Interviewer: Sam Ridgway • December 2024 / January 2025

The below article is based on a transcription from of Episode 1 of the Fit for Business Podcast.

 “I encourage everyone leading or being part of a team, regardless of how busy, to engage in discussions with colleagues about whether they are fit for purpose. Consider how we can enhance our business fitness through practical changes, and how to guide others in this process. Such discussions require discipline to carve out time and establish an agenda to remain focused, along with a commitment to follow through on outcomes. This represents an exciting leadership opportunity to drive change, and it's a goal worth striving for.”

FULL TRANSCRIPT

I think it's fair to say that I'm a bit of a nerd for this subject.

I remember being introduced to the concept of Fitness in my first year at university and if I'm completely honest on my undergraduate, it was a minority interest. Most people weren't interested in it. But I really was. I remember in my first lecture, it was like the lights in the lecture theatre went up by 50%.

There's something for me, personally, enduringly interesting about the topic of Fitness. About the role that organisations play in our lives and how they work as these complex social systems that we create, ideally for a purpose. Often, they don't work. Often they're very disappointing. But whether you're a customer or an employee or an investor, or society at large – we depend upon them functioning well and often they don't.

We see this manifest in so many areas of our life. For me, it really has always been about asking (for reasons that I don't completely understand but have taken huge pleasure in from a professional perspective) what are organisations? what role do they play in our lives? how do they work? and how can we make them to work better? 

What is ‘Fit for business’?

The classic definition of an organisation, any organisation, whether it's large or small, whether it's domestic or international, whether it's a bank or a hospital, public sector, private sector - is simply a collection of individuals and groups of people working together, acting together to achieve a common aim or a common purpose.

But actually what we find in organisations which are not high performing, or even dysfunctional is that they actually represent groups of people acting together to achieve various aims. Not a singular aim, or not unified behind a singular aim, and that's where the idea of fitness comes in.

Organisations must be fit for purpose. They must be able to perform well. The research indicates that time and time again, and we see it in terms of evidence, but we also see it in terms of experience and what we experience every single day as customers traveling on a train or being the recipient of some form of customer service or being an employee working in an organisation, some organisations are great to work for, others less so. Often the big reason why is because of their fitness. Are they fit for purpose? Is there a clear ends and are there effective means to achieve those ends? whatever those ends may be. That's really what I think is at stake here.

If you think about fitness in those terms, then suddenly you're talking about what is essentially the entirety of human existence. From cradle to the grave we are born through the good care of organisations in the form of hospitals, which have employees, case of the National Health Service (NHS) here in the UK, 1.5 million employees, it's an organisation, but it's also a complex system and we need it to function well.

We are educated by organisations in the form of schools, colleges, and universities. We typically spend the majority of our adult waking life working for organizations in order to pay the bills. Our retirements are secured by the performance of organisations in the form of the investments that pension funds make to secure our decline. And then ultimately, I'm sorry to say, we are buried by organizations in the form of funeral homes.

So, it's intrinsic to our experience and it either works for us or it works against us. And the thing is, it's within our gift to ensure that organisations are functional, so when they're not, you have to say it's a failure of leadership and nothing else. In that sense, it places an obligation upon us to simply do better, to do better as societies, for organisations to do better, but also individuals who lead them, which, increasingly, is all of us. This becomes a question of how can we do better? and not just for ourselves, but actually for everybody, because organisations, like I said, are so fundamental to every part of societal and economic and personal well-being.

If business Fitness is so intrinsic to our existence, why are organisations not fit for business? Is this about external factors. Is it external environment, Covid, AI, etc. Is it internal? Is it just poor management? Is it is it a mix of both?

There's a multiplicity of answers to this and the honest answer which you'll find will probably crop up again and again in our conversation, is, it depends.

It’s a classic Oxford answer and it's pretty unhelpful. But it really does depend. I think there are a number of facets to it. I certainly think that today ‘doing business’, whether that's the business of commerce or the business of government and public service or the business of not for profit, is harder than it ever has been. It just simply is harder. Organisations are more complex, the environment is more changeable. There is more that challenges leadership of organisations than ever before.

For some of the reasons as to why it's harder I think you can point to external factors. Our more globally connected world means that shocks that happen elsewhere are visited upon us wherever we are, more quickly than they were in the past. Covid 19 is a great example of this. So too technological disruption, social and economic connection, trade across the world, all of these factors make for a more complex environment. Executives, for example, need to know much more about the world than they once did. Organisations cannot afford to be parochial anymore. It's no longer just being a ‘British organisation’. You may be a British located organisation, but it's in this global context. There are now so many contingencies that happen across the world that have an effect on domestic markets, but especially if you are interested in international markets, and often that's where growth comes for many organizations. So globalisation is one element.

