"Reimagine": We throw it around like a label.
The CEO uses it on stage. The deck uses it in the title. The strategy refresh uses it as the verb. The label moves. The structure underneath doesn’t.
“Reimagine”
We throw it around like a label.
The CEO uses it on stage. The deck uses it in the title. The strategy refresh uses it as the verb. The label moves. The structure underneath doesn’t.
I even named my business after the word and then spent the next eight months discovering the depth of what it actually meant.
Here’s the thing. Most “reimagining”, “reinventing”, “redefining” is at best a variant of what we had before with AI sprinkled on top. Processes, propositions, roles all repositioned but not fundamentally different.
In some cases it’s faster. It’s rarely better.
The problem starts with what we think reimagining is.
We think it’s about the outside. Reimagine the business. Reimagine the operating model. Reimagine the customer journey. Reimagine the org chart.
This is the emerging industry narrative.
But it all carries an unstated assumption.
“We can stay the same, and reimagine the world around us.”
That assumption is flawed. It’s never worked for ourselves or for our company, team or environment, and it’s why AI never works to the extent it could. We change the tools, we keep the box. The people using them still have the same world view. We measure against the same metrics (or the trending variants of them).
The change is incremental and everyone is exhausted.
And here’s the deeper part.
We’ve all trained ourselves to fit into processes and environments that demanded linearity. Like many of us, I’d put myself in a box on purpose, year after year, until I forgot I was in one. That’s what we all do. We orient ourselves by the process. We’re coerced into conforming to an idea an industry, an employer, a family, a culture has of us. We do. And we forget there was ever another way to be.
That’s what conformity actually is. Not the process. The identity built around the process.
Now AI is brilliant at replacing the box. The cost of knowledge and process-following is tending to zero. The identity we built around doing them is going with it. And that’s what makes it so hard.
AI strips us of an identity we’ve been given. It doesn’t touch who we truly are. We mistake one for the other.
Last September I set out to reimagine my consulting business. Similar propositions, a tweaked delivery model, AI working alongside me. The structure relatively untouched.
The more I used AI, the more the value I’d been built on started to look different. If I was using AI to get 80% of the answer for areas I didn’t understand, why would I expect clients to pay me 100%. Conversely I could deliver faster, spending more time on the valuable work and less on the boilerplate, admin and presentation tidying. I assumed it would net out.
Something kept nagging that I wasn’t looking at this right. That there was far more depth to this than I was opening myself up to.
I couldn’t see it for months.
When I started looking beyond the process, I stopped suppressing the nonlinear thinking. And what changed wasn’t logical. What changed was the question I was asking.
Most people ask “how do I use AI?” Some get a level deeper and ask “how does AI support what I do?” That’s the question every operating model is built around. It’s also the wrong one.
What showed up for me was “what am I really trying to make happen here?” Not the business plan version. The first principles version, the one I’d never let myself ask. It’s rarely asked because the answer often points to the fact the process isn’t designed to get there.
And underneath that one, a harder question. “Who do I need to be for any of this to be possible?”
What surfaces when you let yourself ask isn’t a new skill set or a job title. It’s the part of you that was always there before the world told you to drop it.
Curiosity. Imagination. The willingness to explore without knowing where it goes. These are skills we’re born with. They got drilled out somewhere between school and middle management, replaced by process, KPIs, the right answer, “what do you do for a living.”, aka “the box”.
AI is now rewarding the ability to ask what’s actually possible, and the patience to follow it without a map.
It’s hard, it’s confronting, it’s forcing change on us when most are not ready, or who just don’t know how to change. Many of us are having our Wile E Coyote moment.
It’s not all doom and gloom though, on the other side is a more empowered view of what’s possible. This is different for everyone, it comes down to who you are underneath all those layered beliefs.
For me…
I’ve taken products from idea to demo in days, where the same thing used to take months. I run business systems automated and solo where I’d have needed a team. I have a voice on Instagram and LinkedIn that feels like mine for the first time. New conversations, new connections, because I’m showing up more honestly.
What I’m now building, solo, would have needed 6- or even 7-figure investments, a team and likely eighteen months of runway. That’s the part that sounds impressive. The truer version is that I’m a different person, and the business is a byproduct.
Your version of this looks different. It doesn’t matter. The shape of what’s now possible is wider than it’s ever been.
This is what reimagining actually is.
Not relaunching what you had with new tools. Not changing the org chart while the people inside stay the same. Not running a transformation programme that moves everyone from one conformity to another and calls that change.
Reimagining is meeting the part of you the box was hiding. The curiosity. The thing you’d love to do that the role never let you. The version of you that was never really invited to work.
Do that inner work first, and the energy is there for everything that follows. Skip it, and you’ll burn out trying.
I’m starting to come across more people who see this. A new way of being. Different industries, different roles, same recognition. There’s a growing movement, even if it doesn’t have a name yet.
If you’re one of them, Reply back to this email. I'd genuinely love to talk.