after all: leaders create leaders who create leaders.)

Steward the process. Mentor their growth.

Together, define who you will be as a team. What behaviors express that collective identity? What are you committed to delivering together? And how will you know you’re on track?

Purpose. Vision. Milestones. Progress indicators (meaningful metrics). Shared agreements (and a way to negotiate them and clear them when broken). This is the infrastructure of cohesion and high-performance — even under uncertainty.

VENTURE: The Path from Idea to Impact

Finally, you’re not just leading people, you’re stewarding a venture. From early signals and ideas to a new reality in the world.

That path will require different mindsets and behaviors at different stages of the journey. You’ll need the curiosity to sense what’s emerging, the creativity to shape it, and the discipline to bring it to life.

Leadership is a dance between chaos and order.

You surrender to the chaos of the unknown. You allow for emergence. And then you bring order: systems, processes, artifacts that make the new real.

Every Act of Leadership Begins with a Choice

Every moment of chaos is an invitation.

To evolve. To step up. To show up.

So next time you’re faced with a challenge or an opportunity, ask yourself:

What value am I committed to bringing into the world?

And who do I need to become to make that real?

Turn on all your human intelligences so you can thrive in an age of AI, disruption and uncertainty.

Connect with me at https://philiphorvath.com or through LUMAN at https://luman.io to learn how we can get you and your workforce ready for the future.

Need to inspire, engage and activate your people? Hire me for a keynote.

If You’re Not Innovating, You’re not Leading was originally published in LUMAN.IO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The townhall was buzzing, but not with excitement, rather with everyone making sure they did not end up getting blamed for the sales targets that had just been missed.

“Who is responsible for this?” was the big question in the room. The clear answer in everyone’s head: “Not me!”

As a result, the Q&A chat was full of comments (mostly anonymous, of course) trying to find out who was to blame for the recent misses: the analysts who made the predictions about market demands? the leaders who acted on it and built extra capacity? the sales people who didn’t hit their targets and were worried about their bonuses?

A friend sent me screenshots of these chats asking what to do when people get stuck in the blame game.

In organizations the shifting of blame, the search for culprits, begins among colleagues.

But we see it in society, too: Immigrants, “creative types”, “the left”, “the right”, women/men, the young, the old, other countries and their leaders… The blame game is an easy one to use when demagogues prey on the fears of people.

Blame isn’t responsibility

Sometimes, things don’t go as planned — especially in an ever more complex world.

When things don’t work out or we miss targets, our biology, our ancient stress response system — designed for survival, not strategic meetings — takes over.

When we are stressed, we freeze, flee, fight, or fawn. These four Fs, rooted in our nervous system, show up in the workplace as procrastination, disengagement and avoidance, confrontation or gossip, or excessive people-pleasing combined with silent quitting.

But perhaps one of the most pervasive modern manifestations is the blame game.

When you observe meetings and townhalls, especially if things are difficult, you can watch a familiar dance: a room of smart, well-intentioned professionals subtly deflecting, redirecting, and protecting themselves after a missed target.

“Who is responsible for this?” — a valid question, but too often misunderstood.

Instead of seeking response-ability, we seek culpability.

Not who will act, but who must atone.

Herein lies a critical distinction — one that sits at the intersection of leadership, culture, and neuroscience.

The Brain on Blame

Blame is a protective mechanism. When we feel under threat, the amygdala — the brain’s threat detection center — activates the sympathetic nervous system. We enter a heightened state of arousal: heart rate spikes, cortisol floods the bloodstream, and executive function in the prefrontal cortex begins to shut down. Judgment narrows. Creativity evaporates. Empathy diminishes.

In these moments, the brain’s primary goal is not truth, but safety.

When we blame others, we create psychological distance — I am not at fault; therefore, I am not unsafe.

This comes at a cost. Blame reduces oxytocin, the hormone associated with trust and bonding, and inhibits mirror neuron activity, which underlies empathy.

The result? Disconnection. Defensiveness. And a breakdown of the very relational tissue needed to solve the problem at hand.

The Shift to Ownership

Contrast this with what happens when we take responsibility.

When a leader says, “Here’s what I missed — and here’s what I’m doing about it,” something remarkable happens: the prefrontal cortex re-engages. Cognitive flexibility returns. The parasympathetic nervous system — the one responsible for calm, restoration, and social connection — is activated. Cortisol levels drop, and oxytocin rises. Teams feel safer. Trust is rebuilt.

Neuroscientific studies in the field of social cognition have shown that leaders who model vulnerability and accountability activate prosocial regions of the brain in their teams — such as the medial prefrontal cortex and anterior insula — creating what researchers call co-regulation. Leadership becomes contagious.

Responsibility is not about the past. It is the ability to respond to what is here now — and to what wants to emerge.

Practical Invitations for Leaders

In your next jour fixe, team debrief, or retrospective try this:

1. Break the Threat Response Loop
   Address the elephant in the room and acknowledge the discomfort openly. “I sense we’re entering a space of tension — let’s pause for a moment to breathe together.” This simple act helps reset the nervous system, allowing the brain to move from reactivity to receptivity.
2. Shift the Language
   Replace “Who caused this?” with:
   · “What are we learning here?”
   · “What became visible that wasn’t before?”
   · “What have we become aware of?”
   · “Who feels called to lead the next step?”
3. Model Prefrontal Leadership
   Step forward vulnerably. “I didn’t see this coming, and here’s how I contributed — and now I’m committing to…”
   This transparency activates mirror neurons in others, making them more likely to own their part.
4. Create Closure and Coherence
   Encourage teams to share what’s unresolved, what they’re carrying, and what they’re ready to release. This doesn’t just move the work forward — it restores psychological safety and relational integrity.

Responsibility as a Ritual of Emergence

Blame is easy. It satisfies the limbic brain’s desire for quick resolution.

Leadership asks us to expand our capacity — to be present with discomfort, to metabolize complexity, to model a different way of being.

Authentic leadership, then, is not about perfection. It is about presence. It is about stepping into the unknown with eyes wide open, our nervous system regulated, and our intentions and values aligned.

This requires a new operating system, a new way to collaborate and create value together.

As a leader, it requires knowing what you can and can’t change.

“Give me the patience to bear the things I can’t change, the courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

The future of leadership — and of work itself — will not be built by those who are quickest to assign blame.

It will be shaped by those who are most willing to respond.

Let’s transform your organization toward a new operating system that can thrive in pivotal moments full of uncertainty.