And as part of that global environment I also think, simply, the speed of change, often as a result of technology. Business is simply done at a quicker pace than it once was. Whereas previously there was relative stability in markets now we see economic cycles shortening more and more.

But thirdly, there is just more complexity, more people, more regulation, a greater diversity of customers. So we're having to respond to more ‘stuff’ than ever before more quickly, in a much bigger context than we previously had to.

So these are all external factors, and you can think in quite a forensic way about all those sources of disruption. But those factors are true for everybody. Where it gets punchy is the internal factors, and of those, particularly the quality of leadership and management.

The quality of leadership is really the big differentiator here. High quality leadership can navigate those external factors. Poor quality leadership often can't and struggles. And we saw that in the pandemic, not to focus on that too much. You see it now with how organisations are leveraging AI, for example, or other forms of technological enablement or disruption. It's the difference between something being a challenge versus an opportunity and that really comes down to the quality of leadership.

A lot of my time is spent working with leaders to help them to make sense of what fitness means, and particularly what fitness means in the environment in which they're operating. We explore how they can be more strategic, more intentional about the choices they make so that they can run better, more functional, high performing organisations, organisations which are capable of performing their purpose well, regardless of the environment in which they operate and even taking advantage of things like disruption.

At the end of the day, you can analyze external factors, internal factors, cultural misalignment, etc. But it really comes down to the quality of leadership, and so often it's not where it should be and that's something to reflect upon. This should be a positive thing to reflect on, because it means that we can do better. We can certainly do better than we are at the moment. And that, for me, should be a source of hope, inspiration and motivation.

If I'm a front line business leader, CEO, manager, this may all sound a little bit conceptual. Why should worry about this? What then are the tangible implications of not being fit for that purpose?

There’s really two perspectives to this. Again, one of the biggest reasons why organizations are often unfit is because business leaders don't have an awareness of its importance. And it's important because, well, number one, we should be always be trying to optimize performance. We should always be striving to do better. And that doesn't necessarily mean trying to generate more financial income or performance. It means simply that we have a stated purpose and that we are brilliant or if not brilliant, getting better at delivering it. That could be getting better at delivering patient care or getting better at delivering soup and soap if you're a soup and soap manufacturer, the best soup, the best soap in the most reliable, efficient way to as many customers as want it. It could mean that we're delivering brilliant banking services on the high street. And so the logic goes, if we do those things well, if that's our purpose, if that's the reason for which the organisation exists, if we do that, well, then we will make money if that's the measure of success. But this is much more around the definition of success. What are we in business for? We should always try to do better at that, because it simply makes our world a better place. It makes our world a better place in terms of the economics of it, but it actually makes it a better place in terms of the experience that we have as customers, the experience that we have as employees, the experience that we have as leaders. I don't know any leader that has stated they want to lead a dysfunctional organisation. That's not the issue. It seems the issue is often, what can we do about that dysfunction?  

So that's on the positive side of things. On the less positive side, another reason why we should care about fitness and how we become fit, which often means how do we become more aligned behind our purpose? How do we become fit for purpose? Is that it's also a means of avoiding dysfunction, at least poor performance in the first instance and dysfunction in the extreme. Poor performance simply means that we are not able to perform our purpose well. And if our purpose is important, then that matters hugely. We should want to do better. Dysfunction can destroy value when organisations should really be creating it.

You can look at the 2008 financial crisis as an example. An entire sector that perhaps wasn't fit for purpose or at least individual banking institutions that were certainly not fit for purpose and perhaps even dysfunctional in some senses. All of which was reported on, we saw record fines, reviews, commissions, taxpayer bailouts etc. But all of these things point to organisational dysfunctions that ultimately became a global recession.

So, there's risk involved with getting it wrong. There's a huge upside on getting it right. Literally, our lives depend upon it. There is huge downside and risk, destruction of value, in getting it wrong. And the difference is, again, that issue of fitness. And fitness doesn't occur by accident. It's not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It occurs because we make it so. Leaders of organizations and employees or organisations together make it so. And that's partly why some organizations clearly do it well and reap the rewards and others do it poorly and suffer as a result.

