If you can achieve sustainable change in an organization of tens of thousands of people, you can achieve it almost anywhere. This is the story of one of the largest cultural transformations I have been part of — the journey from a traditional energy utility into innogy — and what it really took to move a system of that size without the change evaporating the moment the attention moved on.
The scale itself is the first lesson. In a very large organization, you cannot personally persuade everyone, and you cannot control the outcome from the centre. What you can do is set a clear direction, change the conditions, and trust a cascade of leaders to carry the new behavior into every corner. That means investing disproportionately in leadership — because in a system this big, leaders are the multiplier, for better or worse.
The second lesson is that culture follows behavior, not the other way around. We did not try to talk the organization into a new mindset; we changed concrete ways of working and let new beliefs form from the new experience. People who experience a different way of operating — more ownership, more honesty, faster learning — start to believe in it. Belief that arrives through experience is far more durable than belief installed through communication.
The third lesson is about honesty and patience. A transformation at this scale surfaces uncomfortable truths, and the temptation is always to declare victory early. We tried instead to keep measuring what was really happening on the ground and to keep adjusting. Sustainable change is less a triumphant launch than a long, disciplined practice of staying with the work until new behavior becomes simply how things are done.
If it works with 70,000 people, it works anywhere.
The full article tells the story in more detail — the choices, the setbacks, and what held. Read it via the link below. And if you are facing a change that feels too big to move, take some encouragement from the headline finding: it is possible, even at enormous scale, when leadership, approach, and resources line up and stay aligned over time.
A closing reflection on scale: the instinct in a huge organization is to seek control, but control does not scale — trust does. Our job was less to direct every move than to make the new behavior safe, visible, and rewarded, then let it propagate through thousands of local decisions. That takes nerve, because you cannot see the whole thing changing at once — but it is the only mechanism that moves a system this large without it snapping back.
Read the full article →