Connect with me at https://philiphorvath.com or through LUMAN at https://luman.io

• Need a speaker? Hire me for keynotes.
• Ready to kick off your strategy? Hire us to run a strategic workshop.
• Want to update your organizational operating system? Let’s develop your strategy for transformation.

Beyond the Blame Game: Leading from Ownership in Times of Missed Targets was originally published in LUMAN.IO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you feel like you’re steering your team through an endless fog, you are not alone. In times of transformation and disruption, in pivotal moments, the old ways of collaborating no longer suffice.

The question is: can your team not just survive uncertainty, but innovate because of it and thrive in pivotal moments?

The reality is stark — inefficiencies in team collaboration cost organizations billions. Misalignment, poor communication, and lack of accountability are rampant.

But there have always been teams who succeeded in collaborating amid uncertainty, especially creative and emergency response teams.

These high-performing teams thrive by developing three critical dimensions of collaboration:

1. Personal Development and Individual Capacities — How individuals relate to themselves, regulate how they operate, and take ownership.
2. Interpersonal Capacities — How team members interact, build trust, and hold each other accountable.
3. Project Phases and Customer Orientation — Aligning collaboration with the right mindset and behaviors for each phase of a project.

Mastering these dimensions transforms teams from dysfunctional groups into innovation engines.

Building Individual Collaboration Capacities

Every team is a reflection of its individuals. To collaborate effectively, individuals must cultivate adaptability through self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-organization. The most effective teams are composed of members who:

• Commit beyond personal interests to a shared mission.
• Self-regulate across physical, emotional, and mental dimensions to maintain engagement.
• Know when to lead and when to follow, leveraging collective intelligence.
• Use AI effectively to process information, gain insights, and support self-reflection.

Collaboration isn’t just about acquiring new skills — it’s about personal development. High-performing teams emerge when individuals expand their relational intelligence, starting with how they relate to themselves.

Interpersonal Capacities: Growing and Performing Together

Great collaboration is built on relational trust. Effective teams cultivate:

• Authenticity and Psychological safety — Ensuring individuals show up from their center, every voice is valued, risks can be taken, and mistakes lead to learning.
• Clarity and strong agreements — Defining expectations and following through.
• Feedback and growth — Fostering open, constructive conversations that drive excellence.
• Mutual care and accountability — Creating a culture where team members watch out for each other, hold each other to their potential, while staying committed to results.
• Purpose alignment — Keeping a clear collective vision that guides decision-making and reduces friction.

Beyond interpersonal skills, teams also need effective collaboration structures: well-run kickoffs and regular meetings, clear decision-making processes, regular retrospectives, and the ability to integrate AI to surface blind spots and synthesize learnings.

Phases of a Project: Collaborating with Precision

Every project moves through distinct phases of innovation — and each phase requires a different conversation and tools:

1. Signal — Identifying opportunities and defining customer needs.
2. Possibility — Exploring creative solutions without constraints.
3. Feasibility — Testing assumptions and validating concepts.
4. Commitment — Securing buy-in from key stakeholders.
5. Intelligence — Developing concrete execution plans.
6. Resources — Allocating necessary investments and determining returns.
7. Launch — Bringing solutions to market with impact.

Misalignment happens when teams mix these phases — jumping to feasibility before defining a vision, or discussing ROI before securing commitment. Knowing which conversation to have when reduces friction and accelerates execution.

Leading Through Uncertainty

In today’s disruptive landscape, improving collaboration is not optional — it’s an urgent imperative. The cost of inaction is steep: missed opportunities, disengaged talent, and teams that crumble under stress.

As a leader, you face a choice. Will you let uncertainty paralyze your team, or will you harness it as a catalyst for transformation?

High-performing teams are not born; they are built — through intentional personal development, relational mastery, and structured collaboration.

At LUMAN, we specialize in guiding leaders through this transformation, providing powerful frameworks, practical tools and ongoing support to turn uncertainty into an advantage.

Now is the time to act. Your ability to foster effective, efficient collaboration will define your leadership legacy.

Let’s navigate this pivotal moment together.

Let’s transform your organization toward a new operating system that can thrive in pivotal moments.

Connect with me at https://philiphorvath.com or through LUMAN at https://luman.io

• Need a speaker? Hire me for keynotes.
• Ready to kick off your strategy? Hire us to run a strategic workshop.
• Want to update your organizational operating system? Let’s develop your strategy for transformation.

Effective and Efficient Team Collaboration Amid Uncertainty was originally published in LUMAN.IO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are moments in life that change everything. Pivotal moments that define history. Right now is of them. You can probably feel it, right?

Pivotal moments are when we find ourselves teetering between collapse and control, destruction and oppression, chaos and order.

You’ve likely had several pivotal moments in your life — maybe you’re in one right now.

These are moments of transformation, they are turning points between what was and what could be. They are moments that shape us.

I’ve had plenty: losing my job during the dotcom bust, freelancing and building businesses, getting divorced, failing at a startup and teetering on the edge of homelessness, months of depression, five years living out of a suitcase. The list goes on.

When you are living a transformational life, you will have many pivotal moments.

In these moments, we’re called to wake up, grow up, show up, as Ken Wilber puts it.

When life hits us with uncertainty, we have two choices: let it define us, or expand our capacity to create.

Why We Contract — And How to Expand

Our natural response to overwhelm is to contract — to shrink into fear, react with old patterns, and focus on the immediate, missing the bigger picture.

But when we expand — when we embrace awareness, responsibility, and ownership — we break through limitations. We stop being defined by circumstances and start defining what’s possible.

As a leader, your first job is to come from your center. To respond with authenticity, not react from fear.

How Do You Shift from Reaction to Creation?

This is where a structured approach helps — what we teach at LUMAN. Our A-R-O/I-A-O framework guides you through pivotal moments so you can:

• Expand your Awareness to see the full picture — both external perspectives and inner insights.
• Take Responsibility by choosing how you respond.
• Step into Ownership and align your actions with your authenticity.
• Define your Identity based on who you choose to be, not who circumstances dictate.
• Take the right Actions that are aligned with your identity and
• Create meaningful Outcomes that matter to you and the world.

Mastering Pivotal Moments

When my first startup failed, it felt like my world collapsed. Fear, self-doubt, even suicidal thoughts took hold. But I had a choice: contract — or expand my capacity to create.

By applying the A-R-O/I-A-O framework, I didn’t just recover — I rebuilt. I learned how to navigate uncertainty, take ownership, and create again and again. That’s what mastering pivotal moments is all about. And it’s something you can learn too.

This Is a Pivotal Moment

We are surrounded by pivotal moments. Climate change, shifting institutions, AI transforming work, changes in our teams, families, and lives.

