The Brush Fires We Didn't Set
Regional leadership told us it would never work. By the end of the year, other regions were copying us. Here's what actually happened.
Keith Laplante
Thirty-five years leading inside organizations (TD Waterhouse, BMO, HomeEquity Bank) and advising alongside them (Accenture, ExperiencePoint, The Refinery Leadership Partners). Facilitated leadership programs at Harvard, Duke, and Stanford. Read more about Keith
"The bank didn't roll this out. The bank caught up to it."
August 11, 2026
The Brush Fires We Didn't Set
Regional leadership told us it would never work. By the end of the year, other regions were copying us. Here's what actually happened.
I want to tell you a story from my first formal leadership assignment, because it taught me something about how change actually spreads through an organization that I've never seen articulated quite the same way in any leadership book.
The context was this. I was leading a small team of ten newly appointed branch-level resources at a major Canadian bank. Our job was to bring investment advice to the mass affluent segment of the bank's customer base. These weren't ultra-high net worth clients, which was the segment I'd been working with previously. These were everyday customers who had meaningful savings, growing investment needs, and no dedicated resource to help them navigate their options.
I'd been on the receiving end of this gap for some time. As the regional ultra-high net worth resource, I'd been repeatedly pulled in to help with mass affluent clients whose needs were beyond what the branches could support on their own. It was clear to me, and to the branches, that the customers were asking for something the bank wasn't systematically providing.
What we proposed, and why it was heretical
The idea we landed on was straightforward. Dedicate one resource per branch specifically to investment sales and investment advice for mass affluent clients. Train them properly. Get them licensed. Set them up as local, immediate, on-site expertise rather than making branches wait for someone like me to show up on rounds.
It was a small, sensible idea rooted directly in customer need. It was also, from the bank's strategic point of view at the time, heretical.
The prevailing strategy across the organization was that every branch-level resource should be able to serve every customer need. All things to all people. Specialization was, deliberately and consciously, not the direction the bank was going. Regional leadership was clear about this. What we were proposing wasn't just untested. It was counter strategic.
We were told, in several different ways and by several different people, that it wouldn't work. That we didn't have the mandate. That the model wasn't consistent with where the bank was heading. That we should be focused on supporting the generalist model rather than building something alongside it.
We did it anyway. Not out of defiance, and not because we thought we knew better than everyone else. We did it because the customers in front of us were asking for it, and we couldn't see a good reason not to try.
What happened when we started
The impact came fast. Faster than I would have predicted.
Once the branches had a dedicated resource on-site, the conversations with mass affluent clients changed. Customers who had previously been told to wait, or been referred somewhere else, or been half-served by a generalist juggling ten other priorities, were suddenly getting real, timely investment advice from someone whose only job was to provide it. The branches liked it because their customers were happier and their sales numbers were climbing. The customers liked it because they were finally getting the help they'd been asking for.
Within months, our region was producing investment sales that were dramatically ahead of anything the bank had seen from a comparable footprint. By the end of the year, we'd grown investment sales by four times.
That number, on its own, was significant enough. But it wasn't the most interesting part of what happened.
The brush fires
At some point during that year, other regions started paying attention.
I remember it starting quietly. Someone from another region would call me and ask what we were doing differently. Then someone else would ask if I'd be willing to walk them through the model. Then a couple of them came to visit. Then I ended up travelling out to a few regions to sit with their leadership and share what we'd built.
I didn't try to sell it to any of them. I just told them what we were doing, what we'd learned, and what we thought was working. And they went home and quietly built their own versions of it. Not identical. Adapted to their contexts, their teams, their local customer bases. But the core idea, dedicated investment resources at the branch level serving mass affluent clients, spread from region to region in ways that weren't planned, weren't sanctioned, and weren't coordinated by anyone at head office.
I've thought about that spread for a long time, and I've come to think of those regional adoptions as brush fires. Small, local, spontaneous, difficult to trace to any single source. Nobody set them. Nobody was managing them. They started because the model was clearly working somewhere, and other people who were paying attention decided to try their own version of it.
By the time senior leadership at the bank had formally recognized what was happening and started to think about turning it into official strategy, the fires were already burning in multiple regions. The bank didn't roll this out. The bank caught up to it.
What I've come to believe about this
There are two things I've come to believe from watching that unfold, and both of them have shaped how I think about change leadership ever since.
The first is that the best change ideas often come from the people closest to the customer, and they can often look counter strategic when they first surface. That's not because the strategy is wrong. It's because strategies are, by necessity, general, and the reality on the ground is always more specific. The mismatch between the general strategy and the specific reality is where the best change ideas live. If the strategy at the time had been more open to exceptions, we might not have had to work around it. But if the strategy had never been challenged, the bank would have missed a significant opportunity that was hiding in plain sight.
The second is that when change is genuinely working, it spreads on its own. Nobody had to push our model into other regions. Nobody had to sell it. Nobody had to build a change management program to drive adoption. The results were undeniable, the model was replicable, and the people in other regions were paying attention. That's a very different kind of change dynamic than the one most organizations try to manufacture, where leadership pushes an initiative down through the hierarchy and hopes people adopt it.
The difference is ownership. In our region, the branches weren't asked to adopt something. They were part of building it. When other regions saw the results, they weren't being told to comply. They were choosing to try something that had visibly worked for people like them. And when they built their own versions, they weren't executing someone else's playbook. They were designing their own.
That's what I mean when I talk about change done by us rather than change done to us. It doesn't require permission from the top. It doesn't require an official mandate. It requires a real problem, people close enough to see it, and the willingness to try something that responds to it.
The uncomfortable question
The question I've asked myself many times about that experience, and that I'd invite you to sit with, is this. What would have happened if we'd accepted the initial answer? If we'd deferred to the strategic direction, told the branches we couldn't help, and moved on?
The bank would have missed an opportunity. The customers would have kept waiting. And at some point, someone else, probably a competitor, would have figured out what we figured out, and moved on it.
Most organizations have opportunities like this hiding inside them right now. Small teams, close to the customer, who can see something the strategy hasn't caught up to yet. The question isn't whether those opportunities exist. They almost certainly do. The question is whether the culture makes it possible for those people to try something, or whether it makes it easier for them to defer to the strategy and stay quiet.
The brush fires that spread across the bank that year didn't start because leadership planned them. They started because a small team was willing to try something the strategy hadn't sanctioned, and because the results made the model impossible to ignore.
Sometimes the best change leadership isn't leading from the top.
It's giving the fires a chance to start.
