Think about the last time you were part of something that really had momentum. Not because someone told you to be enthusiastic, but because the work itself felt alive, the people around you were genuinely engaged, and progress seemed to happen naturally rather than through sheer effort. It probably felt almost effortless compared to how much you were actually doing.

Now think about the last time it felt the opposite.

The difference between those two experiences is rarely about the people involved. It is almost always about the conditions they were operating in. And conditions, unlike people, can be changed fairly easily.

Energise means building momentum, agency and connection through shared experience. Not through motivation campaigns or culture programmes, but through the genuine experience of working together toward something that matters, with enough autonomy to shape how it gets done.

Energy in an organisation is not a mood. It is a signal, and it shows up in specific, recognisable ways. It is the person who used to light up in meetings and quietly stopped contributing six months ago. The team that used to eat lunch together and no longer does. The new joiner who arrived full of questions and gradually stopped asking them. The project that everyone seems to find a reason to deprioritise. These are not personality issues or performance problems. They are information. They are the organisation’s way of telling you something about the conditions people are working in.

Before reaching for a solution, it is worth simply sitting with that signal for a moment. Where is energy flowing freely right now? Where does it seem to disappear? Just noticing, without immediately trying to fix anything, is often where the most useful work begins.

Watch a murmuration of starlings and it is almost impossible to believe there is no choreographer. Thousands of birds move as a single flowing form, expanding, contracting, turning in waves that appear to ripple through the flock like thought. No bird is in charge. No bird can see the whole. Each one is simply responding to the movement of its nearest neighbours, and from that simple shared responsiveness, something extraordinary emerges.

The murmuration is not just beautiful. It is extraordinarily effective. The collective movement confuses predators, keeps the flock warm and allows the whole group to navigate in ways no individual bird could manage alone. The energy of the system comes not from any single source but from the quality of connection between its parts. And the birds at the edges of the flock, not the centre, are the first to sense a change in conditions and the first to respond. The information that keeps the whole system safe lives at the periphery.

A healthy human body works in a similar way. It does not wait for a crisis to respond. It is constantly reading its own signals, adjusting temperature, redistributing blood flow, releasing hormones, long before any conscious awareness of a problem.

When we are truly well, this all happens with a quality that we simply call vitality. We do not think about it, we just feel it. And generally tend to notice it when it’s not there.

Organisations have their own version of this, though most have learned to override the signals rather than respond to them.

In 2006, a Dutch nurse called Jos de Blok left his job out of frustration. The healthcare organisation he worked for had become so focused on managing processes that nurses had lost the ability to make basic decisions about their own patients. The signals were everywhere: low morale, declining quality of care, good people leaving. But the organisation’s response was more process, more oversight, more control. The energy was being managed rather than understood.

De Blok co-founded Buurtzorg on a different premise entirely. Small self-managing teams of nurses took full responsibility for the care of patients in their neighbourhood, supported by coaches rather than supervised by managers. They decided together how to organise their work, handle problems and develop their practice. The role of leadership was to create the conditions and then get out of the way.

Starting with one team in 2007, Buurtzorg grew into a nationwide organisation. Client satisfaction ran significantly higher than comparable organisations while the hours of care required per patient dropped dramatically. People described the experience of working there as almost euphoric, not because the work was easy, but because they had genuine agency over work they deeply cared about.

What de Blok had understood was that energy does not come from telling people to care more. It comes from trusting them enough to act on what they already care about. And he had noticed something that many leaders walk past every day: that the people closest to the work already knew what needed to change. The energy was there all along. It just needed the conditions to move.

(Full case study: Commonwealth Fund)

Start by observing before intervening. Spend a week genuinely noticing where energy is already present in your organisation. Which conversations come alive? Where do people linger after a meeting ends? Where does good work seem to happen with less friction? These are not accidents. Something in those conditions is working, and understanding what that is matters more than importing a solution from somewhere else.

Pay particular attention to the edges of your organisation: the people who sit between teams, between you and your customers, between what the strategy says and what is actually happening on the ground. They often carry the most honest picture of organisational health and are frequently the least heard. In complexity theory, the most generative activity in any system tends to happen not at the centre but at the boundaries, where different elements meet and exchange. The same is true of organisations.

Look at where agency is concentrated. Most organisations, without intending to, centralise decision-making far from the people who best understand the situation. Shifting even a small amount of genuine authority toward those people changes the quality of energy in the room in ways that are almost immediately palpable. Not consultation, not feedback loops, but actual trust.

And invest in the quality of shared experience. Not manufactured team building, but the real experience of solving something difficult together, of navigating uncertainty collectively, of creating something none of you could have made alone. That kind of shared experience builds a quality of connection that becomes its own source of energy over time.

Decisions get made with less friction. People bring problems forward earlier, before they become crises, because they trust that raising a difficulty will be met with curiosity rather than blame. New ideas surface from unexpected places. The organisation recovers from setbacks more quickly, the way a healthy body bounces back from illness faster than one that has been running on empty.

There is a wider dimension too. Energised people bring that quality into the rest of their lives. The way an organisation tends to the energy of its people does not stay inside the organisation. It moves outward into families, communities and the places and relationships beyond. That is not a small or incidental thing. It is part of how your organisation participates in the health of the wider world around it.

Before doing anything else, spend a few days simply observing. Notice where energy is already flowing in your organisation and where it seems to get stuck or quietly disappear. Don’t diagnose. Don’t fix. Just watch, the way you might pay attention to how your body feels at different points in a day, before deciding what it needs.

Then find one decision that is currently waiting for approval from above that could reasonably be made by the people closest to the work. Give them the authority to make it, step back, and notice what moves.

• Where in your organisation do people seem most alive in their work? What is it about those conditions that makes that possible, and what would it take to cultivate more of it?
• Think of someone in your team whose energy has shifted in the last six months. What changed in the conditions around them?
• Who sits at the edges of your organisation? When did you last really listen to what they are noticing?
• What would it feel like if your organisation had the same relationship to its own stress signals that a healthy body does, noticing early, responding with care, recovering with ease?
• Where are you currently managing energy rather than releasing it?

Reframing opens new possibilities. Experimenting tests them. Growing deepens awareness and capability. Energise is what converts all of that into momentum that other people can feel and join. Without it, even the best insights stay stuck on the page.

The next action, Nourish, explores what it takes to sustain that energy, rather than burning through it.