A couple of weeks ago I launched an online community for humans who want to explore the book together and help each other apply its techniques to their circumstances.

I expected that first small session to consist mostly of introductions and a light exercise or two—more connecting than deep-diving. Yet I still wanted that first session to begin to establish an intentional Culture.

Solo visioning

Before the session, I spent a little time considering what I hope this community will become. In a solo visioning exercise, I noodled and doodled with pen and paper. I told myself a story about an online session six months from now, where a bunch of folks were excited to share about their latest efforts to practice and invite others to practice.

In that story of the future, I imagined all three layers of an org Culture, applied to this small context of an online community:

• culture — Community members bring curiosity as they respectfully listen to each other’s contexts and challenges. They act as encouraging accountabilibuddies. They engage in deep thinking to learn more about the funny things about humans and about the impact of Culture on results and happiness.

• “business” operating system — With some established norms and easy-to-use tools, people find it easy to drop in and participate, whether it’s their first session or their third in a row. Members know how to catch up when they miss a session. Our tools and processes promote sharing and connection while protecting privacy.

• hidden stories — Everyone who participates in the community genuinely appreciates one another, they find the group invigorating and caring. The group provides the kind of psychological safety that makes the community a place to bring tough problems, explore “crazy” ideas, and admit hard challenges.

An ambitious vision! I certainly couldn’t build all that in one session! But I could be intentional about how to begin.

First rocks and practice

In the book, we talk (in Part II) about changing culture and creating new personal and organizational habits by starting very small, and practicing one small behavior. We also talk (in Part III) about leading a revolution of Culture change by introducing many culture hacks at once in a big meeting.

This community-launch moment fell somewhere in between. The participants in that first session were people with much experience in building org Cultures that welcome elephants and create ownership. For that reason, I knew that I could focus on building a light container with tools that make space for those behaviors.

Because the purpose of this group is community, I knew I wanted to establish opportunities to speak and collaborate as a whole group and in smaller groups. For this first session, connection would be more important than output or outcomes.

For myself, I trusted that my words would be welcoming, my questions open and inviting. I didn’t worry so much about that. However, I also knew that when I get nervous I can talk too much, which fails to create the space I so wanted—the space others could enter. I would need to prepare in order to design time and space, along with clear prompts, to encourage a small group of strangers (to each other) to participate.

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With those three goals in mind—a light container that encourages elephants and ownership, a structure that fosters connection, and a design and script that invites participation—I prepped a Miro board.

• People are more likely to participate in a meeting if they use their voices in the first five minutes. So I designed a simple introduction.

• One of our five critical culture hacks is to cocreate working agreements—clear expectations for how we will behave and support one another (and hold each other accountable, but for this group that goal felt too advanced). I provided a starter set, and we adjusted together.

• To further foster connection, I provided a framework for sharing with each other some current context—without asking anyone to reveal too much so we could build psychological safety slowly.

• The next activity was done in pairs, so that the humans could participate more and dig in a little deeper.

• The next activity provided a little bit of solo thinking time, because I wanted people to know sessions can include space for quiet thinkers.

• Finally, I provided a simple structured way to provide me with feedback (a Return on Time Invested scale with space for suggestions), because I wanted to ensure this community establishes a culture of feedback. (And because I want feedback!)

Next practice

By combining all those practices and hacks, I made an enjoyable meeting (according to the feedback). But it’s not a culture yet.

It’s only through continued practice, and evolving practice, that we build a Culture. And, at this point, we’re not even yet a group such that we can have a Culture. If the same humans return again and again, then we’ll start building Culture. As the group grows, every human in it will contribute to the evolving Culture, through their practice, through their suggested adjustments to the system, through the stories they help each other write.

Since it’s a community about practicing Culture, I have high hopes for ability to build something great. And to keep reflecting on the Culture of the community, even as the community helps each other influence the other org Cultures we’re a part of.

We’ll see what happens next!

Join us!

Both Ronica and Christine are running Practice Makes Culture community practice sessions — some virtually, some in person.

For more information or to join an upcoming session, please reach out on LinkedIn:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronicaroth/

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinelh/

—

Foreword to “Practice Makes Culture” — by Dayton Semerjian

Over the past 25 years, I have been a student and leader of large-scale enterprise transformations in both the technology and financial services industries across multiple transformation themes: profitable growth acceleration, customer experience, employee experience, operational excellence, digital adoption (Cloud, SaaS, Agile, AI). Along the way, I have intentionally identified and curated what I believed were some of the finest frameworks, methods, and team members which directly contributed to each program’s success from places like Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, Stanford Business School, McKinsey Institute, Bain & Company, and from industry and company advisory boards.

I met Christine Hudson over a decade ago after her company, Rally Software was acquired by CA Technologies and her team led CA’s product development transformation to AGILE which I participated in as a senior executive at CA. During that time, I immediately recognized two things; first Christine’s methods in working with groups were remarkable, and second that she was remarkable. Since that time, I have continued to work side-by-side with her and her team in major transformation programs that I have led, all of which have been successful as measured by initial program goals, key performance indicators and external benchmarks.

One of the challenges we frequently ran into was scaling. She and her team of facilitators couldn’t be everywhere at once, and moreover what she was teaching and how she taught it, needed to become new core competencies embedded in enterprise management systems and leadership teams. At its essence, she was leading her own transformation of modern management methods within the broader context of enterprise business transformation, but at the time, I didn’t have the language to identify what was occurring.

During our many conversations, I would challenge her to figure out how codify her methods and “catch lightning in a bottle” as I phrased it, to solve the scaling problem and teach others en masse. Inside, I wasn’t completely convinced she could because I couldn’t separate the methods from the master and resigned myself to the fact that she was a “unicorn” — and at least she was on my team.

When Christine shared with me that she was writing a book to share her methods, my first question what, “what is your ambition and to whom are you targeting?” My direct experience with her approach and methods provides evidence that they work at all levels beginning with small teams challenged to do great things, all the way up to executive teams challenged to do great things.

For me, what makes her work special, or the “lightning in the bottle” that she possesses, lives at the intersection of trust, safety, creativity, ownership, speed and interpersonal joy that build high performance teams which deliver consistent breakthrough outcomes previously unimaginable.

This book is required reading and a must have for leaders, at any level of an organization, who seek to accomplish great things through teams of human beings enjoy every moment doing so.

Dayton Semerjian

Former Chief Customer Care Officer and Managing Director, LPL Financial.

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I gave a local talk recently, previewing “Practice Makes Culture,” and during the Q&A a colleague asked me for my “origin story” for the book. He clarified: What experiences led you to understand culture as critical to success, and great culture as something people in an organization can build?

I usually trace the origins to my time at Rally Software (and that’s another post), but because I worked with this particular colleague over 25 years ago at a different startup, I found myself reflecting on that earlier experience, at Exactis.com.

I joined the company in 1998 as it was rebranding from Mercury Mail to Infobeat; we sent customizable email news and information to 1.4 million subscribers in a free service supported by advertising revenue. For me, the tech writing position and the product’s news tie-in felt like a nice bridge from my journalism career. Joining a Denver tech start-up early in the dot-com bubble was simply fun.

That “fun,” for me, was a manifestation of what I experienced as a great culture. (Fuzzy memory warning: This timeline might wobble and people who were there might need to squint to see the details, but this is how I remember it all now.) I recall a flat hierarchy in which leaders provided strategic vision and the environment and support we needed to design solutions and deliver for our customers. I remember collaborative and creative design sessions. Especially as we shifted the company to focus on consumer data and marketing and hurtled toward an IPO as Exactis.com, it felt like we were all pulling together toward shared goals. I remember a senior engineer, Scott, often borrowing a line from a local fast food chain to end design and architecture meetings with an understated “We’re gonna be big.” Emphasis on a broad “we.”

To support reaching those goals with an ever-growing staff, we started adopting some of the early practices of proto-agile. I remember JAD (joint application development) sessions that brought business and technology teams together to set goals and design solutions. Those big, inclusive, multi-day meetings showed me how, with good facilitation, a large group can create better outcomes, welcome system and room elephants, foster a sense of ownership, and facilitate a culture of openness, collaboration, and customer-centricity. (Those JAD sessions are also where I learned facilitation skills and developed into a business analyst.)

We continued welcoming elephants, creating ownership, and facilitating practice through cross-functional teams that put “business” people on “tech” teams (that was how we thought about it at the time). The whole place buzzed with creative energy.

The culture we built helped tremendously as we navigated the volatility of the dot-com boom and bust. When we were growing like crazy, getting acquired as a tech darling, and trying to meet the ambitious data and marketing goals of bigger and bigger clients, we had the psychological safety to have hard conversations about priorities and to co-create new processes that could organize the chaos. When the bubble burst—when our value declined by 97% and a new, second acquirer announced a graduated set of layoffs to ultimately close our Denver headquarters—we could organize ourselves and our business operating system to do more with less while continuing to care about our customers and each other (welcoming emotional elephants).

