It’s the critical first step for any organisation or individual wanting to think seriously about the next steps in an evolution.
Before I can develop the things I want to change and what I want them to change to we need to understand the starting point.
I am a fifty something Programme and Transformation manager in the UK. I have worked for a number of organisations small and large over my 20+ years in projects and change. I have delivered multiple, diverse programmes in excess of £10 Million on multiple occasions. I have always been employed, never by consulting companies and I have never been an external consultant or freelance. I love working on strategic frameworks and designing transformation projects to enable the change shifts. A good number and percentage have worked, a few have not and they all provide valuable lessons which I continue to use to this day.
I am married, I live in beautiful North Wales with stunning views out over the Dee Estuary looking overlooking Liverpool, Manchester and beyond to the Pennines. I have a Son who has just reached 18 and is about to complete his ‘A’ levels and go off to University. His educational needs required a stable location for work and home for 20 years but this moves it on. One of the drivers for the strategic change is definitely a feeling I need to avoid flown nest syndrome but rather to embrace the opportunities which it brings.
My wife and I have been bitten earlier in our lives by the travel bug. We have travelled, I would say extensively but whenever you look at a map you realise that the world is a very big place indeed, there are an awful lot of places left on the map. We are not package travel people, though in the early years of our Son we did that type of thing as well. We prefer our road trips to Wisconsin, Ecuador or Peru over Florida parks and Cancun any day. We want to do that now in good health than retire at 67 and risk not being. I don’t see myself ever actually retiring. I think it is a common thought process for a product of Gen X.
Volunteering, now this is something that I do get told off for doing too much of. Love a good organising committee be it the Ice Hockey Club, or Director of Hockey Wales and yes in most of those roles my day job is the thing that gives me value to them. Organising, planning and doing. I get so much enjoyment from it though and I learn so much through interactions with different people. As I get older I want to experience more. I play Ice Hockey now but could not skate at the age of 40. I play guitar but again only started in the last 5 years, I have joined a Batala Drum group in the last few months in short I like learning new things.
There is an urgency in the world to get on top of climate change, especially but not limited to greenhouse gasses. No one wants to live on Venus. It’s been a very long term interest of mine. Way back in 1991, I was looking for a subject on my dissertation for my honours degree and remember vividly speaking to a professor of economics at the university who was suggesting that my proposed title of ‘Environmental Cost Benefit Analysis in Construction’ was a little bit too out there for a Bachelor’s degree and that in his opinion many Doctorates and a few Nobel prizes would be found along that particular route, it is a thought that crosses my mind of where I would be if I had taken up the offer of academic research rather than move to industry. And in any case, he continued, academia was only just starting to work out what the language of the debate should be, it was nowhere near a base measurement of CO2 in the atmosphere let alone global average temperatures. In my lifetime I have read books and watched TV programmes predicting the threat of the next ice age.
So there you have it, my position on the map
Destination Statements: Now I can make may statements of what I want to be (my strategic intent) make sense and work out what change themes and metrics can be applied to make the change. I am going to do this and blog them over the next period of time.