And if you’re still reading, you’re probably in one too.

Now is the time to show up with authentic leadership — to thrive amidst transformation.

At LUMAN, we don’t just talk about leadership — we train you to master pivotal moments and expand your capacity to create.

If you’re in a pivotal moment right now, don’t wait. Hesitation keeps you stuck. Every moment you delay is a moment you could be creating something new.

Let’s talk. Let’s explore how you can lead with clarity, confidence, and impact — so you can turn this pivotal moment into your next great opportunity.

Let’s transform your organization toward a new operating system that can handle disruption and thrives on human-AI collaboration.

Connect with me at https://philiphorvath.com or through LUMAN at https://luman.io

• Need a speaker? Hire me for keynotes.
• Ready to kick off your strategy? Hire us to run a strategic workshop.
• Want to overcome your obstacles to AI adoption? Hire us to develop your AI journey

Navigating Pivotal Moments: The Secret to Thriving in Uncertainty was originally published in LUMAN.IO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

AI agents are all over our newsfeeds these days. In San Francisco there are even billboards suggesting to stop hiring humans.

As if AI itself wasn’t overwhelming enough.

Most companies are still struggling with basic AI adoption let alone being ready for AI agents. Ironically it’s not the technology that is the problem. It’s people. It’s humans and a lack of human intelligence — and not the mental kind we typically measure in IQ tests and that AI is already beating us at.

“90% of successful AI transformation is about leadership, culture, and execution. Only 10% is about the technology.” — BCG

Obstacles to AI Adoption

Cognitive Overload and Overwhelm

Every day there seem to be new AI tools popping up and the next one might just be the one... Even as someone who has been following AI for decades, and thinking about its impact on how we work, I find myself overwhelmed trying to keep up with the pace of AI development. Unless this is your primary profession and focus, I think it is nearly impossible to truly understand the current market beyond a superficial layer.

As Marshall McLuhan pointed out: “When humans face information overload, they become passive and disengaged.”

Rapid advancements of AI and constant information leave decision-makers overwhelmed, leading to procrastination in AI adoption.

Instead of focusing on AI, focus on your brand promise and pick an area of customer value you can improve with AI.

Lack of Leadership Understanding

The rise of LLMs has also given people a skewed understanding of AI. Most people equate AI with models like chatGPT, Claude, Co-Pilot or Gemini. But AI is far more than that. We will probably see more and more SLMs (small language models) and specific purpose AIs in the future (and, of course, AI agents).

Beyond that misunderstanding, many executives treat AI as a plug-and-play tool rather than a fundamental shift in decision-making and operations.

AI adoption will fundamentally shift how we organize ourselves and what organizations will look like — including the kind of people we will need.

Without clarity on its capabilities and strategic impact, initiatives lack direction and fail to deliver.

Leadership Misalignment

While many executives advocate for AI, and nearly every leader is quick to say that we need to adopt AI, many fail to align budgets, incentives, and teams to support its implementation.

You don’t have to invest billions in your AI strategy, but you do need to carve out budget to specifically support AI experimentation and more so on building a culture of experimentation. This is not just some slush fund spending, it is a fundamental shift in your organizational development stage.

It is a shift from an optimization focus where you assume a stable core business to be continuously made more efficient — while innovation is happening on the sidelines — to a focus on continuous transformation across the organization, where every business model, even every process is seen as going through different stages of development from idea to ultimately sunset.

Leadership gets to focus on creating a culture of large scale experimentation in service to your brand promise and customer value.

Fragmented Pilots

That large scale experimentation has to be managed in a different way than regular business. Organizations in an optimization stage of development were already suffering from silos and redundant work across multiple departments.

With AI experiments in particular, it is key that projects don’t get stuck in departmental silos, or the wrong use cases are chosen, as that leads to minimal traction and impact.

Focusing on your brand promise, and your customer, pilots for AI implementation need to bring together people from across the organization.

Instead of each department playing around with AI, focus on a new overarching vision and narrative that is in service to your brand promise and the value you create for your customer.

Then bring together resources from across the organization that can implement that new way of operating.

Weak Governance

When embarking on new ways of operating, effective governance, especially for AI, is essential. Without clear guidelines and accountability, responsibility for AI outcomes becomes unclear, eroding stakeholder trust and slowing progress.

Poor governance, especially around training data, also perpetuates biases in AI systems, leading to unfair outcomes and transparency issues that further undermine confidence.

Weak governance affects data management, risking breaches, privacy violations, and inaccurate data use that can expose your organization to legal and reputational risks.

For successful AI adoption, focus on creating robust governance frameworks based on the values you stand for in your brand promise, with clear accountability, transparency, and ethical standards.

Resistance and Fear

Talking about ethical standards: it is key to get to a vision beyond headcount reduction as the ROI for AI adoption. People are already afraid that eventually AI will replace them. So why would they support this process?

The easiest way to destroy psychological safety in an organization is to announce layoffs. When banners tout not hiring humans anymore, it seems clear that the resulting fear would stifle any effort to get people to participate in adopting it, and create resistance to change instead.

There are ways to overcome resistance to change, but key with AI adoption is to ensure people that there is a place for them, that AI will not replace but enable them to do more meaningful human work. That they will be part of the future and that you will train them to have the skills and capacities required for this new age.

Create a vision where people and AI together serve your customer, where AI addresses what it is good at, while supporting humans to do human work, with more autonomy, increasing competence and ultimately a sense of relatedness and belonging.

Relational Intelligence Deficit

Those three factors of autonomy, competence and relatedness are key to intrinsic motivation according to self determination theory. But self-determination ultimately requires self-authoring people.

Most adults are still not at this stage of adult development. For your people to handle AI they need to first grow in their capacity to relate: to themselves, to each other, to your customers, and then to AI.

Especially agentic AI will require clear agreements and solid instructions to perform as desired. People who are externally driven and lack relational intelligence will be guided by AI instead of the other way around.

This requires more than upskilling. Effectively using AI requires you to uplevel your people to a new stage of development.

Upleveling People Over Upskilling

Beyond technical skills, employees need to grow in their capacities, they need to become intrapreneurial in their mindsets and behaviors to embrace what AI can do for your organization.

