Most organisations right now are mid-transformation, questioning how much to change. But the harder question is not how much. It is what. Can we still tell what actually made us great from everything we have merely accumulated?
In Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, there is a shepherd boy named Santiago, who dreams of treasure buried at the foot of the Egyptian pyramids. He sells his flock and goes. He crosses a desert. He is robbed of everything on his first day in a strange city. He works a year in a crystal shop to earn his way back. He falls in love, nearly dies in a tribal war, and finally reaches the place his dream promised him. But the treasure is not there. It was buried, all along, beneath the sycamore tree where he first fell asleep, back home, where he started.
We tend to love this story for the obvious reason. The thing we were searching for was inside us the whole time. But when we read it a second time, something deeper emerges. Santiago could never have found that treasure by staying home. He had to leave, be humbled, be emptied out and remade, before he could return and finally see what had always been under his feet. The treasure did not move, he did. The road did not hand him gold, but gave him the eyes to recognise gold when he was standing on it.
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, a butler named Stevens takes a modest motoring trip across the English countryside. On paper it is a far smaller journey than crossing a desert. Yet somewhere on those quiet roads, Stevens begins to understand that he has given the whole of himself, his dignity, his tenderness, his own moral judgement, to the faithful service of a great house and a master who did not deserve the offering. He mistook duty for meaning. He kept his professional essence so immaculately, so completely, that he forgot to keep a self underneath it. His is not a story of triumph. It is the quiet devastation of a man who realises, on the far side of his life, exactly what his loyalty cost him.
Two men, two journeys, two transformations. One leaves home and finds himself. One serves beautifully and loses himself. And this, I suspect, is the fork in the road every organisation is standing at right now, whether or not it has noticed.
Most organisations I speak to are mid-transformation. New operating models. Roles dissolving and reforming. AI folded into workflows faster than we can write the policies to govern it. Teams reskilled, restructured, and reduced. We have all sold the flock and set off across the desert, and the language we use for it is relentlessly optimistic. Agile, future-fit, reimagined. The brochures promise treasure at the pyramids.
The question rarely asked in the steering committee is the one that matters most. When we arrive, will we be Santiago or will we be Stevens? Will the journey give us the eyes to finally recognise what we were always good at, or will it quietly cost us the very thing that made us worth working for in the first place?
Our first instinct is to protect what made us great. Ring-fence the essence, bury the treasure box under the sycamore tree, and guard it against the desert. And that instinct is not wrong. An organisation that changes everything, all at once, can lose its way, and there are things worth defending at all costs. But here is the catch that Stevens understood too late. The hard part of a transformation is not deciding whether to protect our essence. It is knowing what our essence actually is.
Because a great deal of what we defend is not essence at all, but accretion. The process we inherited in a merger or acquisition and never thought to question. The layer of sign-offs we added the year we doubled in size. The way we have always run reviews. Some of it is genuinely sacred, the few things that made us worth choosing in the first place. But much of it is simply what we picked up along the road and mistook for who we are. If we ring-fence all of it with equal devotion, we are not protecting our essence. We are refusing to travel at all.
That was Stevens’s real failure. He could not tell his essence from his role. He polished the silver, kept the house immaculate, served without question, and called all of it his self, until there was no self left beneath the service. He protected everything equally, and so protected nothing that mattered. A great many loyal, well-run, deeply committed organisations are making the same mistake right now, guarding the polish while the thing worth keeping quietly walks out the door.
Real transformation, the kind that grows wings, does not preserve the caterpillar. Inside the chrysalis the body dissolves almost entirely, and only a few cells carry the blueprint for what comes next. The whole task is knowing which cells those are. And in most organisations, once we strip away the process and the polish and the inherited machinery, the part actually worth carrying through turns out to be human: the people, the trust between them, the way they treat each other on a hard day. That is usually the essence. It is also, too often, the first thing a transformation spends.
So perhaps the binary is false. Perhaps the choice is not to find ourselves or lose ourselves. Santiago had to lose his flock, his savings, his certainty and very nearly his life in order to find what he was looking for. The losing was not the failure but the price of the journey. In this transformation we will lose things too, and that is not the problem. The problem is losing the wrong things. There is a difference between shedding what we have outgrown and discarding the very thing that made us worth choosing in the first place, and the whole task is being able to tell them apart.
A question to leave you with:
When your organisation finally arrives at its pyramids, exhausted and changed, and looks back at everything it left in the desert to get there, will it recognise the treasure under its own tree, or will it have forgotten what it went looking for?
