The sun was out, the morning coffee in front of me.
“Can I sit down here?” he said.
“Sure,” I said. We hadn't met. At least, I didn't think we had.
“It was good yesterday,” he said.
“Thank you.”
I had moderated a Leadership Day the day before – around 75 senior leaders at a global semiconductor company where we'd spent eighteen months running a project to align the organisation around a shared identity and direction. 4,000 people, post-merger, operating across multiple geographies.
“You also did this identity project?”
“Yes, that was us.”
He paused.
“You know, I wasn't involved. But I was in the session where your colleague explained it. We’re engineers. We were sceptical at first. But when I read the output, it just made sense. I thought, ‘Yes – this is us.‘ It reflected who we are so clearly that there was nothing to push back against.”
Another pause.
“And when I heard how it had been done, I thought – of course. That’s why there’s no resistance.”
That conversation captures something I’ve spent almost a decade learning about: how transformation actually works in large organisations.
Why there was no resistance
Two things happened in that moment. First, he recognised the content. ‘That’s us.’ Because it wasn’t abstract or aspirational – it was true. It had been carefully crafted, from their own words, their own sentiments, their own sense of who they were.
Second, he recognised the process as legitimate. When he learned that the identity had been co-created by people across the business – through cross-functional workshops, open sessions, interviews, and months of structured dialogue – he understood why it worked. The process was representative. It was fair. And that explained the absence of resistance.
“When I heard how it had been done, I thought – of course. That’s why there’s no resistance.”
Legitimacy is a bottleneck. People may not even disagree with a direction, but they won’t move because the process that produced it didn't include them, or anyone who understands their reality.
This is why the sequence matters. Recognition first – ‘this describes my lived reality.’ Then legitimacy – ‘the process that created it was fair and representative.’ Then things start moving – without much persuasion.
Creating the ground from which to leap
In our projects, we spend a lot of time finding shared language that people recognise as true. Because this is the base from which forward momentum is built.
We do that through a system of relations: one-on-one reflection sessions with the project lead, cross-functional project team meetings designed as thinking sessions, co-creation workshops with a broader working group, and open sessions – we call them Jams – where anyone in the business can volunteer to take part. Top-down and bottom-up run simultaneously. Each stream feeding the others.
What we’re surfacing is the unspoken story – what the company essentially is. The strengths, the tensions, the gaps, the lived culture as opposed to the stated one. The words a team member in one global engineering company once burst out reveal it: “There should be a way of doing things here. There probably already is. We just haven‘t named it.” Companies spend huge sums on defining ‘The [Company] way’. When they ignore that there already is one, it has no ground to stand on.
Naming the ‘what is’ does something specific: it brings people to a shared starting point. Without a shared ‘here’, everyone interprets the vision (‘there’) from their own reality – which is why alignment at the top so often becomes fragmentation further down.
Companies spend huge sums on defining ‘The [Company] way’. When they ignore that there already is one, it has no ground to stand on.
Once people see themselves in a shared description of reality, two things happen. They feel heard and involved. And they realise that the best version of who they already are is itself an aspiration – one worth pursuing. The conversation shifts from “do we agree with the vision?” to 'what do we need to do to get there?
I saw this in a segment leader at a global engineering company who helped create the value proposition and then said: ‘This is true – but it’s also an aspiration. We need to bring this into the business.’ Nobody had to sell him a vision. He'd recognised one.
Articulation is more durable than agreement
We’re not aiming for consensus yet, but for shared language – phrases, concepts, metaphors that capture something already felt but not articulated. When those phrases come from inside the organisation, not from an external slide deck, they resonate. People recognise them as their own.
In both projects I’m drawing on here – two global companies, approximately 4,000 and 14,000 people respectively – the critical phrases were generated by participants. They emerged from structured dialogue over months. They were adopted because they articulated something real. Something that had been there all along, a story waiting to be told.
Articulation is more durable than agreement. You can agree to something in a meeting on Tuesday and forget it by Friday. But when someone puts words to something you’ve felt for years, that stays. It becomes part of how you describe yourself and your work. In a decentralised organisation, that shared language can reduce the cost of internal coordination. It means people in different regions and functions can build on each other’s thinking without constant realignment. It doesn’t eliminate local interpretation – which is welcome – but it provides a shared frame.
Agreement is low-cost and reversible. Articulation is identity-linked. It changes what people can say in public without contradicting themselves. That’s why it sticks.
Emergence from the inside out: A product brand, an engineer’s poem, and overcoming clichés
In one of those projects, an unloved product brand was repositioned on the basis of an idea that emerged during a collaborative session with marketing and product people. I found a small idea one engineer had had, and realised it was a big one. When I named it, Charly, a middle aged man with thick-rimmed glasses, stood up, put the glasses down and exclaimed: “This is a revolution!” With that, he stormed out of the door. He returned ten minutes later. “Gentlemen, I’ve spoken to the engineers. We’re doing it!” When the product re-launched, sales grew 300% in three months. But the mechanism mattered more than the number: the people closest to the product had the insight. Our role was to create the conditions where it could surface and to give it shape and rigour.
He stood up, put the glasses down and exclaimed: “This is a revolution!” With that, he stormed out of the door. 10minutes later he was back" Gentlemen, we're doing it!"
We often run Jams – open, voluntary sessions where anyone in the business is invited to take part. In one of those Jams, in response to our question, an engineer wrote a poem. One line from that poem became the company’s brand promise. It was tested with the project team, validated by the management team, and adopted because it captured something the entire organisation could see themselves in. A line written by an engineer, in a moment of inspiration, because the process had created the space for it. It created an enormous sense of pride – from the shop floor to the boardroom. Because it was theirs.
In one of our Jams, an engineer wrote a poem. One line from that poem became the company’s brand promise.
There’s something worth noting here. Any brand promise, condensed to a few words, is never far from a cliché. To someone who wasn’t part of the process, it can look slick rather than substantive. But when the line comes from within the language the organisation already uses –
When emergence doesn’t work
This approach requires time – six to nine months at minimum, often more. It requires a leader who is willing to listen, not just broadcast. It requires an organisation where people are motivated and want to do better but don't have a path yet. And it requires genuine openness to what emerges.
If the answer is predetermined and the process is ‘for the optics’, people will see through it and the damage will be worse than not asking at all. If the organisation is in acute crisis and needs command-and-control decisions this week, there is no time for answers to emerge. And if representation is tokenistic – a few handpicked voices presented as ‘the organisation’ – it will generate backlash, not buy-in. Knowing when not to use the method is as important as knowing how.
Getting lift
Every organisation has three dimensions in play. Intent – what it wants. Action – what it actually does. And language – how it talks about itself. Think of them as three blades of a propeller. When they move together, you get lift. Misalign any one of them and you get friction, vibration, wasted energy.
Every organisation has three dimensions in play. Intent – what it wants. Action – what it actually does. And language – how it talks about itself.My work sits at the intersection of the three.
Surfacing what is. Giving it language. Creating the alignment between intent and action that enables forward movement. This creates the platform for a new story to be written and embraced. Because we now have a shared starting point.
The Head of Strategy on the project I opened with, eight months in, described what the identity work meant to him: “Giving people a new home.” After years of restructuring, people needed to recognise where they belonged before they could create something new.
Sebastian, my breakfast companion, had no reason to believe. But he recognised himself. And that was enough for him to come on board.