Apart from resilience, emotional self-regulation, adaptability and relational intelligence, capacities required to deal with all the uncertainty this liminal space of transformation brings, they will need the hallmark capacities of intrapreneurs:

• Self-Reliance — Understanding oneself as a the source of impact, culture and results, independent of position within an organization. This is the foundation of authenticity and relational intelligence.
• Self-Expression — Learning to honor one’s own voice, and the voice of others, so we can use everyone’s genius in co-creation and human-AI collaboration.
• Self-Management — Being accountable and committed, and having the ability to adapt actions toward success. Beyond self-regulation, this requires the ability to consciously relate to oneself, and to take in feedback as a tool for growth.
• Self-Organization — The ability to take an idea from first signal to launching a new venture, and being able to enroll support and resources. AI enabled organizations will look quite different, more akin to holocratic models than traditional hierarchies. This requires innovation everywhere and people who can self-organize around customer value creation.

You will not be able to reach all your people immediately. Here too, the innovation adoption curve applies.

Therefore focus on your innovators and let them build your AI vision, your systems of governance and your cross-silo community.

They are already in your organization. They are the ones, willing to go first. Identify them, then train and empower them to become transformational catalysts for your early adopters, who in turn will bring the rest of the organization along.

4 Types of Transformation Catalysts

You will ultimately require four types of transformation catalysts, which are generally required in any transformation, not just AI. Each addresses different obstacles mentioned above:

• Navigators — they are strategists that provide a north star and decision paths. They create guidelines and policies and manage operational changes. They are focused on a repeatable structured approach and frameworks, and coordination across the organization. They bring clarity, educate and align leadership.
• Guides —they are integrators supporting the emotional processing any transformation requires. Using a psychologically savvy approach, they enable openness and adaptability first and foremost by listening and creating safe spaces for processing anxieties and ambivalences, and as a result foster resilience, empathy, and trust. They reduce overwhelm, resistance and fear and increase relational intelligence.
• Intrapreneurs — as already mentioned, they are the ones actually experimenting with AI, building new prototypes and POCs with your customers. They are customer advocates and rapid learners, surface new opportunities for value creation, and together with your technical experts build future iterations of your business. They build and align your prototypes and create early successes.
• Stewards — Finally, you get to find the guardians of metrics and accountability. They are the custodians of operational integrity focused on transparency and accountability for informed, responsible decision making. They ensure adherence to governance and focus on maintaining integrity and compliance, while integrating AI into the fabric of your business. They ensure adherence to your governance and that your don’t “break things while going fast”.

Adoption of AI and even AI agents is all about people

All the obstacles listed above: overwhelm, lack of leadership understanding or alignment, fragmented pilots, weak governance, fear and resistance and a lack of relational intelligence, are ultimately human issues.

As the BCG quote above said, AI adoption is not about the technology, it’s about leadership and culture. It’s about people.

Technical upskilling is required, no question. But it has to be done while focusing on human development and cognitive well-being.

Skills are best acquired when people solve real world problems. And capacities are best built while doing that — within a proper space of protection and reflection for growth.

At LUMAN we create strategies for transformation and run cohort based trainings, where we develop people while getting work done. We found that creating an engaging narrative, gathering your transformation catalysts, and then getting them to create the future together had lasting impact not just on the participants, but on their home departments, spreading transformation organically throughout the organization. One of our clients found that one participant in average affected ten people around them in how they work.

So, before hiring AI agents, work with the people you have to adopt AI in your organization — but make sure to develop and uplevel them in the process.

Let’s transform your organization toward a new operating system powered by AI.

Connect with me at https://philiphorvath.com or through LUMAN at https://luman.io

• Need a speaker? Hire me for keynotes.
• Ready to kick off your strategy? Hire us to run a strategic workshop.
• Want to overcome your obstacles to AI adoption? Hire us to develop your AI journey

Why you are not ready for AI agents and not even AI — Obstacles to AI adoption and how to overcome… was originally published in LUMAN.IO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We call people in positions of power leaders. They were often promoted because they delivered — or appeared capable of delivering — results. But that really just makes them managers. People who can delegate and get work done.

Leaders are something else. And unfortunately, many so-called leaders aren’t trained to be actual leaders.

Managers get work done. Leaders empower their people to do this work.

They are focused on the human side.

Leadership is all about relating. It’s all about love.

The Indo-European root of the word lead means “to go forth“, ”to cross the threshold” and even “to die” (or at least to transform) — and by that “going before as a guide”.

When we relate, we cross a threshold.

We cross the threshold that separates our sense of self from something we consider other.

That could even be aspects of our own self.

That is why leaders lead themselves first. They consciously relate to their self.

“Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.” ― Erich Fromm

Leaders relate to self first

Who is this self?

There are at least three different aspects to your self:

• your small “i” or me, comprised of your body, your emotions, and your thoughts
• your larger “I”, your higher self and potential — what the Romans called genius: your unique self-expression, your vision, your capacity to see beyond what is, and your ability to create reality consciously,
• and your observer, your point of perception, the part that is experiencing itself through these two domains.

The lower or gross aspects of self are pretty loud, the subtle higher aspects of our self take more attention and a more conscious connection to engage with.

Take a moment to ask yourself: “who is I?”

I purposely did not write “who am I?”.

The latter is about the stories we tell ourselves about our life, the experiences we had and the labels we choose to associate with the label that is our name.

When we ask who “is” I, we actually break down the different elements of our Human Operating System (HOS).

Relating to “i”, your lower circuits

Most of our daily experience is affected by the gross aspects of ourselves: our body, our emotions and our thoughts.

Unfortunately, we mostly notice them, when things are not okay: when our body aches, when we feel “negative” emotions, or when our thoughts are running on repeat and driving us nuts.

Relating to “i”, leading “me”, starts with paying attention to these lower circuits of our Human Operating System.

Relating to the body

Take a moment to scan through your body: How are you sensing your feet right now, your legs, your hips, your torso, your arms, your head? Are parts of you tense, or relaxed? Are there any pains? Are you warm, cold? Or maybe you are warm in some places of your body, cooler in others. How are you sensing the air on your skin? Are you hungry?

[Here is a short meditation to support you in this]

Proprioception, also known as kinesthesia, is your body’s ability to sense movement, action, and its location.

Proprioception, consciously relating to your body, is the foundation of many spiritual practices: sensing your body, scanning for the state of your muscles, sensing your heartbeat, sensing the blood running through your vessels, sensing the air flowing in an out of your respiratory system.

Regularly checking in with your body is key to staying connected to it, and not just tuning it out until it is signaling so loudly that you can’t ignore it anymore.

If our body is not okay, even if e.g. your gut bacteria, your microbiome is unbalanced, it will affect your emotions.

Relating to emotions

We have them all day long, emotions are our shortcuts to experiencing and evaluating the reality around us.

Emotions tell us to get in motion, to advance or retreat.