The implications go beyond the organization itself, of course. 2008 is one example but there's are countless others at the time of writing, you've only got to look at the headlines with all that's going on inside the NHS, perhaps one of the most ambitious social programs in the history of the world, it is a model for so many public health systems globally. But the implications of not being fit for the purpose that it serves are literally life and death. Another example is an organisation like Boeing. I recent incidents show us that tragically, the implications of not building aircraft to the right standard are life and death. So this isn't trivial. This isn't just conceptual for so many of us, both as companies trying to do this and end-users and customers.

Absolutely. Take the NHS as an example. The National Health Service essentially forms post-Second World War for a stated purpose, which is something along the lines of free health care free at the point of delivery for everyone, forever. I mean, wow. And for the it it's an for the most part the NHS is cherished precisely because of that ambition. But I think you also have to say having an ambition or an aspiration, having an aspirational purpose, is all well and good. But if you can't perform that purpose it really is just an aspiration. It's really just a set of noble intentions. So being able to implement it becomes hugely important. And I think, honestly, and this isn't knocking the NHS, but if you were to look at a lot of the performance statistics, they're not where we would want them to be for a variety of or in a variety of different respects.

But this isn't just a public sector issue of which the NHS is an example, as you say, its true also of the private sector. Look at Boeing, once an absolutely feted company and lately in the press for all the wrong reasons. But you can see in every single sector examples of organisations that aren't performing as they should.

One of the impacts is loss of financial performance of course. But that's just really one dimension. Other dimensions which are so important include the customer experience, which can, ultimately, be life and death.

So all of these things are wrapped up and we just see this across every industry, examples of really great companies, of companies that were once great but no longer, examples of companies going out of business, but then subject to some miraculous turnaround. And what's the difference? What's the the factor that unites all of these examples? it comes back again and again and again to fitness for purpose. Fitness for business, whichever business that is.

And that's why I think we should all take an interest in this. Unfortunately, what I've also found on my travels through this topic, applying it in practice and speaking to thousands of leaders, is many people that work for organisations don't actually know how their organisations work. They come to work, they do their work, they go home without thinking too deeply about what it is they're actually participating in. And that's one of the biggest issues. A little bit like how people that drink beer often may not know how beer is made. You can work for an organisation without really understanding what it is. And so part of my personal mission, is to alleviate that somewhat because then, hopefully, we'll manage are organisations in a better, more functional, more aligned, more fit for purpose way.

To stick on this point, just for a minute longer, if I may, with with the example of Boeing. And I paraphrase, but I thought I was just doing some reading around it and it summed it up so nicely. One of the former CEOs was talking about moving the headquarters of Boeing away from its original heartland, because effectively making planes was getting in the way of making money. And that strikes right to the core of what you're saying there about this all coming back to being fit for purpose. Yes, Boeing are fit to make money. But is that helping to make safer aircraft ultimately? And unfortunately, over the last few years, a number of tragic incidents have proven otherwise.

I can give you a live practical example of this. I was recently facilitating a workshop of senior leaders for a major corporation and had a bit of an ‘aha moment’ with them, which was really, really pleasing it's really great when you get sort of that breakthrough. And I think I made some sort of statement like, ‘you're not in the business of making money, you're in the business of x, y, z. And if you fulfill x y z, you will make money’. And for me, that's the difference between the definition of success for an organization versus the measure of that success profit. Profit, in the case of a Boeing or any other private sector company, should rarely be the primary motivation. The motivation should be to, as you say, to make the best, highest quality, most innovative, most efficient, but safest aircraft flying. I don't know what the Boeing purpose is, but it's got to be something along those lines. And if you do that, the demand will follow and money you will make. So in some sense, I think putting the emphasis on profit over purpose is putting the cart before the horse. It’s not to say that being motivated by profit is bad. Not at all. But we must see it for what it is. It's a measure of success. It doesn't necessarily represent success. Success is fulfilling the purpose. That thing that unites everybody in the organisation should be the North Star and should be the end to which everything else is the means, including people, including me as an advisor, for example, or an academic, including suppliers. Everybody. Everything is in some sense, in service of that purpose. And if you perform it well, you will have great success, whether that's financial success or for that matter, public service success, or social success. I think we lose sight of that. And that's often where the dysfunction arises because, simply, we're all aiming at the wrong thing.

We've looked at the implications of being unfit and why this concept is so vital for for organisations but also for end users. But zooming in to the front line of business, to the day to day where the rubber hits the road, how do we begin to implement this as leaders? How do we firstly recognise what fitness looks like for ourselves in our own businesses, in our own context and then get there practically? What are the steps that we we need to take to implement and to reach a reasonable level of fitness?