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For me, that heady journey ended in 2002. My next role followed an Exactis colleague to another company, where I learned and facilitated agile practices and culture more explicitly. In the next years, I continued to champion culture-changing meetings, radical collaboration across silos, a shared sense of ownership, and more.

I didn’t have any of that language back in the early-aughts. Yet I certainly saw the impact of a well-nurtured organizational culture—on bottom-line business results, and also on how well a group of humans can support each other through difficult market shifts and even through the effective end of the organization. That culture created lasting bonds, and I remain good friends with some Exactis “frolleagues” to this day.

(A fun coda to this story: At the end of the meetup that sparked this reflection, I raffled off an advance copy of “Practice Makes Culture.” The winner also had worked at Mercury Mail! We didn’t quite remember each other, but we remembered many of the same colleagues.)

My signed advance copy of Practice Makes Culture arrived last week, and I’ve been sitting with it since. Not because I needed to be convinced of anything in it. I already knew it worked. I lived it before it had a name.

The Phone Call

I was already with the bank, but I had recently transferred out of IT. Then our CIO died unexpectedly, and I was asked to step in on an interim basis while leadership made plans to replace his role.

Here’s the part I don’t usually say out loud: I had spent years actively avoiding leadership roles. At previous organizations, HR and leaders above me sent me to leadership training and often told me I was a “natural born leader” and tried to push me toward management. I always said no. I was content as an individual contributor, or “leading” from inside project management roles where I could drive outcomes without being the one someone else’s livelihood rested on. Being responsible for whether another person succeeded or failed was never the type of responsibility I wanted.

Then the choice wasn’t really a choice anymore. I had to step up or potentially hurt a team I cared deeply for. There was no leadership training for the role I was stepping into. There was no transition plan. I was trying to help hold space for a team to grieve someone they’d worked alongside for years, keep the department running, address new technology issues and needs—all while still doing my other role and grieving myself.

There was real potential within the team. There was also a habit, baked into the culture long before I arrived, of handling hard things as side conversations instead of bringing them into the room. People were talking around problems instead of through them. Grief only made that harder. I knew new leadership would not tolerate that behavior for long. Something needed to change and change quickly.

My first call was to Christine Hudson. I’ve worked with and known her for over 20 years, through every version of my career, and she has never once told me something was impossible. She just asks better questions than the ones I was asking myself.

What the Book Calls “Elephants”

The book has a name for what my team was avoiding: elephants. The emotional, uncomfortable, unspoken stuff that sits in the middle of every team meeting while everyone very carefully talks around it. The things that create a toxic environment.

Naming them was the first real shift. Once the team had language and permission to bring the difficult thing into the room instead of the hallway, the room changed. We built small rituals around it: a weekly practice where people appreciated each other out loud, which grew into a habit the operations team eventually adopted too, and eventually this practice went bank-wide. Small, repeatable, unglamorous. Exactly the point.

What It Actually Produced

I want to be specific here, because “culture work” often gets dismissed as soft, but I don’t find the results bear that out.

Using these methods over the past 3 years, my team drove a 97% reduction in service failures. We delivered 90% of our technology strategy plan 18 months ahead of schedule, which meant we got to go back and raise our own bar early. We redesigned our audit and exam processes from the ground up, and our most recent regulatory exam came back with zero material findings and commendations from the lead IT examiner.

None of that happened because we got smarter overnight. It happened because the team’s whole orientation shifted, from reactive and fear-based to proactive, customer-focused, and growth-minded. That shift is the actual product. The metrics are just how it shows up on paper.

Leading Humans (and Technology Transformation)

While working with the team, I realized I wanted to help lead the team—and the bank—through the next years. I could see great technology change coming and I wanted to help this wonderful organization and team through the process. I went through the formal interview process, and was selected for the CIO role. Me–the person who’d spent years avoiding this exact kind of responsibility—was now fully in it by choice this time. But the work that mattered most had already started months before that, in the interim, with a team that needed to grieve and rebuild at the same time.

Back to the Book

There is a short story about my team in the book Practice Makes Culture. I’m proud to be a part of this book, to help share what worked. Most culture books stop at the “why,” or are light on the “how.” This one is closer to a field manual. It doesn’t ask you to declare a new culture and hope it sticks. It shows you how to turn the meetings you’re already running into the place where culture actually gets built, one small, repeated practice at a time.

If you’re leading a team without a script right now, especially if you’re new to the seat and doing it without much outside support, I don’t think there’s a better place to start.

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Congratulations, Christine. Every leader who reads this book is getting the version of you that my team and I got that first week and more. I hope they know how lucky that makes them.

—

Thank you to our first amazing guest post, Panna Royal. You are an amazing human, and an amazing leader. Thank you for helping others practice.

—

photo by Sol Ponce via unsplash.com

Many amazing humans share that they feel like they “can’t keep up” when it comes to AI. Frankly, when technology is changing this drastically and quickly, it’s easy to feel that way—but you don’t have to. In this post, you’ll find practical steps that help you gain skills and feel better.

It helps to realize that you can only start from where you are, and it helps to practice a little bit every single day. Of course, what and how you practice matters.

If you’re really new to playing with generative AI, start simple and with curiosity. Head to the earlier Practice Makes Culture post Getting Started with genAI in Daily Practice for fun and easy tips and examples, then come back.

Once you’ve started using genAI even just a little, you’ll likely start thinking about how to amplify your own learning, or improve your own productivity. We’ve heard so much hype about productivity! You might be one of the (thousands of?) people who has been asked to “10x” yourself.

As you consider using AI to automate different tasks, workflows, and more, it helps to think about what kind of system or problem space the task sits in, and then explore current AI capabilities and risk relative to AI autonomy and that space:

• What kind of problem space am I working with? Some “problems” have a known answer; some you have to figure out by experimenting. Knowing which is which tells you whether to look something up or run a small test. We’ll draw on the Cynefin framework to help you answer this question.

• How much autonomy might I want to give AI in this case? There’s a real difference between asking a chatbot a question and turning an agent loose to act on its own. We’ll draw on a post from Every: the “Eight Levels of AI Adoption“ to help choose a level of autonomy of AI to play with in a given problem space.

• How much does it matter if something goes wrong? Some mistakes cost you thirty seconds; some are much more serious. Some simple risk analysis can help you decide how much to let AI run unsupervised, and so what type of AI to practice with, next. We’ll draw on a paper I co-authored (with some seriously brilliant humans): Leading the Human-AI Revolution: Strategic Leadership Guidance for Effective Human-AI Interactions for Development and Operations of Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems.

Let’s examine question each in turn.

What kind of problem space am I working with?

We humans often assume there’s something that we can do next that’s “best” or “right”---or we wish there was. Unfortunately, there rarely is a “best” thing to do! Often there are several known “good” things to do, but sometimes even experts won’t know what to do until they try something.

There’s a lovely little “sensemaking” framework or tool called Cynefin (Welsh, pronounced “kuh-NEV-in”). It provides a way of sorting the kind of situation we find ourselves in, and what kind of response is called for in that type of situation.

The Cynefin framework describes four kinds of situations. Perhaps the easiest way to tell them apart is a common question Cynefin practitioners frequently lean on: “could an expert tell you a good way forward in advance, if you gave them enough information?”

The answer changes depending on the situation type:

Clear (sometimes previously called “obvious” or “simple”): Cause and effect are plain to everyone, and a known or best practice reliably works. Processing an expense report against the policy. Resetting a password. Onboarding a new hire against a standard checklist. You don’t need to analyze; you recognize the situation and apply a known recipe. Of course, even “best practices” need to be revisited. A process that has worked for years can quietly lose efficacy when context shifts.

Complicated: There are several knowable good answers, and an expert can find them through analysis — it’s just not obvious, and reasonable experts might choose different routes. Building next year’s budget. Designing the architecture for a new platform. Choosing the team’s benefits plan. The cause-and-effect is knowable; you bring in expertise, analyze, and weigh the trade-offs. These are “good” practices — expert judgment choosing among sound options.

Complex: In this situation, experts can’t tell you in advance which approach will work, no matter how much information you give them—because what works depends on interactions that haven’t happened yet. You can only see what worked in hindsight. Changing how a team collaborates. Launching into a market whose demand you don’t yet understand. Figuring out whether a new AI tool actually fits your real workflow. “Emergent” practices are needed: running small, safe-to-fail experiments, amplifying what works, dampening what doesn’t, and letting the way forward emerge. Think prototypes and design thinking.