When you watch little kids especially before they learn language, they express their emotions fully. They will be angry and frustrated one moment, only to laugh and giggle with joy in the next moment. They have not learned to hold on to these emotions and turn them into feeling, into a state of being we can hold on to.

Emotions guide us when we acknowledge and engage with them, when we consciously relate to them.

Anger, e.g. lets us know that a boundary was crossed, that someone infringed on our sense of self or sense of justice and order.

Key is to relate consciously to your emotions and thus process them. Not to depress them, nor to get stuck in them.

It starts with noticing them, then labeling them, so we can consciously, rationally process them. Labels are the domain of thought.

Relating to our thoughts

According to recent studies we have about 6,000 thoughts a day (it is pretty difficult to measure, in this study, they used an fRMI to identify when a new thought occurs).

Most of these thoughts are repetitions and many are self-defeating.

We spend a lot of time questioning whether we are okay, whether we did alright or not, often rooted in the past, or projecting into the future.

Take a moment to notice your thoughts. What have you been thinking about today? While reading this article?

The semantic circuit of our HOS evolved with language. Once we had words, labels for our experience, we created time. By labeling something, we create persistence of objects, and with that can think about something in the past or future. Children develop object permanence around the age of 12–18 months and fully around 2 years old, when they develop language. Before, something is either there or not there. Curiously, we also find this in some indigenous cultures that don’t have past and future as part of their language.

Learning to calm the mind, still the thoughts, letting them pass by without buying into them is also key in most esoteric and spiritual practices.

When you learn to consciously relate to your thoughts, you also remind yourself that you are the master of your thoughts, not their slave as the Buddhists say.

Once we learned to consciously relate to our lower self, we also realize that there is more to us, that we can use these lower circuits to do something with, to express ourselves and create consciously in service to a higher vision.

Relating to “I”, your higher circuits and genius

Our genius takes some coaxing. While it is sending us signals at all times, we tend to ignore them distracted by our experience in the physical realm.

Your genius is made up of your three transpersonal circuits.

Relating to your self-expression

Each of us is unique, has a unique voice and self-expression. While we all live out certain archetypal patterns — and in that there are not that many of us — , each instance, each individual incorporation of these archetypes is unique.

You are unique.

Take a moment and connect to your individual expression. How are you unique? What makes you different from other people you have met? What is your particular way of expression?

And what are you putting your expression, your leadership in service to?

Relating to your vision

We all have the ability to imagine and vision. Beyond mere projection of circumstance into the past or future — more a feature of your third circuit thoughts and mind — we can vision that which is bigger than ourselves. We can imagine a way of life, we can relate to a future that we want to bring about.

Take a moment and envision your future. Where do you want to be in five years? In ten years? At the end of your life?

What can you see for humanity? For the planet? For our collective future? What are you creating through your leadership?

Relating to your creative ability

Once you realize that you can use your lower circuits consciously to express your unique talents, and you have gone beyond the narcissistic aspect of that, and decided to put your vision in service to something larger than yourself, you can relate to your creative ability, to your ability to consciously create reality.

This highest incorporated circuit is what has been associated with magick in the past. Science has by now shown pretty clearly that we can affect reality with our mind. Our thoughts do indeed become things.

Taught in initiatory societies for millennia, the ability to consciously relate to creation allows us to also consciously participate in its unfolding.

As a leader, how you look at reality matters.

Your ideas of your people, what you see or do not see possible for them affect their reality — even beyond the Pygmalion effect.

Allow me to share an example: I once worked with a leadership team where one of the leaders sought my advice about two team members. One was an extroverted thinker, brimming with enthusiasm for exploring ideas, while the other was a pragmatic introvert, focused on tangible outcomes and intolerant of any “bullshitting”. Frustrated, the leader asked me: “What can I do about them? They’ll never see eye to eye.”

I proposed a shift in perspective. “What if,” I suggested, “you let go of the need for immediate agreement and instead hold space for the possibility of alignment?”

The following day at lunch, I noticed the three of them sitting together. The extrovert and the introvert were deeply engrossed in an animated and joyful conversation. The leader caught my eye, his expression a mixture of wonder and realization. I responded with a knowing smile, letting the moment speak for itself.

Whether we believe something can happen or something can’t, we increase respective probabilities. We do have an effect on “other”, either way.

Leaders consciously relate to “other”

Leaders relate to reality in conscious ways.

The word reality comes from Latin “res ales” — other things.

We learn about reality when we learn words to describe it. Consequently, our reality is also made up of the distinctions we have been taught and learned, and the beliefs and connotations these distinctions hold for us.

For example, if you don’t know much about wine, it will be either red or white wine for you. A sommelier on the other hand will look at wine very differently, identifying the region it came from, the grapes used to make it, and even the year it was cultivated. Having more distinctions available to them, they also have more ways to distinguish the reality of a bottle of wine.

Out distinctions are fraught with cognitive bias and fallacies.

None of us experiences reality “as it is”. We experience an internal projection based on the interpretation of the signals our senses send us, and the attached beliefs.

Leaders know this. They know that they are responsible for their experience of reality, and that this experience might be wrong. They are open to feedback and learning, knowing that they only have their perception to go with, but that this perception is not “the truth”.

Consequently, they meet their people with curiosity, openness and from a place of listening. In that, they hold for the potential of either party to evolve.

How leaders relate to “Other”

The German poet Goethe once wrote that we can never perceive the divine directly. We could perceive it through nature, e.g. a tree, or we could perceive it through a poem about that tree.

Whether you believe in some divine reality doesn’t really matter. You can still hold for the potential of your employees, seeing not just them for who they are now, but seeing them as who they could be — conscious co-creators of reality. Seeing their genius, even if they cannot yet see it themselves.

This is where leaders practice Transformational Relating. Transformational Relating is about encountering every interaction with curiosity for what wants to emerge, who each participant could become through the interaction. They understand that emergence, creativity, innovation all happen in the space in between — it happens in our relating and in how we relate to the world around us.

Leaders relate to the world

While management is about getting results, about efficiency, leadership is about efficacy, about meaning, about purpose, about bringing about a world these results are in service to.

Leaders understand that they impact the world — that through their actions they create our collective future.

Especially in times of transformation as the current one, where planet, politics, supply chains, organizations and people are in the liminal space between what was and what will be, leadership matters more than ever.

Right now, management is less important than leadership.

Management requires a specific target to accomplish.

Leadership is about emergence, about navigating uncertainty and the unknown.

It is about taking that step across the threshold into the darkness and bringing your light to it.

