Making Change

Sometimes it seems like change is impossible. However with an outcome-focus and persistent approach even big businesses can change.

For example Accenture, who blew up a 50 year old structure to enable the company to thrive in an AI world.  Lloyds of London, who achieved a similar turnaround by focusing on what it needed to be.  Filshil, a Scottish Wholesaler, who reversed a habit that was choking the business.

ACCENTURE At Accenture, CEO Julie Sweet executed one of the most dramatic transformations in recent corporate history. She fundamentally rewrote the company's 50-year-old operating model—even dismantling a structure she herself had previously put in place—to make the company more agile and AI-enabled. The change wasn't just structural; it was cultural. Sweet tied employee promotions directly to AI fluency, signaling that the company's future depended on a digitally proficient workforce. This massive change was managed with intentional transparency, and the results have been striking: revenue has grown over 60% under her tenure, and Accenture continues to rank highly on "Best Places to Work" lists.

LLOYDS Dame Inga Beale faced the Herculean task of modernizing Lloyd's of London, an institution that had operated in much the same way for over three centuries. When she became CEO in 2014, many core processes were still paper-based. Instead of imposing change from the top down, she involved market participants in shaping the transformation agenda, which built buy-in and reduced resistance. She simultaneously drove a cultural shift by relaxing outdated norms, achieving gender parity on the executive committee within 18 months, and launching a sector-wide diversity festival. This dual focus on digital and cultural change paid off; when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Lloyd's was able to shift to remote work without major disruption, a feat that would have been unthinkable before her tenure.

FILSHIL At Filshil, a 150-year-old Scottish wholesaler, CEO Simon Hannah identified a critical bottleneck: himself. He had inadvertently created a culture of "upward delegation," where every decision was funnelled to him, slowing down the entire business. To fix this, he implemented an "accountability chart" that clearly mapped every business function to an individual or department and empowered them to make decisions within their budgets. This structural change created a faster, more responsive organization. It also freed Hannah to focus on long-term strategy, allowing the company to proactively integrate AI into its daily operations, such as creating a customer bot to handle regulatory questions.

COMMON THEMES

These examples, along with others like the cultural shift at Ipsos and the tech-driven transformation at the Pan American Health Organization, highlight several shared strategies for achieving major change:

• Executive Sponsorship: In every successful case, the CEO or a top leader was the public champion of the change, signaling its importance to the entire organization.
  

• Culture and Process Must Change Together: Technology or new structures alone are not enough. As seen at Lloyd's and Accenture, organizational change requires a parallel shift in mindset, behaviours, and culture.
  

• Empowerment Breeds Buy-In: Whether by involving stakeholders in the plan (Lloyd's) or by delegating decision-making authority (Filshil), people are more likely to embrace change when they are active participants, not passive recipients.