Chaotic: Cause and effect aren’t just hard to see — the situation you’re in is genuinely unstable, and there’s no time to analyze. A live outage with an unknown cause. A breaking crisis demanding a response now. The job isn’t to find the optimal answer; it’s to act, establish some stability, and only then make sense of what happened. A “novel” practice might be needed here—do something nobody’s tried yet. The goal is to get out of chaos and back onto firmer ground quickly.

Disorder (sometimes called confusion): When you don’t yet know which of the four (other) situations you find yourself in. Unfortunately, a funny thing about us humans is that when we can’t tell what the situation we’re in, we default to the kind of problem-solving we’re most comfortable with. The seasoned analyst treats everything as complicated and reaches for a study. The startup founder treats everything as complex and starts experimenting. The single most common, most expensive “default” is treating complex problem spaces as merely complicated. Naming out loud “I wonder which situation this is” or “I don’t know which situation we’re in, yet” can help.

It’s important to recognize that situations or problems can change types—a task that was complex last quarter can become clear once a pattern stabilizes–and that a typical, real-world problem almost always has parts in different domains at the same time.

Exploring potential uses of AI with Cynefin doesn’t just help with how we approach using AI, it can help with how we feel about it! Applying Cynefin can take a surprising amount of pressure off you and the humans around you. Without it, even brilliant humans go hunting for a roadmap, looking for “good” or even “best” practices and solutions… when that data just isn’t available and that’s not the right approach—not with how rapidly technologies, products, and options are changing, much less how they might interact with your data, your workflows, your environment…and humans and organizational systems.

How much autonomy might I want to give AI in this case?

Once you know the problem space you’re working in, or where you might want to experiment, the next question might be what sort of AI to practice or experiment with. There’s a lovely blog post by Mike Taylor and Laura Entis (of Every) called “Eight Levels of AI Adoption” (linked previously) that simplifies AI autonomy levels in an approachable way:

1. Chatbot: you ask, it answers.

2. Copilot: AI sits inside your file and works alongside you.

3. Agent: you describe a task, it executes step by step, checking in for approval.

4. Autopilot: you skip the approvals, let it run, and review the result.

5. Workflows: you build a repeatable harness around the agent so its output meets your standard reliably.

6. Assistant: the agent works proactively in the background, unprompted.

7. Multi-agent: you’re managing several long-running agents at once, like a small team.

8. Orchestrator: a manager agent runs a team of sub-agents on your behalf.

The most important thing the authors note about these “levels” is that higher is not better. The most sophisticated users seem to operate on several levels at once, picking an appropriate level for each task at hand.

For example, a task that’s become clear, with a known recipe, inexpensive to check is one you might be able to practice taking up to higher levels. A task that’s still genuinely complex is perhaps one to keep low—stay at chatbot or copilot, keep yourself in the loop, and treat each run as an experiment.

However, it’s worth drilling into the third question before landing on a level of autonomy:

How much does it matter if something goes wrong?

That’s a question my co-authors and I dug into in Leading the Human-AI Revolution (with Suzette Johnson, Robin Yeman, Steve Wilson, and Kim Harrison). We were writing about safety-critical, cyber physical systems and products—self-driving cars, surgical assistants, factory robots that work alongside humans… yet the core lens we used in the paper applies to everyday AI autonomy levels, too: Understanding where the next thing you’re contemplating experimenting with or practicing sits in terms of agency and risk. Where a task lands can help you decide how much human oversight it likely warrants, regardless of how capable the technology has become. Here are the four risk/agency quadrants, each with an example from everyday work:

• Low risk, low agency
  Example: An AI copilot that helps you label your emails or sort them into folders. You tell it what to do, it does it.

• Low risk, high agency
  Example: An AI agent that purchases needed office supplies for your organization (up to a certain dollar amount).

• High risk, low agency
  An AI system or agent that surfaces, evaluates, and advises on possible options for revamping an organizational workflow. Humans make the decisions. High risk because there may be tacit knowledge that humans bring to the table, so keep the agency level at “advise.”

• High risk, high agency
  An orchestrator (level 8) that automatically responds to communications for you, including calendar requests, emails, and texts. (If you try this practice, you’ll definitely want thoughtful guardrails to help avoid getting communications wrong with other leaders, other organizations, your customers, your board, your partner or spouse, your kids, and more.)

Putting the questions together: Choose what and how to practice (with AI) next

1. Pick a task. Be specific and concrete: “draft this week’s client update” or “automatically block my calendar after I get back from vacation with a couple of hours for me to catch up.”

2. Identify the problem space: Clear, complicated, or complex? Or can you tell yet? If not, it’s “disorder.” Choose what you’ll practice as a next step, implement as a response, or initiate as an experiment based on the space.

3. Choose an initial level of AI autonomy or automation for the task. (Q&A, Co-pilot, agent, etc.)

4. Weigh the risk: How costly might it be if the AI system makes a mistake? Adjust the autonomy level based on the risk.

5. Try it! If you don’t know how to get started with a co-pilot, agent, orchestrator, or anything else… guess what you can do? Ask one of the thoughtful AI chatbots you have available to you for step by step instructions. :)

Finally, invite someone else to practice with you. Especially your team. If you don’t practice, your team may not have the inspiration—or the safety—to practice themselves. Leaders who model AI learning and usage are much more likely to have team members using it well, too. And giving them these tools will help you all stop feeling like you’re behind… and that makes it even easier to keep moving forward together, to keep practicing!

Remember, it’s not that you’re behind. You’re working on a genuinely complex set of problems, so experimenting isn’t a sign you haven’t figured things out yet—it’s the right kind of response for the kind of situation you’re in.

How will you experiment—or practice—with AI today?

Warning: This post includes some of my own personal hippie woo-woo lens. Stick with me for an idea about how to envision a balanced and dynamic organizational culture.

This month I attended a restorative and regenerative women’s retreat on beautiful land with a master guide. Through morning practices, facilitated circles, guided journeys in the wilderness, rituals, and shared meals, eight women leaned into their feminine energy specifically. We each identified and crossed a significant threshold, and then entered a regenerative space to dream what we want to attract and create next. The invitation to harness specifically our feminine sides meant that we didn’t set concrete goals and develop plans (masculine energy). Instead, we leveraged intuition and reflection to think holistically and invite depth. For me, personally, it was a magical weekend perfectly timed to support me through a time of transition into a new creativity.

And, coming as it did in the lull while our forthcoming book Practice Makes Culture is in production, all that focus on calling forth feminine energy inspired an idea.

What if a group of women from an organization came together in a workshop—maybe even a retreat in a beautiful place—to channel feminine energy and from that place imagine changes to their organizational culture? I suspect the resulting vision would describe an org culture that better balances what Taoism and other ancient traditions would describe as feminine and masculine characteristics—the yin and the yang—to create an environment that is healthier and more productive for all.

(Perhaps at this moment you are thinking why just women? Men can envision that too! Indeed you could gather a mixed-gender group of humans for the same exercise. However, in my experience when women come together they can generate a particular type of creative power that especially serves the envisioning I’m proposing. It’s that creative power I’m curious to engage.)

The Yin and Yang of Organizations

The ancient Chinese concept of yin and yang describes the dynamic play of opposite but complementary cosmic forces that interact, interconnect, support and perpetuate each other. Yang’s masculinity is active doing energy. Yin’s feminity is receptive being energy. The Taoist yin-yang symbol (Taijitu) is a reminder to seek health and wholeness through the dynamic dance between the two.

I’ll note here that I have often found the labels “masculine” and “feminine” to be off-putting, and perhaps even just “off.” More useful: As humans, we all have the ability to be active and driving and we all value structure and order. As humans, we all are intuitive and feeling and we can all think holistically.

Balance is essential. Too much yang without yin results in rigid, authoritarian behavior; too much yin without yang results in a loss of boundaries and direction. Both polarities live in every person, and the seed of each is always present in the other. I believe the same is true for groups of humans, like companies, community groups, non-profits.

In my experience, most Western organizational Cultures tend to be heavy on the yang and light on the yin. The result can be an environment that encourages logic and data, independent action and discipline while discouraging intuition, creativity, connected effort and holistic thinking. No blame there; it’s simply the way we’ve evolved, especially within capitalist systems.

Contemporary Jungian scholarship describes organizations that value both sets of traits — the rational and emotional, assertive and receptive — as fostering innovation, wellbeing, and long-term sustainability.

Inviting More Yin

When I invite leaders to envision an evolved organizational culture, we often paint literal pictures—depicting new ways humans come together, interact and collaborate. We might write a “destination postcard” — a message from our future self describing the way it feels to work here and the results we create a year from now. We write a shared story. Importantly, we create a holistic, positive picture of what the updated culture feels and looks like, rather than a negative picture of what pieces and parts we’ve removed or changed.

