My coffee mug says: Discipline is simply remembering what you really want.

"Oooh!" I thought as I painted it up, "Every time I drink coffee from this mug, I'll remember what I really want, and then I'll only do the right things all day." Years later, I enjoy my coffee and chuckle. What I really want. Which me? The me that set goals in January, or the me that baked delicious brownies last night? Brownies go great with coffee.

In the moment when I’m deciding whether to write that next chapter or check my messages, I don't need to remember anything. I’m completely aware of my goals, and I’m still probably going to check those messages. Because even when I remember what the best version of myself "really wants", the right-now version is running the numbers. The numbers come out in favor of LinkedIn. That's business too, and who knows, right?

Those numbers. I have an internal bookie. So do you. (I call mine Harry.) It/Harry works 24/7. Harry has perfect recall of every bet I've ever placed, every return I've ever seen, and every time I've promised myself things would be different. Harry/It evaluates the options in play, then decides which actions are most likely to pay off.

The equation bookies run works something like this:

Internal bookies run this for every choice, constantly. It's also the root equation underlying team prioritization frameworks: effort vs. impact, cost vs. benefit, urgency vs. importance. Those frameworks ask the bookies to show their math.

Unfortunately for a lot of people and teams right now, the math isn't mathing. More teams are feeling overwhelmed, overbooked, and off-track. They’re doing everything "right" and wondering why it feels like a waste of time. To understand why, we need to look at where the bookie gets its data.

Where the bookie gets its odds

Your bookie doesn't calculate probability from first principles. It retrieves it.

Neuroscience calls it the default mode network. It's the brain's background processing system, most active when you're not focused on an immediate external task. Research published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience describes the DMN as specialized for "recall of past events and internal simulation of future events." It replays your history, projects likely futures, and pattern-matches the current situation against your experience. In short, the bookie's odds are pulled from your autobiography.

This is also why the brain is better described as a prediction machine than a reasoning machine. According to predictive processing research, the brain uses past experiences to build a mental model of the world. It then predicts the best course of action based on that model, and only updates the model when something in the environment violates the prediction strongly enough to demand revision. Small violations get explained away. Big ones force an update, but even then, the update is conservative.

The bookie changes its model as little as possible to account for the new data. Karl Friston calls this minimizing prediction error, and it's why deeply held beliefs are so resistant to change even in the face of contradictory evidence. The model protects itself. Your prior experiences shape what you notice, what you treat as a viable option, and what gets dismissed before it reaches conscious evaluation. You don't observe the world and then decide. You predict, act, and update.

I can’t do a pull-up. Yet! I blame it on my bookie.

Here’s one way this equation plays out between Harry and me.

I want to master the pull-up. My vision: I’m running through a field. Ahead, a mighty ancient tree beckons. I answer the call, leaping into the tree’s arms by pulling myself up onto a branch lovingly extended just above my head.

As a woman of a certain age, with a certain amount of heft to my…assets… and minimal upper-body strength, you are correct in assuming that achieving this goal will take some serious discipline.

But ok, whatever. I believe it’s possible. I did the research, and I have a plan.

But my bookie, Harry, is not taking that bet. His math:

Efficiency! The bookie keeps us from frittering minutes on things it doesn’t believe will pan out.

This is what good navigation looks like in a complex environment. You don’t know how things will play out, so you make your best guess with the information you have and move ahead.

Systems thinkers describe complex adaptive systems as environments with multiple interacting agents, shifting conditions, and outcomes that only make sense in hindsight. You can't optimize from first principles because the system is too dynamic to fully model.

We like to think that if we're just smart enough, if we do more research and consult more data sources, we can figure out the "right" thing to do every time. It's why kids truly believe that, if they had bank back in 2010, they would have bought way more bitcoin, Apple stock, and tickets to Prince concerts than their parents did.

But in complex environments, cause and effect are only legible after the fact. (New to this? See Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework for reference.) Good navigation in complexity depends on accurate pattern recognition and the ability to update those patterns fast enough that your next prediction is better than your last.

