We spent yesterday morning at Melbourne Business School for Shared Value in Conversation, hosted by the Shared Value Project and Sustainable Value Creation Institute.

Shared Value Project Director Sarah Downie led the discussion with Erinch Sahan, Associate Director for Investment at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Together they explored how business models are changing, what the levers of change are and what kind of change is possible.

Businesses around the world are rethinking how they're organised, giving employees, communities, ecosystems and future generations a more meaningful place in decision-making and in the corporate structures themselves.

The ownership models of LEGO, Novo Nordisk and Bosch, to name a few, show that alternatives can operate at scale and still be highly successful.

That matters because it gives us something tangible to examine and learn from. It becomes easier to imagine what might be possible within our own organisations.

This is what evidence and storytelling can enable. As in any major movement, tipping points come when people gain confidence that change can be safe and begin to see themselves taking that leap.

Against a backdrop of polarisation, one question stayed with us: how do we make change possible with people who don't share the same ambition, don't want to engage with the idea, but hold significant decision-making power?

Answering that requires understanding the world as it is, not just as we wish it to be. It means spending time on what people are experiencing, what matters to them and what a proposed change might ask of them, their positions and their lives.

The way we frame change has to connect with those realities.

 So does the change itself.

For us, this raises a question we also like to think about in our work: what do people need to understand, trust and help shape before they can support a proposed change?

This answer should inform what an organisation says, does and plans to do.