In that, leaders are guides of an exploratory mission. Unlike a tour guide, who knows the details of the place they are taking people to, leaders are guides for when there might be a north star to orient on, but where the path is not always clear.

They make the path as they go, taking their people with them by enabling them to be leaders in their own right, so that we can collectively build a future that works for more people.

Leaders create leaders. And they create a leaderful future, in which we consciously relate and create from a place of love for ourselves, each other, and the world.

What’s love got to do with it?

Love is an overused word, and in that a bit meaningless. Most of the time, it’s related to eros, to the romantic delusion of finding our “other half” so we can feel whole. Whether it is a lover, a new job, or a product that is being peddled to you by abusing this force of pull.

But there are other kinds of love.

In Greek they separated these into different words:

• There is eros, the powerful emotional force that seeks to connect with what makes us feel whole (and conversely hate, when we avoid that which makes us feel us separate).
• There is also philia, the love we have for a friend, where we understand that they are separate, and maybe even very different from us, but we appreciate them for who they are and what unfolds in our relating to them.
• Then there is agape, the kind of love that truly transcends. Agape is “unconditional love, charity; the love of God for person and of person for God.” (Wikipedia) Or the love for a partner, who we might at times not find attractive, who we might not even like at times, but who we are committed to and therefore find ever new ways to engage with.

Agape is also the love of the leader.

It is the love that transcends the boundaries of I and expands our sense of self.

Love then is defining self beyond the boundaries if I.

When you realize other is also kin, also your kind, someone to be kind to.

In that, real leaders are lovers.

They see the potential leader in everyone, they understand that we are all part of #teamhuman, and that we are here to support each other in our development.

In doing so, they give of themselves fully, they empower people, lift them up, so they can grow in their own power to create.

Leaders create the future

Relate in Latin originally means to bring back. Like religio, which means to re-connect, it is about bringing back a wholeness — needed now more than ever in a fragmented world divided by labels and the thinking of our semantic circuit.

In order not to fall back into the trap of eros, yearning for something outside of us to make us whole and become irrational, we need to become trans-rational, connect to our relational intelligence, that fourth circuit that is key to authentic transformational leadership.

We stand at the edge of an emergent future, where management suffices no longer as a focus, and leadership must rise and become a priority.

It is time to ask yourself:

How will I lead?

How will I relate to myself and “other”?

How will I cross thresholds, not just for results, but for meaning?

In doing so, you transform not only yourself, your people, or your organization, but the very fabric of humanity’s collective story.

After all, you will die one day, and only your love survives.

Bridging the philosophical with the practical, I empower leaders to cultivate strategies and foster cultures that drive meaningful transformation and spark innovation. Together, we’ll build the relational intelligence and resilience you and your team need to navigate complexity and co-create a future rich with purpose and potential.

If you’re intrigued by the power of relational intelligence or are ready to master the art of transformation, let’s connect. Reach out to me on LinkedIn, explore my insights on my website, or connect with LUMAN to discover how we can collaborate to elevate your leadership and accelerate your impact.

What it means to be a Leader — it’s not titles, it’s love — What people don’t get about leadership was originally published in LUMAN.IO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Are you feeling like your daily work and what actually needs doing are not aligned? That you are stuck in a rut and still focusing on cutting cost while never getting to those really important tasks like learning?

In a world of constant change, rapid learning is key.

While our world is in the midst of transformation, many organizations are still stuck in the optimization phase, doing with fervor more of what is already insufficient to address today’s problems, let alone the many problems we will face tomorrow — and which are coming down the pike real fast.

The top companies of our world have already been living in the new paradigm.

Companies like Amazon, Google, and thanks to Satya Nadella Microsoft have been focused on continuous learning, on continuously identifying and testing potential new solutions for creating customer value.

They understand that optimization is a given, that any new solution gets to be optimized when the time is right (or that AI can take care of that soon enough) — but they don’t start there. Asking for ROI early on is one surefire way to kill creativity. Transformational companies’ focus is not simply on cost cutting and squeezing out some meager percentages to optimize their P&Ls. This, of course, has its place, but long before then, we need to create new business models in the first place.

Since the pandemic innovation has become an afterthought.

Long seen as a nice-to-have luxury (right there with developing your employees), the decadence of the fat years of innovation, when it was the buzz and companies spent money on table tennis and cool office furniture, have left a bad taste in many leaders mouths when it comes to innovation. But innovation is not about the “next cool thing” or fun sessions with post-it notes. Innovation is about planning for the future of your company by addressing real customer needs (whether needs of today, or even better, needs of tomorrow).

Instead of focusing on creating a clear pipeline for business models from ideation to eventual sunset, many companies have been focusing merely on their core business and cutting cost.

Eating away at your substance

Purely focusing on financial metrics will erode your product or service quality as studies even by the big five have shown (whose business ironically was based on efficiency gains and financial optimization). Only focusing on optimization will eventually leave you in the dust.

Organizations stuck in quantitative management show the typical symptoms:

• Entrenched silos that compete instead of collaborating
• Efficiencies to the point where resilience is no longer existing when changes occur (even simple changes, e.g. when an employee gets sick)
• Important opportunities and innovations are missed due to a lag in response time
• Leadership is struggling to keep existing business moving forward while needing to adapt to massive market changes
• ERPs, often outdated, have lots of workarounds in Excel and shadow systems to make things work
• Communication goes through hierarchies resulting in delays, lost learnings, and arbitrage, while creating misalignment
• Obstacles and issues get identified too late, urgent surprises create reactive behavior and constant firefighting
• Insight and innovation are seen as a threat to the core business
• Delays in projects, missed deadlines, entrenchment and blaming and a general lack of accountability
• Innovators and motivated change agents are leaving and employees lack in edge tech skills and an intrapreneurial mindset
• Lack of urgency and focus in projects and routine tasks
• Client experience is outdated and out of sync with expectations of responsiveness

Especially your top talent will not deal with this for long.

Often already turned on to their higher authentic functions, they need to have a clear purpose of why they are working for you. Money and status are insufficient motivators for this group. They need to have a sense that they are actually contributing to something meaningful and not just propping up an old obsolete structure.

What remains are individuals driven only by job security, rank, or money. This results in common leadership team problems, including personal struggles, exhaustion, competition for promotion, and harassment. More damagingly, it leads to short-term, unsustainable choices.

These decisions put the business at risk and weaken its long-term prospects.

So what can you do?

First an foremost, shift your focus toward increasing the Learning Potential of your organization. This will be key for years to come.