The brain's prediction machinery handles complexity well when the pace of change matches what our evolution prepared us for. Patterns are largely reliable. Updates are infrequent. The bookie has good data.

The problem we face now at work is that the update cycle can't keep pace with the rate of change. Patterns go stale before the next prediction runs. The bookie is still doing exactly what it's supposed to do, but it struggles when the game and the players keep changing.

The result?

Two failures at once

Prioritization has always been hard. Two compounding factors make it harder now:

The menu exploded.

Optionality expanded faster than our frameworks expect. You can change careers every few years without stigma. You can launch a product, publish a book, or build an audience with tools that didn't exist five years ago. AI compresses the effort required for dozens of tasks that previously took years and specialists. Everything is, theoretically, on the table.

When options are limited — by geography, economics, social role, or plain logistics — the bookie has a short menu to evaluate.

When the menu explodes, the bookie has to evaluate everything. This is exhausting. And it leads to a particularly modern kind of failure: we keep adding commitments because each new option genuinely scores well on the equation in the moment we encounter it. The list grows. Nothing finishes.

And at the same time...

The priors are lying.

The bookie's data has become less reliable. No matter how much computing power you throw at it, bad data will always give you the wrong answer.

The DMN builds predictions from stable, repeated experience. When context shifts faster than the update cycle, those predictions become confidently wrong.

Software teams have spent years using impact/effort matrices to evaluate features. The effort side of that equation is now partially wrong in unpredictable ways: AI collapsed certain costs while leaving coordination overhead, legacy code, and technical debt largely unchanged. The impact side is foggier still because the market is shifting. Will people still pay big bucks for software when they believe they can write their own? The prioritization framework isn't broken. The priors that feed it are.

And at the individual level: when you can't reliably distinguish authentic information from sophisticated fabrication — when the media environment makes your pattern recognition about "what's real" actively untrustworthy — the DMN is retrieving priors from a context that no longer exists. The bookie is quoting odds on a race that's been cancelled.

Complexity scientists call this a turbulent environment: one where volatility has exceeded the system's capacity to adapt through normal pattern recognition. Your brain evolved for complexity. It did not evolve for this rate of change.

Abstract painting of old-timey racing created by newfangled Midjourney. People will hate it because AI made it. Our priors for deciding what’s good assume quality takes time and effort. That’s going to be really tricky going forward.

Three ways to support your bookie through turbulent times

When you're navigating through uncharted territory, there's no way to optimize your route. Instead, the complexity folks seek to reduce the possibility space, establish clear attractors, and navigate with simple rules robust enough to hold under pressure. These are the documented mechanisms by which groups maintain coherent behavior when conditions exceed their prediction capacity.

Given all of this, here are three ways we can adapt these principles to help our bookies out, and make prioritization easier for our teams.

Structural boundaries: Remove options from the environment.

You don't have to weigh options you don't believe exist, and you don't believe in options that your environment makes genuinely unavailable. No brownies in the building means the bookie never runs the brownie calculation. In complexity terms, structural boundaries reduce the possibility space the system has to navigate. Fewer live options means less computation, faster response, and behavior more consistent with intent.

This is why structure beats individual competency for organizational performance. Explicit decision rules, transparent information flows, and predictable meeting schedules remove wasteful guesswork from the queue. The bookie never calculates the odds for a race no one's running.

Skills matter. But skills always fight the menu. Structure your environment to shrink the menu.

A vivid higher good: Set a strong attractor that shifts the default story.

In complex adaptive systems, attractors are persistent pulls that orient a system's movement across varying conditions. Think of the flame to which the moth is drawn. The moth doesn't calculate a route, and a breeze can knock it off course, but the pull keeps reorienting its movement. So while the path may vary, the direction doesn't.

Of course, for the moth, 🔥=☠️. Which is a useful reminder that many of the attractors guiding our course are inherited; they’re set by our prior experiences of reward. My bookie has no prior experience of the thrill I’ll surely feel when I master pull-ups, but brownies! Oh yeah, I know all about good brownies.