In that same spirit, I’m imagining this group of women who have tapped into their intuitive, compassionate, and nurturing side and who then craft a vision of a balanced and dynamic organizational culture.

• Perhaps they describe an annual or quarterly visioning cycle of gathering reflections and crafting a holistic strategy (yin) that flows into a planning cycle of setting measurable objectives and a feature roadmap (yang).

• Perhaps they imagine a culture of results, wherein success metrics are tied to bottom-line results (yang) and are elevated to the level of the whole business (yin).

• Perhaps they imagine an organizational value of clarity and decisiveness (yang) that requires decentralized (yin) and data-driven decision-making (yang) supported by openness to new ideas and information, broad collaboration, and healthy conflict (yin).

In truth, I don’t know what any given group of women would imagine, and that is what is so exciting to me. Especially as a Mount Holyoke College (Seven Sisters) graduate, I know well enough the courageous creativity and brilliance women bring when they are given the space.

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Try it. Gather some women, perhaps for a meeting, a lunch, or even an off-site. Facilitate a conversation about the yin and yang of organizational culture and especially about what yin characteristics would strengthen your current culture to improve results and happiness. Spark the beginnings of a vision for a balanced culture.

Let me know what you imagine!

As a leader, how are you using AI? How about with your team?

I posed that question to a group of amazing leaders last fall in the AI Studio at Grace Hopper Celebration—just before every single leader built their own simple app, using just a GenAI web chat. That short activity was all it took for these amazing humans to be shocked, impressed, inspired, and maybe a little freaked out by AI capabilities. For many, this was the first time they realized the sheer building power that is now available to any human with a web browser. They realized that they, too, could be builders (or return to building/coding, as I have). After the exercise, I asked each person to share what they had learned and built afterwards, with someone who couldn’t attend our session. To pay it forward, to help someone else learn—while reinforcing learning for themselves. And, ideally, to do that sharing with their teams, to encourage their teams to learn and grow, explore and experiment with them.

This post takes you through a similar exercise, and beyond a bit, too.

Getting Started

Let’s get right to it: Open up a browser window and navigate to a GenAI chat interface, either claude.ai or chatgpt.com for this exercise. Important: You don’t need to pay. Start with a free plan.

If you haven’t done this before, don’t kick yourself. The best time to plant this tree was perhaps awhile ago—but the second best time is now.

When you’re set up, logged in, etc, and the system asks what you want to do, enter this text/prompt:

“I want you to write and run a javascript app in an artifact window for me. Please choose a fun option for a visual app that you can write and run this way. Then, go ahead and build it for me. Please provide instructions for how I play with or use the app, and also show me the code you created to make it for me. Please don’t ask me any clarifying questions, just create a fun example of what you can do.”

What app did you get? Try it again with a different GenAI program. This time, try making suggestions for colors, options in the app, visualization methods, and more.

More Practice

If you’ve already started using AI personally or with your team, where are you finding value? Are you using AI in meetings, having the meeting agent catch you up when you’re late or stopped paying attention? Do you ask GenAI to track down basic (or complex) data for you, have it create market/competitor/product/etc reports? Have you automated workflows and document creation? Have you designed and built your own apps to make your work more joyful or help you work on your own growth areas?

A simple powerful practice is to use GenAI to help argue for AND AGAINST a point you’re trying to make. This method can help you critically evaluate a topic, deepening and speeding your learning and understanding. It can also help you check your assumptions. Example prompt for evaluating the planning fallacy:

“Please find a total of six credible peer-reviewed resources, three for and three against the following statement: Humans frequently underestimate the time, cost, and risk of future work if they don’t plan it out in a relatively granular way.”

Ok, you’ll probably want to choose something more fun than that. I mean, large project overrun is super annoying and costly, but not fun. To help your team get started you can definitely go lighter: “Please find a total of four credible peer-reviewed resources, two for and two against the following statement: Ice cream can be part of a balanced breakfast.”

Note: My prompts in this post have plenty of room for improvement. There are hundreds of sites and YouTubers that can help you write great prompts for GenAI. AND you can also ask for help from GenAI itself:

• “Please help me write a great prompt for thinking critically about…”

• “Please ask me three clarifying questions that will help me to deepen my thinking and write a crticial evaluation prompt…”

Time to Practice

There’s no time like the present to get started. AI is rapidly changing how work done within individual roles, the way value is created and flows across teams, and even changing the structure of organizations. And, after you practice, please invite others. Especially invite your team to practice and learn with you. If you don’t practice, your team may not have the inspiration to practice—or the safety. Leaders modeling AI learning and usage are much more likely to have team members using it effectively, too. How will you practice today?

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References and additional reading

+ Vibe Coding by Gene Kim for exercises that take you from zero to vibe coding with agent teams. My first interactions with Claude and ChatGPT writing code for me (as someone who hadn’t coded for well over a decade) are included as a case study in that book.

+ Hyperadaptive: Rewiring the Enterprise to Become AI-Native by Melissa M. Reeve for more on how AI might changing roles, organizational structure and value flow in organizations.

+ Robot-Proof: When Machines Have all the Answers, Build Better People by Vivienne Ming

Over decades of being on, leading, and coaching teams, we have learned that anyone, in any role, can make small changes to their behavior and create a big impact for the whole team.

Here are a few typical complaints we’ve heard over the years.

• Planning meetings get derailed when those two particular humans get into heated battles.

• That one manager regularly strong-arms the team into unrealistic commitments.

• The junior people on the team have stopped offering their thoughts.

• The execs keep talking about “AI transformation,” but they don’t know what that means, and neither do I.

• We all talk over each other all the time. No one listens.

All these situations (and many more) can generate a lot of emotion, like frustration, fear, anger, and stress. (Funny thing about humans: we are not as rational and are more emotional—even at work—than we think we are.) Making it even worse, these dynamics might leave you feeling particularly helpless. These cultural elements are too big for me to change. Does anyone else even see it?!?

The good news is that you can effect changes to the culture of your team, your program, your organization. And you can do it through tiny changes to behavior and language that you plan and practice.

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Faced with a desire for change, we often think in broad strokes and big efforts. We set an intention to behave differently, like “I’m going to encourage civil discussions,” or “I’m going to get over my AI fear.” But such intentions often stay just that: unfulfilled intentions. Just how does one encourage a civil discussion? How do you make yourself do it when the tension is thick? How do you get over a fear? You might take a class or read some articles. But it’s hard to put in the effort when fear will talk you out of it.

It can feel counterintuitive, but what works better to create change—in yourself and in your team culture—are very small actions planned out. Tiny actions. Tiny might feel a little silly, yet tiny is what makes it doable to try—to practice—new behaviors.

To find a tiny action and set yourself up to follow through, we’ve found it so helpful to use a six-step process we call the Practice Makes Culture change loop. The loop captures the way we’ve made behavior changes (and coached others to do so) for years. We tested earlier iterations in talks over the years, and we introduce an updated version in our forthcoming book, Practice Makes Culture: How Welcoming Elephants, Creating Ownership, and Facilitating Daily Practice Transform Organizations.

Pre-order Practice Makes Culture

Leverage the Practice Makes Culture Change Loop

Let us introduce the loop to you.

1. Review your vision for how you wish things were different. Initially this vision might be just a slice. I’d like a team environment of respectful collaboration and collective craftsmanship.

2. Identify one supporting small improvement. Here’s where tiny comes in. What is one little method change, behavior change, or skill upgrade? To start, focus on something you can control about yourself. I’m going to help bring the heat down in design meetings. I read you can do that by stating out loud the behavior you’re seeing.

3. Choose when and where to practice. Be specific about the situation, interaction, or meeting. Choose a day, date, and time—maybe even identify a specific part of a discussion or a particular trigger. In Tuesday’s design meeting, when the conversation gets heated.

4. Make a plan. The more specific your plan, the more likely you are to follow through. You might want to script the words you want to use, or write down a reminder to take a breath first. I’ll state what I see. Likely something like “I hear raised voices and see animated bodies.” I expect that to get people to chill. If it doesn’t, I might follow up with a question like “how is this passion serving our discussion?”

5. Practice. It can take courage to follow through. You can do it!

6. Appreciate and improve. Be sure to claim a #win for setting an intention and following through. Give yourself a star next to your plan. Perhaps appreciate your colleagues for accepting your observation and reacting by bringing down the heat. Back at your desk, evaluate how well that worked and consider what you’d like to try next time. (That sets up your next trip through the loop.)

The Practice Makes Culture change loop is powerful because it helps humans deal with many funny things about humans. It helps you remember to start small (overcoming the tendency to discount small changes), to get specific and have a plan (overcoming our tendency to avoid hard things), to practice (overcoming our tendency to underestimate how much practice we need to improve), and to celebrate wins (so we notice the impact of a small change) and reflect and improve.

