“What if instead of driving productivity you focused on creating the best place to work and the atmosphere that inspires optimal human potential and adaptation?”

Today, as major forces including digital transformations, supply chain disruptions, generational shifts, economic uncertainty, and other pressures build, reinventing organizations is becoming a norm - a trend expected to grow through the 2020s, and beyond.

Reinventing an organization is often treated as a strategic task that is imagined and then implemented from the C-suite. It is only in the wake of these plans that CHROs and their teams are expected to figure out how to pivot and help the people adapt. However, today’s digitally-driven organizational reinventions are necessarily so urgent and encompassing that they are mandating fundamental changes in people's practices in a way we have not experienced before.

Current human resource trends, including enhanced compensation and retention packages, personalization of benefits, skilling and reskilling opportunities, and building strong, inclusive, and welcoming cultures are all critically important as organizations work to engage and develop their people. But, as many human resource leaders are already aware, these practices alone are not enough to support the growth in human capital required by today’s organizational reinventions.

Everyone in an organization has potential that is waiting to be unlocked, and unlocking this potential is the key to organizational reinvention. Collectively this becomes the potential for an organization’s people to do more, contribute more, adapt and pivot faster. Enabling organizational and personal transformation, however, is a complex, and adaptive task. Unless organizations put human development - the unlocking of human potential - at the center of the transformation process it cannot succeed.

Human development is already addressed by many organizations, but primarily at a senior leadership level. Bespoke and high-end leadership development programs have long incorporated adult development approaches that encourage growth and change at the individual level, however, these practices rarely trickle down into broad-based development efforts. Broad-based efforts are focused more directly on functional or technical skilling, which is important but doesn’t address the fundamental human need to grow and develop through change.

Our research on unlocking the black box of human-development-driven reinvention provides critical insights for organizations looking to transform and reinvent themselves. Specifically, it suggests that broadly supporting and developing employees’ abilities to reinvent themselves may provide the key to successful organizational transformation and reinvention.

Everyone in an organization has potential that is waiting to be unlocked, and unlocking this potential is the key to organizational reinvention.

Amid rapid changes, organizations will need to rely on people who possess reinvention skills – people who can reimagine familiar identities and productively grow in new directions. An organization’s ability to tap into this human potential will shape its ability to successfully transform. This article describes reinvention from two angles: (1) what it looks like at the individual level and (2) what organizational practices will be most effective for fostering a culture of reinvention.

Supporting and developing employees’ abilities to reinvent themselves may provide the key to successful organizational transformation and reinvention.

What is human reinvention?

Human reinvention is the practice of imagining and then creating your future self. It includes the ability to transform yourself professionally and personally by developing your abilities and letting go of what no longer serves you. In our research, we identified four key stages that make up the reinvention process, each possessing wisdom that is important to leverage during reinvention: (1) Not Knowing, (2) Letting Go, (3) Exploration, and (4) Gathering. Different people progress through the stages at different rates, and the stages aren’t exactly linear - they can overlap. Nevertheless, understanding these stages helps identify them in one’s reinvention and to be able to assist others.

Not Knowing

How can you know whether you are in the “not knowing” stage? A paradox! What this stage points to is the felt sense of uncertainty, the sense that something is not quite right about where you are and what you are doing. It may be experienced as a longing for something greater, but the path to that “something greater” is unclear. This stage can be deeply uncomfortable as your familiar routines and habits feel misaligned with your deeper aspirations.

Often this stage is accompanied by anxiety, discomfort, and lack of clarity. People start to wonder “Am I in the right career?” or “Am I in the right organization?” Actions that worked in the past to address these feelings - whether it means learning new skills, a conversation with a colleague, or interviewing for another position - no longer work. As one author experienced, “In the past when I felt this way I would look for another position and it would come to me easily. I felt like my career was always growing and progressing. But this time, nothing I tried seemed to be working and I couldn’t understand why.”

While it may feel urgent to resolve the ambiguity at this stage, there is tremendous value in remaining open and curious while letting this sense of uncertainty unfold on its own. Transparently acknowledging that this is a normal stage of growth and development helps to normalize people’s experiences and to reduce anxiety thereby opening paths to learning.

Letting Go

Not knowing can last months, or in some cases a year or more. We have found that eventually, people realize that things are changing in ways they simply need to accept. Letting go is characterized by the acceptance that you are on a different and new path, listening to your inner voice, and embracing the fact that your past plans and expectations no longer guide your present.

It may mean letting go of a specific career path, a part of your professional identity, or becoming a beginner again after having been an expert in the past. Sometimes the letting go stage also relates to people’s personal lives and things that are holding them in the past this is trickier to navigate from an organizational perspective but important to accept as a natural part of the reinvention process.

A key example of letting go in an organizational context is fully accepting and becoming comfortable with the idea that you are truly a beginner again at something. As we build our careers over time we like to think that new skills progressively build upon old ones, but sometimes we have to leave old skills and perspectives behind to fully embrace what is new.