Today, the things that signaled job success in the past (climbing the management ladder, building a software product from scratch) exert a powerful pull even when the conditions that made them valuable have changed. You may not be directionless, but you could be orienting toward a flame that no longer signals good things.

This is why naming your higher good explicitly matters, and why personal coaches will say that:
"You need to visualize it. Why do you really want it? What’s that deeper story - do you truly want to write a book, or is there something that you think the book will get you? What will that feel like? Who do you have to be for that to happen? You are that person. Maybe you weren’t before, but now you are. See it! Believe it!”

In the past, I found this advice perverse. It seemed to imply that people who fail just didn't want success hard enough, which is both cruel and nonsensical. Are you saying starving children don't believe in food hard enough? Heck with that.

But by dismissing the idea as a motivational slogan, I was missing the mechanism underneath.

Research published in Frontiers in Psychology found that linking actions to our beliefs about who we are and what matters to us–our identity–sustains behavior change more effectively than goal-setting, because identity operates as a persistent top-down prediction in the brain rather than a target fed into the bookie's calculation. A runner who has genuinely internalized "I'm someone who runs" isn't fighting the calculation every morning. They've changed the prediction model that generates the calculation. Goals are targets you feed into the bookie. Identity is a prior you install in the DMN. One operates inside the calculation. The other changes the calculator.

Andersen’s employee-owners celebrating end-of-year profit sharing. Image: Andersen Construction

At work, this might look like Andersen Construction’s higher good. They seek to be their clients’ “Builder of Choice,” and prioritize actions that make their clients happy to call them again and again. The leadership team at Valdez Ports & Harbors believes they are “Positive Stewards” for everyone working with and for the city. They prioritize actions that ensure people are comfortable, respected, and welcomed at work. At Zingermans, they draft a “Vivid Vision” every few years that tells the story of who they are living into. They prioritize actions that make the story come true.

Your higher good — the value or outcome you're ultimately protecting — works at both the personal and organizational level. Name it clearly, make it concrete, and it stops competing with other preferences. It becomes the attractor: the criterion by which options are admitted to the menu or not.

Navigational heuristics: simple rules for when the menu gets too big to think through

In complex systems, agents don't navigate by running full optimization calculations at every decision point. They follow simple rules that produce coherent behavior without requiring perfect information or central coordination. The classic example is murmuration, where thousands of starlings move in fluid, coordinated waves by following three rules: maintain proximity, avoid collision, and match velocity. No bird leads, and none sees the flock.

Navigational heuristics work the same way for teams. Once you have an attractor and environmental boundaries in place, you can build the pre-decisions that mean the bookies run fewer real-time calculations. Some examples:

• Stop criteria set upfront: We build email reports as long as our users regularly engage with email. If activity shifts to another channel, we stop building email reports.

• Even-over trade-offs made explicit: We protect our profit margin even over opportunities to acquire new clients through discounting.

• Work in progress limits: We never have more than three articles in draft and no more than eight in the queue.

• Red lines that hold when you're tired and the menu is full: Safety first. We don't start a task until conditions are verified safe.

These pre-decisions make choices easier. The rules are simple enough to apply without deliberation, and robust enough to hold when conditions change. Once the higher good is clear, establish heuristics to keep the bookie from reopening settled questions every time something shinier arrives.

Shifting How We Prioritize at Home and Work

My mug is partly right. Knowing what you really want really does matter.

But it's neurologically naive to think we can rely on "remembering" to keep our priorities straight. Once you understand the mechanisms — how the bookie builds its odds, where the priors come from, what shifts the calculation — you can tilt those odds in your favor.

Structural boundaries shrink the menu before the bookie opens for business. A vivid higher good installs a persistent pull that keeps reorienting what the bookie treats as worth betting on. Navigational heuristics mean the bookie never has to run a full calculation on questions you've already settled. All give your bookie better conditions to work in, whether you're trying to master pull-ups or figure out what your team should be building this quarter.