Start with Purpose

Learning is the new knowing. Make learning how to serve your customer not just today but also tomorrow your core purpose. Instead of a set strategy to execute on, create a strategy of continuous transformation and learning experiments. Have clear boundaries and focused domains, but allow your employees to discover where to go instead of telling them.

Develop your People

Thanks to our school and university system which was focused on learning once and then executing based on that for the rest of your life, many people forgot how to learn. Or, they don’t have the capacity and time to do so in a world where everything has been optimized to the point where they are working at over 100% capacity already.

So make time for learning. Give your employees space and time and not just offer thousands of classes or require them to fulfill on learning credits, but actively engage with them around learning new skills. And it’s not just about horizontal development and learning new skills, but also about vertical development and growing as individuals. For that, especially, active and applied learning is key.

Create new Processes

How do you discover new needs, and turn an idea and into something tangible? Many employees have never learned this. Most never even talked to a customer since 80% of people tend to serve someone else in the organization.

There have to be pathways for exploration, incubation and acceleration of ideas. While many companies have taken steps toward design thinking and playing with a first idea, many are lacking in pathways for innovations to become real and integrated into the business. Innovation is not separate from your core business.

Every process, every business model is now in perpetual beta, and there need to be ways for new ideas to progress through stages of maturity.

Platforms for learning

Where do those new learnings live? Where do you gather new ideas so your employees can find out what is happening on the edge? Platforms for learning are not just a bunch of online classes your employees can take. They are hubs for innovation, for new ideas, so that others inside the organization can find out what your organization is already learning. “If we only knew what we know”, is an all too common complaint, we have heard from our clients, especially in larger organizations. Give employees a space to find out what everyone is investigating and learning about.

Planning in learning cycles

Instead of set strategies, plan for multiple scenarios and in horizons. Think of learning cycles in which you run experiments to get more insights on which of your scenarios is unfolding. Instead of having one clear strategy, build decision trees that allow you to continue to navigate into the future.

Having retrospectives is one easy way to foster a learning culture. Take the time each week, or at least each month to review with your team what you did. What can you celebrate that worked well? What were new insights or learnings you had on the team? And also, and especially, what didn’t work so well and what could you do differently next time?

Propagate learning throughout the organization

Share your learnings. Tell the stories not just of success, but also of failure. We can learn most from things that don’t go well. Wrecks are where the treasures are. As Nelson Mandela said “I never lose. I either win or learn.”

Be bold enough to share your learning with your employees. It will not just allow them to understand the direction you are headed in, but will also create an atmosphere of authenticity and foster a growth mindset.

How to get started

Of course, all this is easier said than done. Learning is not always easy, and learning what doesn’t work isn’t fun sometimes.

It takes vulnerability and courage to embark on a path of learning. But it’s also not about some random experiments, rather it is about adopting a scientific attitude. We are taught that we only get rewarded when we know, but now we need to reward learning as such. Only then will we continue to move into the future and be able to have the resilience required to deal with all the coming challenges.

It starts with individual employees.

Case Study Siemens

At Siemens we helped create the Intrapreneurs Bootcamp. In this program we guide self-selected participants through the process from developing an idea by talking to customers to ultimately pitching it to management. They have to apply to the program ensuring we have individuals who are motivated to learn in the first place.

Using the vehicle of business model building we train them in intrapreneurial skills. While many ideas don’t make it past the pitch, the learning the employees walk away with will stay with them forever. On not just them. A internal study showed that one participant in average affects about ten other employees in how they work. This is why Siemens considers the bootcamp a “zero regret” initiative.

Instead of simply horizontal development and training them in skills, they realized the need for vertical development and ultimately creating serial intrapreneurs.

Over the last 8 years we have trained hundreds in this program, impacting thousands in the company in their growth mindset and how they approach their work — shifting their culture into the future.

It starts with individuals

When we work with our clients we focus on individual learning first. Systemic transformation is always also personal transformation.

Learner safety is a key aspect for Psychological Safety. When leaders learn that it is okay to learn and not know, they can also create an atmosphere of learning for their employees.

After all: Organizations are made up of people.

If you want a learning organization that can handle continuous transformation, start with learning employees who embrace transformation, and who are willing to give up what was for what could become. Starting with themselves.

That will get you out of the rut.

If you are looking for support in how to unleash the Learning Potential in your organization, or want to talk about transformation and how to make it work, please don’t hesitate to reach out. You can reach me via my website at https://philiphorvath.com or our company site at https://luman.io

Unleashing the Learning Potential of your Organization was originally published in LUMAN.IO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If not you then who?

If you are reading this, chances are pretty good that you already are a Transformational Leader. According to psychologist Robert Kegan, who I have quoted before, only 1% of the adult population reach a self-transformational level of development. So, congratulations, you are the 1%!

It is those 1% of leaders who feel called to drive transformation in their organizations, understanding that in an age of transformation and AI, we need to also transform not just how we work, but who we are being at work.

This shift is not merely about new skills or horizontal development, but about vertical personal development, about activating new ways of being. It is about activating relational — and ultimately higher circuits of — intelligence and guiding employees in their upleveling from socialized to self-authoring, and from self-authoring to self-transforming development stages.

Ontological coaching has long understood that to shift an individual requires activation on somatic, emotional, and linguistic levels; that behaviors are only the tip of the iceberg, and that focusing on identity provides much greater leverage when transforming “how we do things around here.”

Each of us creates ripples. Culture emerges in the interference pattern of how each individual shows up. This is true for our families and groups in our personal lives, for our teams, organizations, nations and even humanity as a whole.

Each of us then also has the opportunity, invitation, and maybe even duty to step up to the challenge at hand, and transform our world. After all, the simplest definition of leadership is “see something, do something.”

Our times require transformational leaders to

• uplevel the workforce,
• to innovate and implement new ways of organizing,
• and to craft culture consciously.

Upleveling toward a Relational Workforce

As technology takes over new functions in the organization, there will be a shift from transactional to relational work environments where human connections and collaborative networks are prioritized.

Transformational leaders are called to not just manage the work, but to actively develop their people, fostering authenticity and environments that encourage self-authoring and decision making — all the while promoting open communication and ensuring that all team members feel valued and included.

Prototyping Future Organizational Structures

There are a myriad of new organizational forms. New organizations feature flat hierarchies, decentralized decision-making, and agility, but there is no new “right way” to do things. Instead, the organization has to flexibly adapt to serving ever changing strategies, while reaping the benefits of more and more possibilities of automation with AI.

Transformational leaders are called to guide organizations through these changes by embracing flexibility, fostering innovation, and maintaining a clear vision for their areas. Within that, they can encourage experiments on the three horizons of change (upleveling existing processes), transformation (replacing existing processes), and innovation (creating altogether new processes).