Try it out! Use the loop to discover how you can begin to change culture on your team. Let us know how it goes.

You can pre-order “Practice Makes Culture” here: https://itrevolution.com/product/practice-makes-culture/

This post shares the story of a much more elaborate and inclusive visioning process, in which a 10-year-old scaleup company decided it was time for new mission, vision, and values. The executive team decided every employee should contribute.

That year of visioning meant a lot to me, especially because I helped design and facilitate some of it. That year continues to inspire me, because of the leadership team’s belief it was absolutely essential and even self-evident that the whole company should co-create the next vision and because of the way everyone stepped up to participate. I hope this story inspires your next attempts to imagine an amazing future for yourself and your organization, and gives you some new ideas about how to include more humans in the process.

Rapid growth and a completed mission

Rally Software was founded in 2002 by Tim Miller and Ryan Martens. They built the company to be driven by its mission: “Perfecting the Art of Software to create a restorative economy.” The accompanying BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal, from Verne Harnish’s Rockefeller Habits): “Become the default solution and company for excelling at software development.”

The vision was to achieve those aspirations through the sustainable delivery mechanism of a SaaS product and consulting services that supported the relatively new modern methods of Agile and Lean software development.

From the beginning, Tim and Ryan believed a critical success factor for this new company would be a great culture. They built a Lean/Agile organization that fostered transparency, systems thinking, continuous learning, active collaboration, and engaged humans working in strong teams. Tim in particular considered growing a great culture as a primary responsibility in his CEO role. He leaned, in part, on the values they established:

• Maintain a healthy work-life balance

• Create your own reality

• Make and meet commitments

• Support our community and give back

• Theory driven decision making

• Treat people with respect

As an early customer (2004) who joined the company as a coach/trainer in 2006, I can attest that Rally had an awesome culture that helped us succeed with customers and bring Agile beyond the early adopter phase and into the mainstream for software organizations in all kinds of companies.

I remember the day in late 2011 when Ryan announced—in his matter-of-fact style tinged with subtle shared pride and celebration—that we had achieved our original mission. (!!!) Approaching our 10th birthday, it was time to draft a new mission and vision and to update our company values. At that point we were about 350 employees with offices in three states, London, Amsterdam, and Sydney. We were growing fast, in numbers, revenue, and customers. Over the year just ending, subscription and support revenue grew from $19.9 million to $31.1 million, a 56% year-over-year growth rate. We had over 1,000 customers, including 36 of the Fortune 100 companies. I don’t remember whether we all knew it yet, but this purpose and culture re-set was also designed to prepare us for IPO.

Tim and Ryan further announced that every employee in every office would contribute in a year-long process to envision the next evolution of Rally, with a purpose we could all rally around (pun intended) and a culture in which we could all continue to thrive.

Facilitating Whole-Company Co-Creation

With Jean Tabaka as our First Coach and Culture standard-bearer, Rally was a company steeped in the philosophy and techniques of great facilitation. When I look back at our 4-quarter visioning journey, I see a 1-2-4-all facilitation model. When applied to a roomful of people considering a topic, that model helps all types of people contribute and builds a collective response: first each human can think independently (1), then they work in pairs to help each other flesh out their thoughts (2), then pairs combine to form a small group to both expand and converge on a shared set of ideas (4), which are, finally, brought into the whole room to build the superset of responses (all). That process is often followed by one that synthesizes and distills, depending on the ultimate goal.

The Rally Year of Visioning was structured into four parts over four quarters.

Q1 Personal Visioning (1, 2): In a series of facilitated workshops, every employee got a chance to describe for themselves their personal vision. People worked solo and then in pairs. The goal was entirely to help people get grounded in their desires around family, community, career, growth, and more. These visions were not shared (and didn’t even have to be shared in the workshop. They were simply preparation. (The exercise was so powerful that we continued it for every new employee, as part of orientation.)

Q2 Modeling in Small Groups (4): We brought in Todd Siler, an artist and creativity researcher, to facilitated his ‘Think Like a Genius’ workshop, where cross-functional groups of 5–6 people built models using foam, images, straws, and other found materials to express elements of the future Rally. Every employee in every location was included.

Q3 Departments Unpack the Models (all): Everyone had plenty of opportunities to look at all the models. We met within our department teams to discuss and unpack those models, finding the elements we found most important. Each department put images into words, writing draft mission/vision statements and (if I recall correctly) documenting our thoughts and feelings about how we wanted Rally to continue to evolve and become more awesome.

Q4 Launch Mission to Mars (synthesis): We (maybe the 25% of the company who normally attended steering?) had a chance to review all the department contributions and discuss. (My memory here is a bit vague.) Then we chartered a “Mission to Mars” rock: a wonderful team of people—which included a mix of people old and new, from near and far, of different departments and levels—spent a quarter doing the hard work of synthesizing everything into a new mission/vision statement and updated set of values.

The result was pretty great. Of course it couldn’t contain everything we all said we cared about. And, sure, some of us indulged in some nitpicking about it later. Yet I believe everyone liked it. Every human could see themselves in this new mission/vision that conveyed our beliefs, our aspirations, and who we are—including the energy with which we worked together.

At Rally, we believe empowered people who actually want to come to work are essential for solving today’s big, complex problems.

We inspire continuous innovation and collaboration in our customers, helping them empower their people and deliver a factor of four increase in value to their business.

We do this through our world-class software, coaching, and community services. We call it Rallying!

I remember very soon after speaking at a meetup in Omaha. In introducing me and Rally, the sales rep tried out the new words. It felt amazing to have our company introduced by our beliefs and purpose, our “why”.

The Mission to Mars team also suggested updates to our values. They became:

• Balance our lives (I’ve always seen this as a direct result of the personal visioning that helped us all ground in a holistic view of life)

• Create your own reality (doubling-down on the idea that we should discover and pursue what we individually want, because that’s how you design a fulfilling career and life)

• Live Agile (so much nuance there, coming from our deep understanding of that word)

• Cultivate trust & respect (I loved this expansion to shared responsibility for the whole culture at Rally)

Result: Better Business Results (mostly) and Happier Humans

The results of that year were energizing. The experience reinforced our collective belief in our mission and appreciation for what a great place to work Rally was. (In fact, Rally had and continued to win many awards as a “best place to work,” from sources such as Outside Magazine, B-Corp, and ColoradoBiz magazine.

We did indeed continue to grow our business, and we successfully IPOd in April 2013. Culture is not a single silver bullet for business success (nothing is). For other reasons our results later declined such that we needed to be acquired to continue our mission.

Yet, from my own perspective, Rally remained a great place to work, as it grew, as it went public, and even as it got acquired. So many companies struggle to maintain a great culture through growth and change. I believe that year-long collective visioning is a big part of the reason we kept ours going. To this day, Rallyers (wherever they might now work) talk about that company’s amazing culture. I know they are all dandelion seeds, planting bits of that great culture wherever they go.

WOOP it Up

WOOP stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan, and is a easy, fun way to help you create advance plans to address obstacles, making it more likely you’ll follow through on your desired improvement.

Created by Dr. Gabriele Oettingen, the WOOP model is well–researched and frequently used. WOOP is simple enough that it’s been used with kids to help them get to school and pay attention, and powerful enough to help adults change in challenging situations like college kids drinking less alcohol at parties and adults with diabetes changing their diets.

To WOOP it up, simply:

1. Specify a wish, something big but attainable/feasible, ideally within the next few weeks. (Keep your wish description short— about 5 words.)
   Example: I wish to sleep soundly and deeply through the night.
   

2. Now, picture one of your favorite outcomes from achieving your wish. There will likely be many; try to capture a favorite.
   Example: If I sleep soundly, I will feel at full brain power each morning, sharp and ready to learn!
   

3. What might keep you from your wish? Identify obstacles, especially internal obstacles. Are there thoughts, behaviors, or actions you might personally take that would keep you from your wish? List as many as you can think of.
   
   One example obstacle: I love to drink tea, especially in the afternoon as a pick-me-up. But when I do so in the afternoon, it keeps me awake much too long.
   

4. For each obstacle, you’ll also make a plan to handle it. Just thinking ahead makes you more likely to take a helpful path.
   
   Example plan for this particular obstacle: I will buy a caffeine-free herbal infusion, so I can have a delicious hot drink that’s a little reminiscent of tea. In fact, this week when I go grocery shopping, I’ll buy some elderberry infusion packets, and I’ll carry a packet around with me in my pocket. When I’m tempted to have a cup of tea in the afternoon, I’ll pull out that packet and make a cup herbal infusion, instead! And, as a pick me up, I’ll go for a quick walk outside—even two minutes will help wake me up.