Let me tackle the first question first with the ultimate Oxford answer. It depends.

And that's part of the challenge. And I think that's also part of the explanation as to why some organizations, perhaps most organizations, aren't fit for purpose. There is simply no standard recipe or cookbook or instruction manual or prescription or set of practices that will produce superior results, regardless of context. It's deeply contextual.  

What works for Google wouldn't work for Boeing. What works for Boeing wouldn't work for the NHS. What works for the NHS wouldn't work for Oxford University, for example. Each organisation requires its own recipe, its own set of principles for what fit for purpose looks like, which means having clarity around its purpose. It means selecting a purpose over the short, medium, long term, and then building an organisation that's capable of implementing that stated chosen purpose. There's no silver bullet or easy one size fits all, off the peg answers. It's something that's got to be homegrown, something that we've got to create ourselves.

I'm a consultant turned academic who does advice on the side, but it's a little bit like being a poacher turned gamekeeper or maybe the other way around, I don't know, but the reason why I made that transition is because I don't think there are easy answers out there. I think in many respects, fitness is something which is needs to be decided on a case by case basis, it really is the responsibility of leadership teams to work it out for themselves. And I think research and scholarship can help with that by providing those practical frameworks. And we can talk about what the options are, but ultimately it's for an organisation's leadership to decide and they themselves have to be fit for purpose.  

Okay. But I'm not going to let you sit on the fence here, Jonathan, because I had a feeling you might say it depends. Perhaps, though, you could give us at least some parameters to work with. As you say, a framework, some guide rails here as to how we might go about doing this.

And I think that's a fair challenge. What you can see are patterns within industry, different configurations of fitness, different approaches to fitness in business. And we really see, I think a clustering around different models.

1. The first model that I'd mentioned is probably the one which we know best or resonates most, because in many respects it reflects where we've come from in terms of our industrial heritage as organizations. And that's really an efficiency-based model which is focused on maximizing economies of scale. And these are often typically hierarchical organizations that are quite top down, quite formal and rules based. The idea of ‘the hierarchy’ is thought of as being old fashioned. It's not. There are many excellent hierarchies that exist currently that are extremely high performing. So, it's absolutely a viable model and probably the best known example of a hierarchy or this efficiency based model that I can think of is McDonald's. They’re serving, at scale, 80 million customers a day or thereabouts, creating $25 billion in annual revenues, they have 1.4 million employees, I think around 40,000 restaurants operating in virtually every country in the world. Well, how do you do that? How do you become fit for business when you are that type of business? Well you do it through that hierarchy. You do it through process. You do it through really excellent operations. You don't do it by being a flat organization with high levels of empowerment. No, it's a machine. It's a machine that is constantly operating, constantly fine tuning. And that's quite as it should be. But that's not necessarily appropriate for other forms of business. That's what works for MacDonald’s. It wouldn't necessarily work for others, nor should it.

2. You can take another approach, which is to be more flexible around customers. So instead of offering a standardised menu, you offer a bespoke, Savile Row tailor made suit, and that's a different form of value proposition. But if that is the proposition, then you've got to be fit to do that. And that requires a very different approach to how you organise the people you employ, what you expect of them. You want creative behavior, you want risk taking behavior, you want intimacy with customer to know their needs so that you can adapt and flex the proposition to market, whatever that is, whether that's, for example, a financial service, whether that's a legal service, whether that's any form of proposition to market such that you can adapt it to the personal preferences. You can personalise it even to what customers want. You create portfolios of products and services reaching out beyond their own organizational boundary or border to engage in an ecosystem of partners to be able to offer their own customers greater choice, but choice which is connected as part of a coherent bundle. So that's really that synergistic effect, which again, is quite in contrast to the traditional or industrial model, which was really all about the vertical management.

3. Suddenly now we see that for many organizations it's becoming about the horizontal. And this idea of leveraging ecosystems either internally or even more exciting, more complex externally. Again, it works for some organisations, not all organisations. A good example might be ARM that listed recently on the Nasdaq, for in excess of $80 billion, but employs only around about 7,000 people, mostly based here in the UK. It has 20,000 innovation partners. So the implication of that is that a lot of intellectual capital that the company relies upon to create evermore innovative microprocessors that power smart devices, which is really arm's core business, sits outside of the company. And yet it's there as this hub within its ecosystem to hoover up all of that expertise, that knowledge, that innovation, that creativity in such a way that it can stay on the cutting edge.

