The Evolution of ETM (so far!)
ETM is excited to announce that our company has rebranded and launched a new website.
When I reflect on our transition over the last eight years it’s fascinating. At the core, we’ll argue that our purpose has basically remained the same: We are passionate ‘sense makers’, ‘educators’, and ‘simplifiers’, helping people and organisations to survive and thrive in a fast changing and complex world.
What’s changed radically, is what we believe is MOST important!
To be successful, ETM has always believed that focus is critically important, and there should always be a primary area of focus, where we direct our passion & energy, in building knowledge skills and expertise.
So how and why has ETM evolved?
2012 – 2015: Project Management
In the beginning ETM’s focus was on Project Management. We wanted to be experts and thought-leaders in the project management space. The world, we believed, was moving to a ‘project-based’ way of working and everybody needed project skills to be successful. During this period we became leading educators in the project management space, designing very successful short courses and teaching classes all the way up to global credential level (e.g. PMP).
2016 – 2019: Agile, Lean & Systems Thinking
We then realised that there was something big missing. We went on a painful and confronting journey of discovery. We realised that traditional project delivery was only a small piece of a much more complex puzzle, and this resulted in changing our primary focus, aiming now to become experts in the ‘Agile’, ‘Lean’ and ‘Systems Thinking’ space. By the end of 2019, ETM was now recognised as a leading educator in the Agile and Lean world, designing and building very successful short courses and teaching courses up to a global credential level (e.g. AgilePM and SAFe).
2020 – >: Unlearning & Driving Business Agility
We’ve now come to big realisation that, to be able to provide the most value and impact, we need to focus our passion and energy on the critically important area of UNLEARNING to help enable BUSINESS AGILITY.
We'll argue that learning is a given. Things are changing and we've all got to be able to learn new things continually. However, as humans we operate on autopilot most of the time so unlearning the past is actually not so easy. In fact, the latest thinking in neuroscience reckons that 95% to 97% of what happens in our brain is automatic responses, based on our subconscious mind. So knowing when you need to change, and how can we break out of these ingrained habits & responses is actually a big challenge.
At ETM we believe that UNLEARNING is now a hugely important skill, needed if we want make sure we continue to stay relevant.
We see our primary job now as helping leaders to ‘LEARN to UNLEARN’. Teach them why and how to UNLEARN limiting or obsolete mindsets (beliefs) and behaviours, and help them to RELEARN new more suitable ones, so they can achieve breakthroughs in performance, and most importantly, continue to stay relevant!!!
In our opinion, organisations are just kidding themselves if they think they can enable true Business Agility without tackling the senior leadership mindset. Unfortunately, in most traditional organisations we typically have an old world industrial/mechanistic mindset that exists at the most senior level. This is crippling organisations, making it impossible for them to evolve sustainably.
“The world as we have created it, is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
Albert Einstein
Unfortunately, this is what I'm seeing currently happening in many organisations. They are trying to make something like this work!
Organisations are working very hard to build digital enabled capability, which needs to have a 'people & change centered 1st mindset', to enable them to respond to a fast-changing external environment, but, the foundations upon which this is based is in many cases old thinking and ways of working (i.e. a 'work & process 1st mindset'). These 2 mindsets (beliefs) cannot both exist as being the MOST IMPORTANT! They are fundamentally very different, and, if this situation is allowed to co-exist in an organisation, it will ultimately result in a dysfunctional organisation!
If you agree that this scenario is happening, then, would you also agree that there is a lot of UNLEARNING needed to be done in organisations? We believe so, and of course this represents a VERY big challenge!
We need to work towards getting a shared mindset (set of beliefs) across the organisation as to what we all believe is MOST important. Having this is place from top to bottom will drive common goals, synchronization and alignment, consistent organisational priorities, behaviours and actions, and will allow, a suitable ‘culture’ and ‘system of work’ to naturally evolve.
At ETM we believe that UNLEARNING really needs to start at the board level, down into the C-Suite, and into all the big functional areas like Finance, HR, Procurement, Group Risk and Compliance, Sales and Marketing and even IT.
In our opinion, MINDSET is probably the single biggest issue that’s out there and if we don't work to get the foundations right, any kind of transformation we believe will be ultimately doomed to failure given the inherent conflict that will continue to exist.
If our goal is to build healthy organisations (ones that people want to work for and continue working for) that can sense and respond to a fast-changing external environment, all leaders must embrace an ‘people & change centered 1st’ mindset', to help organisations cope with a fast-changing environment, and, to help unleash the full potential of their people.
Make no mistake the world is changing at an unprecedented rate, and many commercial organisations do not have time to pussy foot around here, as, significant disruption may not be far around the corner! The approaches to doing work will and should vary, however, helping leaders to UNLEARN outdated 20th and 19th Century thinking, and RELEARN 21st century 'people and change 1st' thinking is critically important.
By doing this, we can hope to evolve a suitable common shared leadership mindset from top to bottom in the organisation, and then, when combined with applying appropriate business models and strategies, it will enable organisations to create, build, maintain and evolve suitable fit for purpose ‘Systems of Work’ allowing them to survive and thrive into the future. For commercial organisations getting this right is maybe the only way they’ll survive!
To help us on this journey, we’re hugely inspired and influenced by such awesome people as, Barry O’ Reilly (Unlearn), Carol Dweck (Growth vs. Fixed Mindset), Simon Sinek (Infinite vs. Finite Mindset) and Tom Bilyeu (Impact Theory).