Season 1 Disc 1. By the time you read this (if I’m that lucky!) I will have had my breakfast with the IAP2 group. The topic is authentic leadership and I know that most of the people who are coming along have had to deal with a lot of change over the last year or so. I sometimes use a photograph of a major motorway under construction and for a bit of fun, get the people present to see if they can identify it. Then later, I show a photograph of another motorway under construction. It’s odd, because it looks familiar but not quite right. Actually it’s the same motorway, first construction 45 years ago and then the reconstruction, right now.

I’m revisiting the first few episodes of Seinfeld in preparation for the presentation in the morning (good thing they won’t read this first!). The most successful television series of all time and watching the first disc after quite a few years it certainly appears to be the show about nothing. Or is it?  They look a little younger, the set is dated, the humour is slightly more obvious. There’s constant change to be dealt with from an endless pit of shallow human interaction you might think, somewhat cynically. They are stories though.

I’ve a feeling that in the morning we’ll have some stories about change – some that hurt, some that’s exciting and some grudgingly accepted. We can learn a lot from the change that we’ve had in the past. That’s not exactly new of course although we can easily overlook past experiences in dealing with the current change.

So how to tap into the change learnings from the past that might be buried? Think about where you go for your authenticity stories? What’s your Season 1 Disc 1? The more you practice your authentic stories with your teams, the more change you will uncover further and further back, that  is the same as what you’ve got going on now.

We’ll be there in the morning. Happening right now if you’re reading this first thing.

Stephen