Crafting Culture Consciously

Enabling these experiments will require a culture of experimentation, one that embraces risk and manages the possibility of failure scientifically. After decades of optimization, expansive experiments are required as markets and supply chains continue to become even more uncertain than they are now.

Transformational leaders can set the tone by embodying the archetypes and principles they wish to see in their teams, thus creating ripples that lead to broader cultural shifts. They can plant language and symbols consciously to unconsciously trigger shifts in practices, and ultimately measurable behaviors.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self. — Aldous Huxley

Transformational Leadership sounds great, but how?

But where to start? We cannot change all of our work environment, but we can start with what my colleague Margaret Wheatley calls “Islands of Sanity”, then focus on the ripples you create. Keep focus also on your own development and on how each interaction provides the opportunity to evolve. Remembering that leadership is about developing your own and your teams’ capacity to create and that it starts with you and how you take care of yourself.

Creating Islands of Sanity

You cannot change the organization as a whole, but you can become a beacon of a new way of doing things.

• Leadership is independent of title and position. Anyone in the organization, no matter at which level can show up with ownership and drive toward new outcomes — no matter how small.
• Even small actions can have significant impacts, such as how you conduct meetings. Having regular check-ins, celebrating small wins, and fostering an environment of psychological safety are key to guiding people toward new shores.

Creating Ripples

Each of us is creating ripples as I mentioned above. No matter where you are in the organization, you can start ripples of new behavior.

• Individual behavior change is best done with small incremental changes as James Clear pointed out in “Atomic Habits”. The same is true for organizational cultures. Making small positive changes gradually transforms the entire organization.
• One of our clients researched the efficacy of our programs and found that in average one participant affected ten other people in their home department in how they worked. By showing up differently, you can seed a new culture.

Vertical Development

Leadership starts with leading yourself — you get to go first. Your constant reaching up will open the path so others can go. With AI breathing down our neck, and catching up to the lower functions of what humans can do, leaders get to focus on higher human development stages.

• All life goes through stages of development. From physical to emotional-territorial to rational mental development, we can trace our ancestry of life in the development of individual humans. Each of us has magnificent hardware available, but many do not have the software yet to run it. At the same time, we have been building technologies to replace those lower human functions.
• Current times don’t just require new skills (horizontal development), but require activation of higher human circuitry (vertical development), e.g. our capacity for creativity, for self-expression, visioning and actively creating reality. To lead others, you get to make time to work on those higher human circuits, get in touch with you genius, and lead from there.

Transformational relating

Leading others begins with how we interact with them.

• Every interaction has a transactional component, but also invites us to use each opportunity for connection, for growth and evolution.
• As a transformational leader, you also see each interaction as an opportunity for you and for your team to develop. Instead of simply seeing them for who they are, begin each interaction with connecting to who you, and who they could become in this moment. What is your highest potential in this situation and what can you see for them? By holding yourself and your employee to that during your interaction, you will ensure to relate not just transactionally but transformationally.

Management vs. Leadership

Management and Leadership still get confused a lot of times. As a transformational leader, you get to be clear about the distinction.

• Management is about distributing work and making sure outcomes are achieved. Leadership on the other hand is about enabling people to create these outcomes.
• As a transformational leader you will seek to push as much of the management down to your team. With the trend toward flat hierarchies, decision making is also becoming more distributed. Use AI and systems to automate as much of your task management as possible, and make it as asynchronous as possible, reserving your time together for the things that matter — relating. To foster a sense of ownership over outcomes, hold people accountable for the results they create — starting with holding them in a container where they can perform at their best.

Self-Care and Self-Regulation

To be able to perform at your own best, you require self-care and the capacity to regulate yourself.

• Selfcare isn’t selfish. It is the required foundation for you to focus on what matters. In order not to be distracted by unfulfilled needs, you get to check in with your own operating system first and make sure that you address your needs. As they say on the airplane: “put your own oxygen mask on first”.
• Strategic self-regulation is about your own ability to adopt new habits that serve you, and to let go of habits that don’t serve you any longer. By doing so, you also gain the ability to situationally self-regulate. E.g. when there is stress and tension in the room, you get to start by regulating your own nervous system down to a place of calm. In doing so, you also regulate the room around you due to limbic resonance, aiding your team in also regulating their own stress responses.

Self-Cultivation

Becoming a transformational leader is a never ending process. You are never perfect. Perfect means done anyway, and who wants to be “done” with life?

Within that, we get to continuously expand our awareness, take responsibility for what we become aware of, so that we can keep stepping back into ownership, into the center of our authentic self — and choose our identity, actions and the results we are committed to from there.

As you develop yourself and your team, experiment with new ways of organizing yourself, and actively step up to craft the culture of your organization, make sure to keep your vision in mind of who you would like to become in this process.

In order to have the necessary intrinsic motivation, especially for those moments, when it’s not fun, you require a vision of yourself that you are aspiring to. Not one to judge yourself by (otherwise, logically, you would fall short), but one to be inspired by, to reach toward, to strive toward every day.

We cannot escape from society and work, but within it we can keep orienting ourselves on our own — and others’ — highest potential.

As the German poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann said:

“I am certain that we must remain within the order, that there is no such thing as leaving society and that we must test ourselves against each other.

Within the boundaries, however, we have our eyes fixed on the perfect, the impossible, the unattainable, be it love, freedom or pure greatness.

In the interplay between the impossible and the possible, we expand our possibilities. I think it is important that we create this relationship of tension in which we grow; that we orient ourselves towards a goal that, of course, moves further away as we approach it.”

More about how you can transform your workforce and yourself in the previous installments:

• Part 1 — The Relational Workforce in an Age of Transformation and AI — How need to activate relational intelligence and authenticity in order to relate productively and collaboratively create value
• Part 2 — The Future of Organizing — Characteristics of new organizations — purpose driven and with a new Cultural Operating System focused on relationships and value creation
• Part 3 — How to shift your cultural operating system — how you can use your innovators and early adopters to build internal capacity and cross the chasm to “a new normal”
• Part 4 — Learning cycles of the individual — the leadership development and resilience required for those willing to use the liminal space of transformation in order to actively create the future

Are you curious about the future? Already actively creating it? Want to learn more about transformation or share with me how you are mastering it? Please connect and reach out on LinkedIn, my website or if you are leading transformation at your company and can use some support via LUMAN.

Transformational Leadership and Creating a Relational Workforce was originally published in LUMAN.IO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.