Break it Down

In addition to WOOPing it up, we suggest you break it down. You likely have goals that are too big to achieve in a few weeks. That’s cool. We have big goals, too.

For example, many humans, great sleep isn’t something that will happen in a week or two.

Start with a vivid description of your big goal. Write yourself a story about how it will look and feel when you achieve it. You might consider writing about a whole day—how would a whole day be different, from the time you wake up, to the time you go to sleep? How would you know things were different? What behaviors would you notice in yourself and others? What would be different in your environment?

Then, write down some ideas about what it took to get there. What did you need to do? What does a revamped routine look like?

In our example, great sleep more often means I’m more likely to exercise more. I would listen more effectively when my partner, kids, and colleagues are sharing information. I would remember more effectively and learn more quickly. I would feel better! To get there, I’ll need to reduce or remove my caffeine intake in the afternoon. I’ll probably need to eat dinner earlier (experts recommend not eating or drinking ~3 hours before bedtime). And somehow, I’ll need to avoid screen time as late as I usually do — stopping work, tv, computer usage 1-2 hours before bedtime.

Read the story aloud to yourself. What are 3-4 big areas of focus you’ll need to address?

In our example, the timing of caffeine intake, evening meal, and screen viewing were important.

For each of your focus areas, make a list a few VERY small things you can do to improve each one. For example, you might try to move a family mealtime 10 minutes earlier. You might decide to watch a favorite TV program while you work out instead of at night before bed.

Once you have a list of at least 15-20 small things you might do to make tiny steps of progress towards your goal, move on to calendaring.

Make yourself a simple weekly list for the next 13 weeks— and put just one small thing in each week. It helps human brains quite a lot to have specific plans about when (and where and how) you’ll take these small steps.
1. Week of Jan 1: (one small thing)
2. Week of Jan 8: (one small thing)
3. Week of Jan 15: (one small thing)
…
13. Last week of March: one small thing

Once you have your calendar filled with small ways to make progress towards your goal, WOOP it up using your week #1 item. Make plans to remove, address, or handle any obstacles in your way.

This sort of quick, easy, thoughtful effort—where you break it down and WOOP it up—will help you create the habits and improvements that steadily move you towards your goals, making it more likely you’ll achieve your visions, your improvements, your wishes. We can’t wait to hear about your achievements in the coming weeks, quarters, and year.

References and Additional Information

For more on WOOP, check out the helpful website: https://woopmylife.org/

Appreciations

We appreciate all the amazing humans who helped—and our helping—with our forthcoming book “Practice Makes Culture.” It is and has been a big effort for us this year. We could only do this with your help. Thank you again and again!

You can pre-order “Practice Makes Culture” here: https://itrevolution.com/product/practice-makes-culture/

If you haven’t recently received (or given!) genuine appreciation, why is that?

There are a variety of human biases that get in the way, whether you’re leading by position or influence: Humans ignore doing actions that are “too small,” and especially when the benefits are seemingly imperceptible. Humans assume they will do things in the future that they never get to (but continue to believe they will). Humans believe they can tackle much more than their typical capacity leaves time for (leading all of us to be overbooked and so very busy). There are plenty of reasons you might not make a habit of appreciating the considerate actions and behaviors of humans around you.

Yet daily gratitude practices are one of the simplest interventions leaders can use, and simple to start. Delivered well, even small appreciations can increase energy, psychological safety, and connection.

Start with One Small Goal

Many humans benefit from starting with very small goals, to make sure they take action, and get an almost immediate win. What might a goal or intention look like for gratitude?

This MONTH I’m going to write down one behavior, action or language from one of my team members that I especially appreciated.

That’s it. Once you set an intention around your very small first action, you can complete it! Claim your #win, and you might even be inspired to do a bit more!.

Now—for your second month intention, try setting the same very small goal. Keep making your #wins easy enough to obtain that you’re creating a winning streak.

Soon, you’ll be the type of person who has a monthly gratitude practice.

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We appreciate you, amazing readers. We know you’re the type of humans who want to lift up the amazing humans around you. We can’t wait to hear more about your gratitude practice.

Resources on gratitude and appreciation:

More ideas for how to appreciate humans in your office: https://chatgpt.com/share/69277edc-92a0-8000-a141-4e223bf08c3d

https://management30.com/blog/ways-to-practice-gratitude/

Lovely, high-level overviews of a few well-being benefits of appreciation: https://emmons.faculty.ucdavis.edu/gratitude-and-well-being/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190313091929.htm

Research: The Grateful Workplace: A Multilevel Model of Gratitude in Organizations: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307559986_The_Grateful_Workplace_A_Multilevel_Model_of_Gratitude_in_Organizations

Practice Makes Culture is available for pre-order: https://www.amazon.com/Practice-Makes-Culture-Facilitating-Organizations/dp/1966280203/

This month we’re going to talk about practicing a leadership skill that’s so important that it can drastically improve your leadership effectiveness and overall business outcomes. A skill so foundational that it improves your culture, business operating systems, and the hidden stories that keep your organization from succeeding at change efforts. We’ll get right to what it is.

Listen up

That foundational skill is… Listening.

Yep, the humble skill of listening. And active listening, especially.

Active listening is when you listen well enough that you can paraphrase back what the speaker was conveying, using some of their own language, position, and emotion. With active listening, you also check for understanding: “Did I get that right?” or “What did I miss?”

I hear you, but I’m not listening.

Often humans think we’re listening when what we’re doing is hearing. Hearing is when sounds go in our ears. Listening implies cognitive processing and some synthesis, interpretation.

Humans aren’t actually great at listening and remembering; initially we are typically able to relate back about half of the information we’ve recently heard. Longer term, we are able to retain only about 25%.

The human problem with listening is not actually a new problem, it’s just part of being human. Studies from the last hundred years or so show this behavior. And yet many of us genuinely believe that we are pretty good listeners—or at least above average.

Active listening has been shown to help increase retention, increase understanding, and build trust. So, why don’t we use it?

A few funny things about humans

We’ve observed (and studied) and found that there are a combination of factors related to why so many of us don’t actively listen, or practice improving our active listening skills:

1. Most people believe they are above-average listeners, so why practice to improve?

2. Practicing active listening is simple, but it’s effortful.

3. Practicing active listening seems like such a small thing, so basic. Humans often don’t practice the small things.

The first one seems intuitive. If I’m good at this, I don’t need to practice. Similarly, we’ve noticed that most people just aren’t aware of the studies, of the general human problem of a low information retention rate when passively hearing. Why practice something if you already think you’re good at it and you don’t think it’s a problem?

The second factor is a function of how our brains work. You can think of it as if we have two different response systems at play: our more intuitive and habitual quick response– so-called “fast thinking”—and the second “slow thinking” that is more effortful. Slow thinking is more costly in terms of calories. Until we practice active listening such that it becomes a habit, we’re literally working harder. For more on this topic and lots of interesting and funny things about humans, please check out the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman.

The third factor reflects another curious response we’ve often observed and studied as leaders, coaches, and consulting partners over the years: When the perceived value of an individual change step is too low, we just don’t do it. We bet you’ve heard these excellent small-improvement suggestions, that so many humans just don’t do:

• If you want to get in shape, park a few extra spots back at the grocery store or take the flight of stairs instead of the elevator.

• If you want to save money, skip the daily latte at the coffee shop and make your own cup of coffee.

Active listening simply feels like too small a thing to be worth the effort.

If you are willing to test the assumption that you’re already a pretty good listener and willing to practice a small effort that leads up to big change, you can make some great strides in leadership effectiveness and overall business results. Let’s talk about how you can practice.

How to add active listening to an interaction

Hint: you don’t have to tell people you’re doing it. For example, you don’t have to start the next conversation with “Hey, do you have a minute, I’m going to practice active listening with you?” Though we’re sure your colleague, friend, or partner would be vaguely amused.

Instead, just try practicing active listening in a normal conversation. Hang out, just like you usually do, and listen to the words a bit more intently. Try to get a good enough grasp of the situation such that you can share it back. You want to collect their words, their interpretation, their feelings. You’re going to summarize and share their information back with them, using some of their words and language. Then, make sure you didn’t add too much of your own story, or miss anything important.

For example, after your colleague goes on about how “frustrated” they are that the Filament project is delayed, and why, when they’re done you could just say something like “oh gosh, so wait, the Filament project is going to be delayed because of quality issues with the filament, again? And you think that’s because of the Filament stretching machine, but you don’t know where the issue is yet? I can see how you would be frustrated. Wait, was there another cause of delay in there I missed?”

Ok, so you’re probably not talking about Filament machines. But you get the picture. It’s not rocket science. However, we’ll invite our rocket science friends and family to provide an example, next time.

