FROM:TODAY
Hosted by Jonny de Mallet Morgan, Chief Vision Officer at leadership and communication consultancy FROM:TODAY, this podcast is where leadership meets inspiration. Join Jonny as he engages with thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and innovators who share their dreams, challenges, and the stories behind their leadership journeys. With a passion for people and business, Jonny uncovers candid insights and experiences to inspire both current and aspiring leaders.
Each conversation serves as a powerful resource for anyone looking to grow, lead, and create meaningful change in their organization.
Mini-Series Feature: The With INTENT: mini-series, led by Chris Wickenden, Chief Creative Officer, offers a weekly dose of inspiration. In 5-minute deconstructions of the latest business and leadership trends, Chris sparks new thinking and encourages practical, constructive action.
FROM:TODAY is a leadership and communication consultancy dedicated to building high-performing teams that thrive on strong communication and a shared purpose. We help organisations create environments where people feel they belong, grow, and deliver their best work. Whether you're tackling talent retention, engagement, or burnout, we work with you to provide the tools and strategies to future-proof your business and elevate your culture. Learn more at www.fromtoday.com.
FROM:TODAY
The 5 Elements That Will Make or Break Your Business
With INTENT: our 5 minute deconstructions of the current trends to inspire healthy rethinking and reconstructive action.
by Chris Wickenden, Chief Creative Officer at FROM:TODAY
This week, Chris explores the 5 founding elements that make up, and will ultimately make or break, your business.
[00:00:00] It's Chris here from From Today. A lot of you have been asking us about Intent. Intent is our diagnostic organisational performance tool, and with that mouthful you can see why we've given it a more succinct name. So we've referenced Intent in our previous episode, certainly the one on cultivating more care and presence within your organization. And I thought I'd take the opportunity today to give you some more insight into how it came into being, how it works, and most importantly, how it can help your business right away. So for years as a business, we have been trying to distill what the founding elements to high performance within an organization are.
We've had a number of convictions, um, certainties, some uncertainties, different strands and themes to our work. We've done lots and lots of work and research out in the field. It's also included a number of [00:01:00] sleepless nights sort of waking up, making a note, scribbling it. Oh, scribbling it, throwing it away, then scrabbling around for the notes in the morning thinking, Oh, no, no, no, that is it, that is it.
And interestingly enough, it was delivering at an expo in early 2023 that we really made some breakthrough. Now the expo itself as a business opportunity, we felt at the time was an unmitigated disaster, but what it did provide us with two days of headspace to reflect on and consolidate our work and The model was born and it will be known as the model until one week before we relaunched the business in November, 2023, as from today and we christened it Intent.
Why Intent? It's so important that organizations approach their people and cultural problems with intent and are proactive as opposed to it being an afterthought if there happens to be a bit of budget [00:02:00] left over and this isn't common enough. All of the data out there suggests that there is a direct correlation between how connected and engaged workers are and the performance of the organization.
Not engaged workers account for 8. 8 trillion in lost productivity globally. That's 9 percent of global GDP. It's huge. So what are our key founding elements? Authenticity, care, empowerment, Presence and purpose. You can see how these interact in the model on our website. Authenticity, the extent to which people feel safe, supported and inclined to show up as their whole selves, satisfying that human need for safety.
Care, the extent to which people truly connect to their work and the people around them, satisfying the human [00:03:00] need for connection. Empowerment, the extent to which people are supported to think, feel, and speak up freely and have agency to act in a positive way. which satisfies that human need for learning and growth.
Presence is the extent to which people are afforded time and space to dedicate all of their attention to the here and now, which really determines the quality of being and therefore every action that people take within the business. and purpose. The extent to which your organization has a shared, articulated meaning and direction.
And this has an impact on every other element within the model. It gives you that reason to be and that reason to do. So, these five founding elements need constant and sustained attention in order to ensure the health of your organization and also its future success. It's absolutely crucial. And just to be clear, [00:04:00] we are not looking to replace one rigid culture with another one.
There's this traditional idea in change management that you need to unfreeze a culture. And the habits and actions that go with it, build a new one before refreezing it. This won't do, we want to create a security in being liquid and responsive to what is the constantly changing needs of the market, customers, your people, the world in general, ultimately creating a truly agile business.
So take five minutes now to fill in intent. You can access it at assess your performance on our website. We'll be in touch to discuss your results. So that's all for me today. I'll be back next week to deconstruct some more of the current themes out there and show you how intent can have a very real tangible impact on your business, providing that actionable insight right away.
As always, we look forward to hearing from you. You can [00:05:00] get in touch with me at chris at from today. com or just get in touch with me on LinkedIn. Cheers. I will speak to you soon.
