All too often, well-crafted and finely designed business strategies fail to materialise, despite a rigorous plan and solid rationale.
The truth is that having the best project is not always enough: it is also essential to create the right conditions for real change to take hold. What is required is what we call “internal listening”.
We can therefore look within, listen to one another, and understand how change can truly take root in our working environment.
Where should we start with internal listening?
To practice internal listening, we can begin by imagining ourselves in a gardener’s overalls.
We look at the soil to be sown through the gardener’s eyes, deciding how to arrange the seeds and young shoots. We cannot grow plants by scattering them at random: each organism requires different amounts of light and specific soils, whether acidic or alkaline.
For your garden to flourish, you must pay close attention to exactly where you plant each shoot, creating the conditions for them to grow tall, healthy, and resilient.
To achieve this, the business organism must ask itself a series of questions.
It starts by asking, for instance:
- Is the change aligned with our values, purpose, and shared vision?
- Is the entire management team aware of the change?
- Do they support it and know how to explain it to people?
- Can they guide people along the path of change?
- Can they provide constructive feedback to those implementing the change?
- Do people genuinely identify with the rationale behind the transformation?
- Do they have the skills and motivation to make it happen?
To succeed and endure over time, any project must be aligned with the organisation’s identity—with who it is and what it does. That is why launching a strategy inevitably calls for dedicated time to talk and share, giving values, deep purpose, and organisational vision the space to emerge.
Once the starting point and the destination are clear, the next question is whether everyone truly understands the meaning of the journey, whether they want to carry it out, and whether they can carry it out.
How demanding and resource-intensive is the journey?
Pushing someone to do something they are unable to do is never constructive. The direct result is paralysis, a sense of helplessness, and the disappointment of failure.
Let us start from here to understand how to put internal listening into practice.
Before embarking on any change, let us ask ourselves:
- Is the change clear to executive leadership? Are they genuinely committed to it? Will they sponsor it?
- Are the company’s managers aware of the change process and genuinely part of it? Did they also help shape it?
- Can they articulate it? Do they possess strong communication and engagement skills? Do they know how to give feedback? Do they maintain an open dialogue with those taking the first steps?
- Have people had the opportunity to learn about and understand the change and its impact on them?
- Have individual functions adopted—or can they adopt—these changes to achieve a structural transformation?
- Have people contributed their ingenuity to completing the path and defining the direction forward?
- Has all of this been communicated clearly and consistently outside the organisation as well?
We must look across all organisational structures and individual functions within the business, because whenever a new, non-routine strategy is implemented, it profoundly impacts the entire system: apparatus, organs, tissues, and cells.
The garden of Hermes
At Hermes, we have always been gardeners and architects of the terrain. We create the conditions that allow what is sown to flourish over time, by opening spaces for deep listening, dialogue, collaboration, and co-creation—where everyone can contribute to shaping their own future.