Letting go is a key stage because human reinvention is just as much about dropping what is unhelpful as it is about adding new things to your life. Without discerning what is important to let go of, these habits and patterns will be carried into your next stage of life and continue to frustrate you. Letting go, however, is not easy and this stage can elicit fear, pain, and grief as you drop what is comfortable and familiar. You may also feel a sense of freedom, excitement, and lightness as you shed what is no longer needed.

Exploration

After doing the challenging internal work of Not Knowing and Letting Go, it is time for some fun! The third reinvention stage, exploration, is generative and divergent. It embraces creativity, learning, and exploration. It is characterized by getting in touch with what energizes you and dedicating time to personal passions, and interests, as well as exploring new professional paths. As one of our interviewees described “I had an open posture to learning and to being curious and opening myself up to people and ideas and things that I’d never seen or understood before. I became both a student and a professional all at the same time.”

Exploration is about trying new things and letting your heart guide you forward. Give yourself permission to get outside of your comfort zone and do things that your old self may have been resistant towards. Pursue what energizes you, without giving thought to being pragmatic, strategic, or rational. This stage is about finding joy again and discovering what that means to your reinvented self.

Organizations could do a lot more to support the exploration stage: too often during reinvention, we either work to put people quickly on another clear path, or we leave them without structure or support to ‘figure it out’. By working with employees to both explore new paths and by putting in a structure that helps them create a future building from their creativity and desire to try new things.

Gathering

The Gathering stage is when we can finally see how our transferable skills and interests create continuity from past to present. It is about intentionally bringing together what serves your reinvented self. For example, identifying supportive people and finding ways to meet with them regularly. Or collating resources: books, journals, photographs, and artwork that remind you of your deepest aspirations. Now is the time to update a resume or LinkedIn profile, or to cast a broader net in terms of gathering specific information in your professional areas of interest. In this stage, we know who we want to be and are ensuring that we have the necessary support to take this reinvented self out into the world.

Many learning and skilling programs focus solely on task or process skills. The rapidly evolving world of work will require something different: a focus on growing and developing our uniquely human skills, not just at the leadership level, but across the organization.

How can people increase their reinvention potential?

The first way that people can increase their reinvention potential is through building awareness of themselves and what they want, what we call “clarity.” This can be done by giving yourself time and space for reflection, journaling about your thoughts, feelings, and intentions, or working with a coach. It is helpful to cultivate both curiosity and self-compassion during this process. Many of us have the tendency to judge ourselves negatively, which is a habit we will need to be aware of during this process. Curiosity can help us be open and ask questions like: What do I care about? What is worth spending time doing? Self-compassion helps us be kind to ourselves and to take care of ourselves as life is not always easy. It reminds us that we often feel vulnerable and scared, and that is ok. Curiosity and self-compassion will naturally bring more clarity into our life, and this clarity will reveal what is worth holding onto and what can be let go of.

The second way that people can increase their reinvention potential is by actively taking steps towards something new, what we call “agency.” Most people have some sense of what is important to them and so taking a couple of steps each day in this direction is important for building reinvention momentum. Research by reinvention expert Herminia Ibarra underscores the importance of experimenting with “provisional selves,” or aspirational identities that we can take out for a test ride. Sometimes taking these initial actions can give us the confidence we need to keep going.

What can organizations do to foster a culture of reinvention?

The desire to learn and grow is deeply human, and if organizations want to empower their people, they must foster a culture of reinvention that encourages people to grow into their greatest potential, and that includes their ability to find meaning and fulfillment in their work as it evolves and changes.

Many learning and skilling programs focus solely on task or process skills. The rapidly evolving world of work will require something different: a focus on growing and developing our uniquely human skills, not just at the leadership level, but across the organization.

These “21st-century skills’’ include creativity, communication, problem-solving, collaboration, and innovation all vital for fostering internal reinvention. This internal focus will enable people to see more clearly how to work effectively and what can be done to improve their organizations what things they can change, and what things may burn them out leading to a more balanced, sustainable change process.

From a learning perspective, gaining these skills includes progressing through what has been described by Bob Kegan, the developmental psychologist, and emeritus Harvard professor, as progressively more complex ways of knowing, where people acquire a more complex understanding of themselves and others. “The expectations upon us…demand something more than mere behavior, the acquisition of specific skills, or the mastery of particular knowledge. They make demands on our minds, on how we know, on the complexity of our consciousness.”

One possible way to do this in organizations is to broaden access to experiences in developmentally-focused learning programs that generally fall under leadership development, including coaching. Broadening these programs to ‘people development’ and offering them across the organization in advance of transformation efforts can create a more resilient and empowered workforce once the change arrives.

Human reinvention is not only a natural process but once normalized, accepted, and nurtured, it has the potential to be a potent force of innovation and adaptation in the future of work. Learning that supports human reinvention is a great vehicle for driving lasting change in organizations. Growing and developing what is uniquely “human” deserves at least as much attention as task or process skills - it is an investment in the future, which recent years have taught us is just around the corner.