So the point is that there are multiple different ways in which companies can succeed and thrive in the market environment, and in the future market environment. Which is best? Well, again, it comes back to my unhelpful answer. It depends. And that's why it has to be about quality of leadership, making judgments about what fitness looks like for your business.

To use an analogy, it's a little bit like physical fitness. In the summer we had the Paris Olympics, which was for a whole variety of reasons, breakdancing not least, full of amazing moments. What was interesting was if you looked across all of the different events, 100m versus the marathon, they require a very different approach, a different discipline a different skill. If you had a shot-putter trying to compete in the 100m, it probably wouldn't be so effective and vice versa. You have to be fit for the race or event in which you're performing. The same is true of companies, but we need to define that for ourselves. We need to work out what fitness is.

So, we need to define our competition, work out what fitness looks like, and then strive to become superior by careful management, leadership and governance of our organisation. So, it really does depend, but it requires discipline and it requires strategic thinking.

You mentioned leadership there and you've mentioned strategic thinking discipline. The physical analogy is great because that's what this is about. So practically speaking, thinking about getting fitter, How do we keep this up? Do we need a fitness instructor figure to help us keep on top of our fitness? And the second part of that question is, just how involved should traditionally time poor CEO leaders be in this process? Should they be the fitness instructor? Should this be somebody else? Should it be a mix of the two?

I get asked this a lot, and I work with a lot of organizations, either in a research capacity or in an advisory capacity. And to some degree, I've never thought of myself in that respect, a fitness instructor, I don't really like that! I feel like a total fraud if we're talking about physical fitness. But in terms of business fitness, yes, to some degree.

The reality is, I think every organisation and every organisation's leaders or leadership should take responsibility for their own fitness. Just in the same way that every person should take responsibility for their own physical fitness. But it's hard. And again, not to want to stretch the metaphor too far, but but there is a parallel, business fitness is a little bit like physical fitness in the sense that it's much easier to stay fit than it is to get fit. Overcoming that initial hump, getting into a pattern, acquiring the routine, that's easier to sustain than it is to acquire.

When I've worked with a lot of misaligned organisations, there's a lot of painful choices that have to be made. Some of the most painful, for example, potentially letting people go (whether at a senior level or lower), changing culture, changing capability, committing to a particular market or withdrawing from another market as a strategy choice. These are really tough, painful choices, but often choices that have to be made and implemented to realise some form of improvement, but before you even get to that, you need to know what the problem is. You need to be self-aware enough as an organisation to be able to recognise a problem and have the appetite to want to fix it. And often that isn't the case, I think particularly when we are in a positive economic environment. When the economy is doing well, business say actually, you know, a multitude of sins can hidden or even forgotten. I think when times are good, it's very easy to just roll on. I think the true test of fitness is when times are bad. Covid was an example, the 2008 financial crisis was another example. There will be future disruptions. When times are bad for whatever reason, that’s when you find that a lack of fitness equals vulnerability. And you see that for entire industries, actually, you see it for organisations within industries. Some compete better than others. So in many respects, I think it should be that organisations take responsibility for their own fitness, but sometimes they need help along the way and help to ask the right questions. What should we be thinking about? What are the things that we should be discussing that we're not currently? What are the tough conversations and how do we have those conversations? And actually, how do we make the best choices possible, recognising that there's rarely ever I think when you're operating at this relatively abstract level, a right or wrong answer, there are good answers and there are bad answers, but often time will tell. We don't know immediately. We're operating at a high level of uncertainty. Strategic decision making is harder today than it ever has been because business is more complex, more uncertain, more dynamic, and more disrupted. And it's set to become even more so.

So in many respects I think fitness is a muscle that we need to develop. It's a discipline. It should be a leadership capability. Listeners may not believe me when I say this, but I'm genuinely delighted when I'm no longer needed, when I’ve made myself redundant, because that means an organisation no longer needs someone like me, a so-called fitness instructor as you described it, (I would say strategic advisor). When that's no longer needed, it means that that muscle has been developed. That's the way it should be, because that's the path to sustainability. Maintaining fitness over time should be the goal of all leaders. It's especially the goal of the Chief Executive who should be orchestrating that process. So, Chief Executives should be, ‘Chief Fitness Instructors’, if you will, or at least ‘Chief Alignment Officers’.

Fitness is the outcome of alignment. We have to make sure all of the different and various moving parts of our organisation align and if they do, then we experience great outcomes an organisation which are sustainable over the long term.

