Who needs best practice when you have passion and persistence

Today marks a very special moment in time for RPO Global - the launching of our new website.

Not quite on par with the invention of the wheel or the printing press, as some of my colleagues would have you believe, but it feels significant to those of us who have poured ourselves into the RPO journey over this last decade. To honour this line drawn in the sand, we look back on a journey well travelled and consider what lies ahead.

From bootstrapping to breaking new ground

BOOTSTRAPPING - To get (oneself or something) into or out of a situation using existing resources.

I have found myself in recent years persistently trying to seek out the Best Practice in any given situation. Whether it's writing blog posts or demonstrating a new feature on our WeMatter platform, I felt honour bound to delivering the industry standard version of whatever it was I was delivering.

In reality what this looks like is a quick natter with your favourite robot friend around the prompt "What is the best practice for [INSERT TOPIC]".

This definitely wouldn't pass as best practice for achieving best practice. What it has allowed us to do is grow a business around one individual's innate skill and passion for elevating others in their personal and professional lives.

It didn't matter that our latest marketing campaign was scribbled on the back of a service station napkin, or that our first 2 websites were designed and built by an Economics graduate with a stifled career in primary school teaching. We even used to portray the digitisation of our paper based appraisal system as a huge achievement, sound in the knowledge that I'd be up till the early hours manually entering data into said digital system. Disclaimer: our platform is now built on a cutting edge stack of technologies by qualified engineers, get in touch if you want a demo!

We used the tools we had available to do what we thought was the most important task in front of us to the best of our shared capabilities. This approach brought results one moment, and a frustrating lack of results the next. Mistakes have littered our journey, and from those mistakes has sprouted a deep experiential knowledge and understanding of our craft.

Looking back on this now, best practice was never the defining variable in whether we were to achieve what we set out to achieve. It was always going to be the unquestioned assumption that at every turn we would apply our knowledge and experience to improve people performance for our partner organisations. Our commitment to this ideal renders best practice a shadow of what I considered it to be, so much so that I can now see the danger of best practice inadvertently producing more of the same.

“It is better to make a thousand mistakes than to think you know everything and not make any.” - Paulo Coelho, The Valkyries (1992)

So here we find ourselves, a thousand mistakes in our wake, breaking new ground with the latest iteration of our website.

Our growing team

This brand new shiny website also represents the collaborative efforts of our expanding team. From a technical perspective, the website was masterminded by our latest addition to our Digital Solutions team - Ben Marles.

Ben has worked tirelessly since joining last September in designing and building the site. Other recent additions, including Lou Dale in our Partnering team and Anita Baldwin in our Business Development team, have contributed to the content and visual design.

A live and kicking library of insight

So where to from here?

Whenever the term Thought Leadership crops up in our team, it is reliably caveated with the phrase I hate that term. I think because it conures an image of industry leaders broadcasting expertise from their pedestal. A top-down diktat of We Know Best.

This isn't what we dream of our website pretending to be. Instead, we want to prioritise authenticity.

This is a controversial topic in the age of exponentially advancing artificial intelligence. The 'content is king' philosophy has already provoked a tidal wave of information for us to consume, but now with AI producing often superior content at a fraction of the cost, is it naive to begin a conversation in such a noisy environment? Possibly. But as a team we are committed to exploring what this could look like.

Each of us has a unique set of experiences and perspectives accumulated through the years of contributing to RPO. Many of us have worked closely with organisations across a multitude of industries, collaborating with their people to improve engagement, performance and culture. Several of us have many years experience delivering digital solutions to facilitate these improvements. And one of us has 3 decades of experience working with individuals and teams at the highest level. From our myriad mistakes, we have learned things and formed opinions - sharing these feels like an important contribution to the larger conversations.

We are always looking for ways we can walk our talk at RPO. Elevating our people and their personal and professional lives is one way we look to do this. Personally, I'm excited for the potential of this website to bring together the voices from within our business. I'm also aware of a growing sense of pride that a new website can cultivate within a team. We've worked hard to get to this place and share in a sense of excitement and anticipation for the future. Our website exhibits this sense of pride and future-focussed anticipation for the world to see.

So check in regularly to keep up-to-date with our journey - from recent opinions in the people performance sphere, to our latest partnering and digital solutions - we look forward to traveling the road ahead with you by our side!