The need to move to stay healthy
Regular movement has significant health benefits. I know this from my own experiences–walking our dog twice a day since she joined the family gets me moving when I might otherwise sit at home at my desk–fixed to a computer screen all day long.
I also feel the difference in winter when I stay at home more, and at points of the year when I move less. With the exception of the occasional excursion to explore the UK Lake District, this isn’t about big exercise. It’s regular small movements that help keep my body relatively healthy.
Understanding how organisations need to move
My experiences of work over the years tell me that our organisations are the same. They need lots of small movements to stay healthy. Exec teams need to make adjustments to strategy, priorities, and continuously align work in the right ways to achieve goals and outcomes. Individual teams need to stretch and push themselves enough to keep a level of agility.
I think you could measure an organisation’s health by its ability to take small steps and how well its systems can initiate and sustain small experiments. You can look at the health of any organisation by asking: what are you testing, doing, or changing? These are the type of activities that create movement, or that keep things moving. Otherwise the same systems, organisations and teams become rigid–they lose their ability to adapt, move and change at all.
We can think of this as the ability to use test and learn approaches. It might mean being deliberate with how we create spaces for teams to move in new ways inside our organisations–like Service Labs, or innovation spaces. However, like any type of exercise, there’s a need to start and keep going, to form new habits and to find rhythms. To achieve this, we should also recognise that organisations need support—someone to move with them, guide them, and encourage their teams to sustain these efforts.
In all situations, the important thing is not to sit or stand still. We can be deliberate in creating the spaces, expectations, and support for cultures that allow for regular movement in our organisations, teams and work.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.