But I think there's also another consideration here, simply that we often don't know how to have those conversations. Indeed that's not how we educate or develop leaders. So strategic thinking is something that sounds really nice, who wouldn't want to be a strategic thinker! But it's not actually a capability that we see in organisations, organizations and their leaders often outsource strategic thinking to consultancies who give answers in the form of recommendations, or they don't do it at all, and they become overly distracted with delivering results at the cost of thinking about the future in a critical way. Or they simply spend their time problem solving, reconciling the tensions and the conflicts that occur as a result of a lack of fitness, because of misalignment between individuals and their employer or somebody who didn't get the promotion they wanted and now they're dissatisfied, or between different teams or departments, or just simply trying to keep the train on the rails and not really thinking too much about where it's going and just trying to keep it all together.

I have huge sympathy for the average Chief Executive because, particularly if they're at the top of a hierarchy, its often really tough. They're holding it all together with two hands, and that's not the way it should be. If you have a fit organisation it is about leadership, not the leader. And that's a collective activity that’s shared. And that's a wonderful thing to see because that's really powerful. You're gathering the wisdom of the crowd. You're not just relying upon the energy and the inspiration and the heroism of one individual, no matter how talented. And who doesn't want to be part of a great team.

But this is really tricky for organisations. Scary even. You mentioned awareness. You've got to be aware that this is a problem in the first place. So actually, companies shouldn’t be surprised if there is a lot of work up front here. Like you say, once that muscle's developed, okay, maintenance is fine. But awareness is so key here. And that's there's so many strands to that. And that's cultural, that's organisational.

When I reflect upon my own career, and I teach I speak at conferences, I publish. I can't tell you the number of times over the last year that I've been asked to speak about generative AI, even though I self-confessed, barely know anything about it. I understand the broader strategic context. I've invested time, you know, I've worked on digital transformation etc. but I'm not an authority and would never claim to be. But it's the fashionable term. It's the flavor of the month. It's what everyone wants to hear about. And you can almost chart over the last 30 years what those have been. And that's where all the attention goes. So I've made my career in alignment. Why is alignment not more mainstream? more fashionable? And I think the answer is exactly as you said. It's too big and it's often too scary. It's too multifaceted. It's not easy. We as business leaders gravitate towards the shiniest thing, and the shiniest thing is the thing that seemingly can offer us almost immediate results or immediate help. Help us to do something better. Not with little effort, but rather it's simple and it's straightforward. Alignment and fitness is not simple. It's not straightforward, but it is essential. It is enduring. A thousand years from now, we will be having this same conversation. Because it will always be important, because it always has been. But it takes different forms in different periods, according to the environment and our sophistication.

Now is the hardest time ever to be a leader of an organisation, but it's also the most exciting because of the potentiality of organisations to be capable in ways that previously were just unimaginable. That's partly because of technology, but it's also partly because of globalisation. It's also partly because of advances in social movements.

And I think this really is the critical point. If we aren't thoughtful, if we aren't strategic, if we aren't intentional, if we aren't disciplined, if we aren't analytical, we will as leaders and organisations and all of the people that rely upon organisations, customers, investors, communities, policymakers, nations, we will be hostages to fortune and not masters of our own destiny. So there's a large component here around fitness, which is choosing how we want our organisations to be, how well we want them to work, and then executing that in the most effective way possible. And that, for me, is what gets me out of bed in the morning. Not doing that, but helping those that do.

If you to give one key takeaway message to listeners and readers, from this discussion, what would it be? What's the one thing you would want them to do differently perhaps?

I would encourage everybody who's listening or reading, who is either leading a team or part of a team or part of multiple teams, I would encourage them to find the time, which is really tough because they're all super busy, but find the time to have a conversation with their colleagues and to simply ask the question, are we fit for purpose? And then further to have the conversation, what does that even mean in a particular context? How should we think about that? And if the answer is actually we could do better? Embrace that as a positive opportunity to have a conversation that's optimistic, not self-critical or negative, but rather optimism. And the way to do that is to say, well, if we're doing this well already. How much better could we do if we just improved our fitness, even just by a little bit? And what would that even look like? What would that look like as a series of practical changes? And how do we lead that? How do we take others with us? These are all really positive conversations. But for that to happen, we have to be disciplined to find the time. We have to be disciplined to structure those conversations with an agenda. That means that we don't become distracted, and then we have to have the commitment to want to see through whatever the outputs of those conversations are. But really, I think it's a tremendously exciting leadership opportunity to affect change. And who shouldn't want to do that?