How to add active listening to a meeting (stealth mode)

You can add active listening to any meeting you’re participating in. Just do what you did for the interaction (as just discussed) each time someone provides information during the meeting:

1) Listen intently
2) Summarize and paraphrase
3) Check for understanding

If you’re stealthily practicing, you might want to do the summarizing as notes you take instead of out loud. Because it will probably be pretty weird for you to suddenly start summarizing each person’s update right after they give it if that’s not the norm. That wouldn’t be stealth mode.

As you make written notes and a summary in stealth, you might find you now have questions you want to ask, because you’re listening a little more deeply. Always remember to check for understanding! Wait, Jim… I think I heard you say that Application A has to wait on the API from Platform Z? But I thought we were moving App A to Platform X! What did I miss?

How to add active listening to a meeting (non-stealth)

You probably need to be running the meeting to do this one. So, pick a meeting you own or run.

And, you can explain some of what we’ve written in this post, that you are working on active listening because it’s supposed to be good for the business and leadership skills in general.

“Hey, we’re going to do this active listening thing I’ve been working on because it’s supposed to be helpful in lots of weird and surprising ways. What’s going to happen is, after each person gives an update, someone else is going to summarize what they shared, and then check to see if they got it right, what they missed. I’ll do the first one as an example. After that, I’ll pick the person to summarize after each readout.”

Provide a little air cover for people. Tell them that it might be harder than they think, because it is a skill we just haven’t used as much as we perhaps think we have. Give space and grace for people to get it wrong, then just do it. After each person presents, have someone else attempt to summarize and check for understanding. Don’t choose the person to summarize until after the person is done presenting. This makes it more lively. AND tiring! Everyone has to actively listen the whooooole time. The first time, most people can’t. They literally zone out and the presenter has to go again. It’s ok. It’s practice time. Keep it easy and fun, and/but reinforce the actual practice.

That’s it. Appreciate people trying it with you! Do it again tomorrow, or next week.

If you really love this exercise, and you want to get deeper into systems understanding and information retention, you can ask people to present and take questions on each other’s information. Teaching information is a great way to improve understanding and retention.

Expected Benefits

When you practice active listening, pretty quickly you will likely see:

• Improved systems understanding: more thorough understanding your business system levers, issues, and opportunities

• People around you feeling understood, feeling “seen” and “heard”

• Increased leadership presence and trust, even if you’re leading by influence

These are things that most leaders want to improve—and rightfully so. Studies show these three things are often important in effective leadership, in better outcomes, and in happier, more engaged humans in and around your organization.

We’ve seen that these are critical to facilitative leadership, great results, and Welcoming Elephants of all three types, one of the critical focus areas for creating successful, sustaining change in an organization.

Please let us know how it goes!

Our book is now available for pre-order: Practice Makes Culture: How Welcoming Elephants, Creating Ownership, and Facilitating Daily Practice Transform Organizations

We would be honored to have your pre-order support: https://itrevolution.com/product/practice-makes-culture/

References and further reading

• More on funny things about humans, and the Type 1 and Type 2 systems thinking our brain uses: Kahneman, Daniel. (2013) Thinking, Fast and Slow. https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555#

• More on active listening and how to practice: What is Active Listening? HBR. https://hbr.org/2024/01/what-is-active-listening

• Old studies in listening: Rankin, P.T. (1926). The measurement of the ability to understand spoken language. Dissertation Abstracts, 12, 847-848. An early study, suggesting that people retain only about 25% of what they hear. https://www.google.com/books/edition/THE_MEASUREMENT_OF_THE_ABILITY_TO_UNDERS/R9F9nQEACAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

• Old studies in listening: Nichols, R.G., & Stevens, L.A. (1957). Are You Listening? McGraw-Hill. - Found that immediately after listening to someone talk, the average person recalls only about 50% of what was said, dropping to 25% after 48 hours. https://archive.org/stream/areyoulistening00ralp/areyoulistening00ralp_djvu.txt

• More recent studies on working memory and retention: Working Memory Underpins Cognitive Development, Learning, and Education - PMC : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4207727/

• Fun/easy read about how we’re bad at listening but don’t believe it from Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/play-your-way-sane/202108/were-worse-at-listening-than-we-realize

• And the survey info that article attempts to link to, unsuccessfully: https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2015/accenture-research-finds-listening-more-difficult-in-todays-digital-workplace

Whether it was great and you want to hone your high performance or you need to turn things around, we have a practice that serves both: create Working Agreements in one of your regular meetings.

In our first post, we promised some practical, actionable guidance to help you create positive everyday change and successful transformations, including ways to Welcome Elephants (3 types: Emo, System, and Room), and to Create Ownership and Facilitate Practice. Often by hacking your meetings. The practice of Working Agreements covers all three.

Working Agreements for meetings set clear expectations that help participants create better short-term and long-term results:

• clarity in desired outcomes for the meeting

• clarity in how the meeting’s desired outcomes lead to longer-term business impact

• clarity in decision-making authority of various humans and departments in the meeting

• clear expectations for behaviors and language, and for how everyone will hold each other accountable to those behaviors and language

• desired positive changes—aspirational skills, behaviors, and language the team is working on practicing, together.

We’ll look at how Working Agreements can help Welcome Elephants, Create Ownership, and Facilitate Daily Practice, then we’ll provide guidance on how to facilitate and create your own.

Welcoming Elephants:

• Emo: Working agreements help address some of the behaviors, language, and habits that are rewarded and tolerated, help humans feel heard, and change people’s perceptions about what’s possible—all of which are so important for the emotional side of change.

• Systems: Agreements provide more clarity into the larger system by repeatedly clarifying not only the desired outcomes, outputs, decisions and authority, but also how these outcomes serve longer-term business goals.

• Room: Working Agreements create an invitation or expectation around when and how difficult information is shared.

Creating Ownership:

Meeting Working Agreements are co-created, pure and simple. Created in the meeting, by all the humans. Agreed to by everyone in the meeting, meaning everyone agrees to hold themselves and each other accountable to the agreements. Everyone owns these agreements and is responsible for upholding them and encouraging others to do so.

Facilitating Practice:

When you create and use Working Agreements in a regular meeting, you are practicing together: using positive peer pressure—often—to create the clarity and positive change you want to see.

Implementing your own Working Agreements

Next we’ll provide guidance for implementing your own working agreements, using an example around creating additional psychological safety—to improve culture and results.

Larger culture change desired: Outcomes-oriented, psychologically safe culture

Psychological safety, aka Safety Culture, when paired with clear desired business outcomes, has been widely and repeatedly shown to deliver better results and more engaged humans—both in our own decades of experience and in research.^{[1] [2]}

Team psychological safety is defined by expert Dr Amy Edmondson as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”

A desire for more psychological safety often sounds like

• “I wish my team felt like they could tell me the hard things.”

• “I’m worried I don’t have the real, up-to-date information I need to make great decisions.”

• “I wish I could get more out of the smart, quiet women on my team. I know they have opinions, but they don’t speak up.”

• “I’m so tired of watermelon projects…everything is reported as green. Until it’s due, and suddenly it’s red.”

Working Agreements that Help Foster Psychological Safety

Direct agreements to create clarity in business outcomes and to share hard information earlier can certainly work well for some teams or groups. However, you may need to start with more basic groundwork for meeting participants. Our experience and research both suggest that you might consider proposing some of the foundational components and behaviors that begin to build safety:

• A purpose for the meeting—a set of clear expectations and outcomes of the meeting, how the work of this collaboration helps serve customers and the business

• Encourage hearing from everyone

• Encourage learning from mistakes with something that makes people laugh

We’ll go through a detailed example leveraging these below.

Meeting selected: Weekly status meeting

A weekly status meeting or update meeting is a frequent starting point for both improving and honing organizational performance. Most humans have or attend one of these. And, interestingly, you can often suggest these agreements for a weekly status meeting whether you run the meeting or not. Lots of people will appreciate the improvement.

It takes time to build real psychological safety, to make it so people believe that they can co-own the meeting and that they can welcome elephants. But it takes almost no time at all to create the first experience that can help people begin to change their belief. It’s simple enough to add to a meeting without taking too much time away from updates. You might find a few wins the first time you introduce working agreements around psychological safety, yet the real wins come with extended practice—another reason to choose a regular meeting.

Think about how you’ll introduce Working Agreements

So, how can you begin to foster an environment in which people feel safe to raise difficult topics, to admit and learn from failure, to have hard conversations?

It helps if someone leads the way with a couple of examples or seed agreements. And, if you’re the one proposing this, It helps to think about how and when you’ll set the stage, and the language you’ll use to introduce working agreements to the meeting.

