Some of the most interesting people we meet don’t fit neatly into a job title.
They might be engineers, strategists, technologists, sustainability specialists, researchers, trainers, communicators, commercial thinkers or consultants.
What connects them is not the industry they work in. It’s the way they think.
They are curious enough to ask better questions. Experienced enough to challenge assumptions. Collaborative enough to know that meaningful change rarely comes from one person working alone.
And, most importantly, they want their expertise to make a difference.
At The Change Impact Group, we call these people Agents of Change.
Why we value Agents of Change
We work on complex challenges.
Sometimes the problem is environmental. Sometimes commercial. Sometimes technical. Sometimes organisational.
Often, it is all four at once.
That means we are rarely looking for someone who will simply arrive, complete a task and leave.
We want people who can look at a problem, understand the wider context and ask:
What are we really trying to change here?
An Agent of Change might notice an opportunity nobody has considered.
They might connect two people who should have been speaking to each other.
They might challenge an established way of working.
They might bring specialist expertise that allows an organisation to do something it could not previously do.
Or they might simply make the people around them more capable by sharing what they know.
That attitude matters to us just as much as technical skill.
Because this is how we work too
The Change Impact Group operates in what we describe as the Fourth Sector.
At its heart is a simple idea:
Can we use economics and business to help create positive behavioural change?
Rather than seeing commercial success and environmental or social impact as competing objectives, we look for ways of making them reinforce one another.
We build our work around three pillars.
Cause
There has to be a clear environmental or social mission.
What problem are we trying to solve?
What needs to change?
Why does it matter?
Community
No meaningful change happens in isolation.
It requires people, organisations, knowledge and capability to come together.
Sometimes that community is a client team.
Sometimes it is suppliers, customers, researchers, specialists, contractors, communities or investors.
Often it is a combination of all of them.
Business Plan
Impact needs a way to sustain itself.
So we look at the economics.
Where does value come from?
What changes behaviour?
What creates revenue?
What reduces risk?
What makes the better choice commercially attractive?
The aim is not simply to have a good idea.
It is to create a model that allows the impact to continue.
Our clients don’t have to become Fourth Sector businesses
This is an important part of how we work.
A manufacturer does not need to reinvent itself as an environmental organisation.
A property company does not need to become a social enterprise.
A technology business does not suddenly need a new purpose statement.
Our clients and partners can continue doing what they do best.
They can impart a specific part of the challenge to us, and we can help deliver that impact on their behalf.
That might mean developing an environmental programme.
Building a commercial model around a sustainability opportunity.
Understanding a carbon challenge.
Creating new evidence.
Engaging a community.
Designing a new service.
Or bringing together specialist expertise to solve a problem that sits outside the organisation’s existing capability.
That is where our network becomes incredibly important.
The right people rarely all sit inside one organisation
One of the things we have learned repeatedly is that the solution to a complex problem rarely sits within a single discipline.
A project might need:
an engineer who understands the physical problem,
a data specialist who can make it measurable,
a commercial strategist who understands where the value sits,
a sustainability expert who understands the impact,
a technologist who can build the system,
and a communicator who can make other people understand why any of it matters.
No one person needs to be all of those things.
But someone needs to bring them together.
That is why we are building an Agents of Change community.
A community built around capability
We want to know who is out there.
People with deep expertise.
People with unusual combinations of skills.
People who have spent twenty years understanding one very specific problem.
People who have moved between industries and can see connections others might miss.
Independent contractors.
Consultants.
Researchers.
Founders.
Freelancers.
Technical specialists.
Experienced professionals who still enjoy solving difficult problems.
The community is not about collecting names on a database.
It is about building a network of people we can connect around the right challenges when those challenges emerge.
And as our projects grow, we will increasingly be looking for particular expertise within particular sectors.
Conversations with Agents of Change
Our podcast, Conversations with Agents of Change, grew from the same belief.
There is no single route to creating change.
Some people create it through technology.
Others through business.
Others through science, leadership, education, sustainability, creativity or community.
The podcast gives us the opportunity to hear those stories.
To understand what people are trying to change.
What motivates them.
What they have learned when things have worked.
And, often more interestingly, what they learned when they didn’t.
Those conversations remind us that an Agent of Change is not a job title.
It is a way of approaching your expertise.
So, we’re looking for you
Over the coming months, we will be looking for Agents of Change across a number of different areas of expertise.
Some opportunities will be project-specific.
Some will require very specialist knowledge.
Others will bring together several disciplines around one challenge.
But before we narrow the search, we want to start by finding the people.
People who are excellent at what they do.
People who are curious.
People who collaborate.
People who can challenge constructively.
People who understand that the best solutions have to work in the real world.
And people who would like to use their expertise to create something meaningful.
So perhaps the better question isn’t:
What is your job title?
It is:
What do you know how to change?
If you consider yourself an Agent of Change, we’d like to hear from you.
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