Posted on: 16/09/2026

Thought Leadership

Moving forward isn’t always about embracing the next change. Sometimes it starts with deciding what to leave behind. Michelle O’Neill explores the idea of the pivot: the point where we let go, reframe what’s in front of us and find a different direction. For people, that means finding balance when things move. For organisations, it means creating the space to question old assumptions and make better choices about what comes next.

Michelle O'Neill Principal Consultant OD, Leadership and Learning at West Midlands Employers

We talk a lot about moving forward, but much less about what has to happen before we can. Michelle O’Neill looks at that crucial pivot point – what makes us turn, what keeps us stuck and the questions that can help us find a best direction. Something slightly odd is happening in our organisations.

How’s that for an opener? We keep moving on.

• New structure? Move on

• New Chief Executive? Move on

• Budget changed? Adjust the plan

• Transformation programme? Get behind it

• AI? Start experimenting

We’re becoming remarkably accomplished at continuing, regardless. I’m just not sure that’s the same as moving forward.

Yes, I’m talking about change, but I’m thinking slightly differently. You tell me whether this makes sense!

People leave fingerprints on change, but not always obvious ones. More often, they are smudges left on conversations, decisions, habits and relationships. A joke that lands a little sharply. A meeting where nobody says the thing everyone is thinking. A team that nods along because they have learned the safest response to change is to look cooperative.

Ok imagine with me…you’ve seen one of these:

• The service might have restructured, but someone is still annoyed about the job they didn’t get.

• The new leadership team might have been in place for eighteen months, but occasionally you can still hear the old one in the room.

• A manager tells their team to embrace the latest change while privately thinking, I haven’t got over the last one yet.

Yet somewhere, an organisation proudly describes itself as agile while all of its people are quietly waiting for things to settle down. Really, when was the last time anything settled for long?

Which is why I've become interested in the pivot (and I don’t mean just another word for change). I mean really think about a pivot. The dictionary definition describes it as:

“The central point, pin or column on which something turns or balances.”

Read that again.

A pivot isn't the movement. It's the point that makes the movement possible.

Perhaps the challenge isn’t simply that we need to change more quickly. Perhaps we need to become much better at knowing what to hold onto, what to let go of, and how to turn without losing our balance.

We don’t start the next change empty-handed

People and organisations have memories. We carry previous changes into new ones. Sometimes that’s useful. It’s experience, wisdom and scar tissue that helps know what not to do again.

However, the baggage travels with us too. Alongside the useful learning come the things that slow us down; disappointment, old loyalties, habits built for a world that has moved on, and familiar stories like ‘that’s not how we do things round here’ or ‘we’ve tried it before’.

Over time, though, the same stories can stop explaining the organisation and start constraining it. We've seen versions of this in some of our work with teams experiencing deep-rooted relationship difficulties:

The formal event is over. The process has concluded. Everyone has technically moved forward.

Except they haven’t.

The emotion stayed.

We also see this in coaching and mentoring, the change may be finished on paper, but the person in front of you is still carrying some of it with them.

That’s made me wonder whether one of the most underestimated organisational capabilities is actually letting go.

That doesn’t mean forgetting or pretending something wasn’t painful. Letting go is deciding: This mattered. I will take something from it, but I don’t need to take all of it with me.

Then there is the turn

Here’s an experiment. Think about a problem currently occupying your workplace.

• Recruitment

• Demand

• Management capacity

• Productivity

• Absence

Whatever yours is, finish this sentence: “The problem is…”

You’ve just created a frame. Once we’ve created one, we’re surprisingly good at staying inside it.

If the problem is “we can’t recruit enough people”, the conversation becomes recruitment. If the problem is “we have more work than our current workforce can sustainably do”, suddenly the conversation could include demand, process, technology, prioritisation, job design and what work shouldn’t be happening at all.

Same workplace. Different frame.

Reframing isn’t positive thinking. It’s moving far enough around a problem to see something you couldn’t see from where you were standing.

AI makes this particularly visible. “How can AI help our employees complete their work more quickly?” is a perfectly sensible question.

Move a little.

“If technology could do a significant proportion of it, what would we deliberately want our people to spend more time doing?”

Move again. “If we were creating this service today, with the technology and workforce we have now, would we design it like this at all?”

Now we’re somewhere else entirely. That is the pivot point.

It’s where good questions and looking from other perspectives can make a difference: leaders, coaches and mentors can help question the frame, see what else is possible and work out what comes next.

What can keep us stuck

Often we wrap change in governance. A room fills with sensible people saying sensible things. We need more information. Let’s wait for the strategy. The technology isn’t mature enough yet. We should probably establish a working group.

Sometimes that caution is wise. Sometimes we have retracted inside a very impressive-looking structure.

The pivot question is simpler: what do we know enough of to do next?

Maybe run the experiment, have the conversation, stop doing one thing or redesign a process. Let a team try something small enough to be safe, but real enough to teach you something.

Finding your balance when things move

People often pivot in their heads and sometimes in their stomachs, not in a framework or process. Will I still be good at this? Where do I fit? What if the expertise I’ve spent twenty years building becomes less valuable?

AI, new operating models and changing expectations will create plenty of those pit-of-the-stomach moments.

This is where our language about resilience can become a little unhelpful. Let’s not aim for everyone to be so resilient that nothing knocks them. I mean, is that even achievable? How about we aim at become more capable of finding our balance again when something does?

Which brings us back to the pivot point. If everything can move, what shouldn’t?

If I'm really clear about what I'm anchored to, I can become much less precious about everything surrounding it.

That feels potentially significant for transformation.

• Keep the purpose: Question the process.

• Keep the outcome: Question the structure.

• Keep the public service values: Question how they’re expressed.

• Keep what makes us human: Question which work humans still need to do.

Knowing what not to pivot might be every bit as important as knowing when to move.

Who is standing around your pivot?

We talk about networks as though they're useful additions to our working lives. Maybe they're becoming something more fundamental.

When the answer isn’t obvious, who helps you think? A colleague, mentor, coach or peer? Someone in another similar organisation? Someone in another sector entirely?

Perhaps we should be much more deliberate about building these circles of thinking.

Maybe we need to get better at pivoting

Playing with this slightly different way of thinking about what it means to be ready for the future. I’m parking change ready, resilient and the likes of agile. I’m letting my mind play with this idea of better pivoting.

For those of us who coach, mentor or support people through change, perhaps these are useful questions to carry with us:

• What do you need to let go of?

• What happens if you look at this differently?

• What is the next move you can actually make?

• Who do you need to think with?

That is the art of The Pivot: knowing what we’re anchored to, what we can leave behind, and how to move without losing our balance.

I’m looking forward to exploring this more in November at the Public Sector Coaching and Mentoring Conference 2026: The Pivot. Come and explore with us what it takes to let go, reframe and move forward.