In this example, we’ll provide clarity in business outcomes ahead of the meeting, and provide a couple of example seed agreements for you to propose to start the exercise in the meeting itself.

Clarity in business outcomes

If you own the meeting, you can add a meeting purpose to the calendar invitation, and ask for improvements on it before or during the meeting.

Your meeting purpose can include clarity in desired meeting outcomes, desired business outcomes, and even start to address elephants. For example:

Purpose: This weekly meeting is for everyone to share important information, issues, and updates, and to learn more about each other’s work, so that we ensure that together we deliver with confidence.

Proposing Seed Agreements in the Meeting

At the beginning of the next meeting, introduce the context and the concept: Everyone, I hope you all notice I made an attempt at capturing a purpose for this meeting. I’d really love your advice on how to improve it. Let’s do a quick pass now, maybe a minute or two. I’ll read it real quick out loud: <read purpose>. What improvements do you suggest? Let’s do a quick round robin. <gather feedback> Thank you. Feel free to offer more suggestions in slack.

Ok, next, I’ve read some practical advice—that seems well supported by research—that it can be helpful for high performing teams to have clear working agreements around hearing from everyone thoughtfully. And to foster an environment where we feel able to have frank conversations. Working agreements are one common way to help us do both of those. Working Agreements are clear, co-created expectations for each other. Based on what I’ve read, I’ve got three to propose to kick off the exercise. And then I’d love for us to edit those, and perhaps propose others, all together. Up for trying this with me? Cool. Thanks.

Here are my three, I’ve put them in our meeting document so everyone can see them:

• Hear from everyone
  I’ve noticed we don’t get to hear from everyone each meeting when it comes to the difficult decisions, and I want us all to help improve our systems, help when there are challenges. So I’d like to ask us all to make sure we hear from each other.

• Ask questions
  It can feel unsafe to contribute ideas or gain clarity if there is an immediate response of counterarguments or defensiveness. If we actively expect each other to ask more questions, it can help remove that immediate reaction of defensiveness. At least that’s my thinking on this one. You all might have a better idea.

• Gently learn from mistakes
  I know sometimes we’ll still react defensively when we get a question, and it helps to have something silly to cut the tension. We need a funny word that allows us to—or encourages us—to regroup and try again. Maybe we should rename this one with an unusual word we can blurt out when we get something wrong, or something goes poorly, and we want ourselves or someone else to try again. How about a food or something? Bananabread?

Ok, time for edits. What do you think about these three? What edits or updates do we need?

Pause deeply when you ask for input. Typically 7 full seconds is about right for the quietest participants to have time to feel like they have space to add their own thoughts.

Invite continued co-creation. What other suggestions do people have? Remember to pause deeply each time. For any suggestions, ask people to make the proposed additions or edits themselves, if possible, typing right into the document.

Expect a bit of debate or discussion. Don’t try to get to perfection. You simply want a starting point of agreements that will help people begin to feel safer to contribute.

Voting on the Agreements

Once you’ve edited to everyone's “good enough for a first pass” satisfaction, ask if you all might try these agreements for a few meetings, maybe three to four weekly meetings, and then revisit.

It’s important that everyone feels like these agreements are good enough to try out, that every single human can currently agree to hold themselves and others accountable to these expectations.

You might say something like:

Ok, let’s take a vote. Simple thumbs up or down, but I’d love for you to vote physically, please, and keep your thumb up for a moment, so everyone can see each other’s thumbs. Here is what we are voting on:

Can these be our working agreements with each other for the next four weekly status meetings—can we agree to hold ourselves, and each other, kindly, to these expectations?

Then ask people to vote thumbs-up or thumbs-down. If you get any down votes, facilitate finding out what adjustments will get everyone to a thumbs-up.

Now you have a starter set of working agreements!

Close this exercise by making sure everyone understands how to (gently) hold each other accountable to these agreements. If anyone notices an agreement being broken, please speak up. It might sound like, “Bananabread! We have created an agreement to hear from everyone, but we only have two minutes left and I haven’t heard from Anna.” We want to remind each other about the agreements. Sometimes we actually might need to update the agreements, for clarity or because it’s just not serving our style. Sound good? That reminder is an invitation for a person or set of people to change their behavior, or for the team to write a better agreement.

Put the working agreements to use, immediately, in the meeting: Hold your weekly status meeting.

After a few meetings, we recommend checking in with the group to learn how well the agreements are helping create the change you want to see. You all will likely update and improve them at that point.

Let us know how it goes!

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Our book is now available for pre-order!
Practice Makes Culture: How Welcoming Elephants, Creating Ownership, and Facilitating Daily Practice Transform Organizations
We would be honored to have your pre-order support: https://itrevolution.com/product/practice-makes-culture/

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References

[1] Dr. Edmonton’s recent paper surveying results across a decade plus of other studies on Psychological Safety and improved results: Edmondson, Amy C. and Bransby, Derrick P., Psychological Safety Comes of Age: Observed Themes in an Established Literature, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 10 (January 2023): 55–78. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=63309

[2] Google famously learned through their Project Aristotle research that their highest-performing teams had in common psychological safety and approximately equal talk time: Duhigg, Charles, What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team: New research reveals surprising truths about why some work groups thrive and others falter, The Work Issue, The New York Times. 2016 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html

—

Our book is now available for pre-order!
Practice Makes Culture: How Welcoming Elephants, Creating Ownership, and Facilitating Daily Practice Transform Organizations
We would be honored to have your pre-order support: https://itrevolution.com/product/practice-makes-culture/

What you practice as a leader and as a leadership team defines—and can redefine—your organizational culture. Your words and behaviors create experiences that shape others’ beliefs and actions, and, ultimately, your results.

We want you to have better business results, with happier humans, working in high-performing teams. We want you to be able to deliver with confidence, steer with clarity, and lead with heart.

And we know you can do it. We’ve led, consulted, facilitated, studied, and advised leaders of teams ranging from 3 to 30, 300, 3000, and larger. In organizations from Fortune 5 enterprises to local government groups, startups, and non-profits. We’ve worked with rapidly scaling 100-person startups and Fortune 500 companies, and with companies in the midst of drastic cost-cutting in slowing markets. We’ve seen leaders in all these cases leverage a handful of practices to drastically change their results, along with the engagement and joy of their humans.

That’s why we started this substack, and that’s why we’ve been writing the forthcoming book Practice Makes Culture, a guide for leaders on how to create better business results with happier humans.

There are some very Human factors keeping too many businesses from getting the results they want, keeping too many change efforts from succeeding: Humans, we don’t like to talk about hard things. We avoid conflict. We make up stories. We often resist even the most positive change if we don’t have a choice about implementing it. We resist things we’re not good at. We hide what we’re not good at and what we don’t know or understand. We aren’t great at estimating complexity and effort. We gauge value in interesting ways. And we tend to think that our decisions are much more rational than they often turn out to be.

To enable and empower the humans in your organization to deal with their own funny human factors, to own their own change, it helps to name the things that need to be addressed, and help bring them front and center. These things are also the subtitle of our book: How Welcoming Elephants, Creating Ownership, and Facilitating Daily Practice Transform Organizations.

There are three types of Elephants to Welcome, the “emotional” elephant dealing with our emotional vs rational decision making; the second “systems” elephant acknowledging that we too often only see and value our own part of the system—to the detriment of understanding and helping change the whole; and the “room” elephant, to create ways to welcome the difficult information and behaviors in the room, hiding in plain sight.

In the book and in our posts here, we’ll provide practical, actionable guidance, some that you can begin using the same day. Each of our suggestions will help you and your team practice together to create new skills, change behaviors, and of course, to welcome elephants, and create a renewed (or new) sense of ownership of the organizational system and changes to it.

For example, we’ll share how you can fix your quarterly business review meetings for rapid positive change. Most leaders start here because the jolt of positive change is an incredible win, like a jump start for the organizational system.

We’ll share how you can update your business operating system with just a few key practices to help make things run more smoothly over time. We’ll share some fixes for all your meetings—the place where culture is so often visible and influenced. And we’ll describe how to create sustaining culture and results change by investing in yourself, and in how you show up, how you facilitate change in yourself and others. Culture change starts with you, and it starts within you.

Subscribe below for monthly guidance on how to create positive results and lasting change, and please invite other leaders to join the conversation, too. We welcome your thoughts, challenges, feedback, and can’t wait to hear about your #wins.

Ready to practice?

Note to our amazing readers: While we have some earlier blogs at our website, http://thewelcomeelephant.co, and you can follow us on LinkedIn for shorter posts (Christine https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinelh/ and Ronica https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronicaroth/), this substack is where we’ll be doing most of our posting related to Practice Makes Culture moving forward. We are moving our newsletter here, too.