Hold Up A Mirror to See Infinite Potential - Featuring Minola Jac PITY PARTY OVER

Organizations often view change as something to manage, an unfortunate and inevitable inconvenience that gets in the way of solid performance and results. 
My guest for this episode is Minola Jac, a transformational business professional whose background combines consulting, organizational development, and journalism. 
Minola has worked as a senior consultant for Deloitte and is currently the Group Change and Organizational Lead for the Syngenta Group, whose mission is reducing emissions and improving biodiversity.
Minola believes that, too often, organizations focus predominantly on change management without fully understanding what change entails and its impacts on people.
Minola highlights the transformative power of the change process to become a metaphorical mirror in which people can see their infinite potential. 
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TRANSCRIPT
Stephen Matini: Hello everyone, I am Stephen, and welcome to Pity Party Over. Organizations often view change as something to manage, an unfortunate and inevitable inconvenience that gets in the way of solid performance and results. 
My guess for this episode is Minola Jac a transformational business professional whose background combines consulting, organizational development, and journalism. Minola has worked as a senior consultant for Deloitte, and is currently the group change and organizational lead for the Syngenta Group whose mission is reducing emissions and improving biodiversity. 
Minola believes that too often organizations focus predominantly on change management without fully understanding what change really entails and its impacts on people. Minola highlights the transformative power of the change process to become a metaphorical mirror in which people can see their infinite potential. Please welcome to Pity Party Over Minola Jac.
Stephen Matini: I read a nice quote from your LinkedIn profile that says, “The mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size” by Einstein. Why did you choose that quote?
Minola Jac: Well, there's, there's a very long love story between Einstein and, and myself, and, and I will also share a fun fact that quote really resonates with me because I do a lot of change work. Some people call it change management. I prefer to call it change work and focus more on the change than on whether we call it management, leadership, agility or whatever. 
I do believe that change starts in the mind and the moment you have a new idea or you connect new dots, or you connect existing dots in a new way, you cannot possibly un-connect them, and you cannot forget it. Maybe you forget the idea itself, but I do believe that at least you get that feeling with you. You know, that feeling of, oh!, you know, that, that surprise, and I dunno how you can un-live that or forget that. This is why I, I chose that quote.
It's very funny and it also links to, to change and, and how you hear things and you don't know whether you would ever use them again. A few years back, I was in a development program by my then employer, and we were in a workshop about the use of artificial intelligence in HR, and we had this wonderful trainer completely energized by everything AI. 
It was very early days for Siri, and he said, look, Siri, imagine you're in a conversation with a client and you are in in their office, and you'll spot that they have a poster with Einstein. So definitely they're a huge Einstein fan, and when they step out for a moment, you are like, Siri, what's Einstein's birthday? And I raised my hand and he was like, yes? And I was like, March 14th, 1879. He said, you just killed Siri. And I'm like, I'm really sorry.
What I didn't share with him was that it so happens I was born precisely to the date 100 year