Now, the more challenging implication. Every prioritization framework your organization uses (the impact/effort matrix, the cost/benefit analysis, the urgency/importance quadrant) is formalized bookie logic. These tools emerged as ways to simplify and crystallize the bookie's past outputs into repeatable processes. Which means they have exactly the same failure point: when the environment shifts faster than the priors update, the frameworks produce confident, coherent, wrong answers. Even the best tools fail when fed outdated data.

I’m not suggesting you abandon the tools, but I do think you need to understand what they can and can’t tell you right now. In a stable environment, your impact/effort matrix gives you informed answers. In a turbulent one, it’s a starting point for a conversation about whether the assumptions behind the numbers still hold. The teams navigating well right now hold their priority lists loosely and trust the attractor more than the matrix.

The bookie evolved for complexity. Give it the right conditions, and it's very good at its job. We just shouldn’t expect it to pick the winning strategy when it’s betting on a race it's never seen before.

Quick note: if you’ve followed us for a while, you may remember that we’ve shared 2 of 3 promised articles on Conversations We’re Not Having. Part 3 is delayed because I had more conversations, which made me realize the challenge was both harder and weirder than I believed. I’ll share those stories in article 3, but more noodling is needed.

This article is Part 2 of 3. We began by looking at three common traps that keep conversations stuck.

1. We fail to understand one another.
   Language is a poor approximation of reality, so you can assume there's some misunderstanding in every conversation. (e.g., "Walk the dog, please." "Sure. Oh, now? A long walk? Then, no. You do it!") This becomes a problem, and a trap, when you want to find alignment or tackle complex challenges.

2. We play it too safe.
   We debate the actions of industries and generations, drawing credibility from reports that live "out there." We rarely risk touching on the personal, the practical, or local, where we might be judged and held accountable. While this feels reasonable, it also robs us of agency. We become observers debating the movement of forces beyond our control, and retell stories in which we only appear as the helpless victims of other people's bad choices.

3. We let others determine our options for us.
   This is a natural consequence of the first two traps. The media sets the talking points, and it's easy to start there. The trap: modern news cycles give us so much to talk about that we can spend all our time debating the latest, without ever questioning whether these are the conversations we need to have.

In part 1, I shared examples of how these patterns play out in conversations between individuals. The same patterns play out at scale. Today, we'll see if we can break out of these traps in our conversations about AI.

Six AI Conversations Everyone Is Having

Zoe Scaman is a strategist who works with senior leaders at major companies on emerging technology. She spends her days in the rooms where these conversations happen: keynotes, client away days, boardroom strategy sessions. In her article The Six Loops, she catalogues the six conversations she hears on repeat:

1. Fear: AI will take our jobs. Adapt or die.

2. Hype: AI will solve everything. The singularity is near.

3. Efficiency: We can produce more, faster, and cheaper.

4. Exceptionalism: We're special. AI can't do what we do.

5. Tactical: Here's how to prompt better and optimize your workflow.

6. Minimizing: It's just a tool. Nothing fundamental is changing.

She describes it as a setlist that never changes: the vocabulary gets shinier, but the conversations underneath haven't shifted. Read her piece here.

Here are those conversations placed onto a 5D topic map.

Click to embiggen

• (Time: Far future, Scope: Global change)
  The Fear and Hype conversations paint big, fuzzy pictures out there in the future somewhere. One is highly positive, the other negative.

• (Time: Now, Scope: Tasks)
  The Efficiency & Tactical conversations focus on executing today's tasks differently. The Minimizing conversation suggests that's all there is to it. Tools make tasks go. No need to take the conversation further.

• (Stakeholder: Creative professionals & super smart folks)
  The Exceptionalism conversation says these people have a uniquely valuable and irreplaceable perspective. Oh dear.

As Ms. Scaman points out, it seems that the hive mind is broadcasting these conversations on repeat everywhere. Fair enough. They're interesting conversations. Lots of implications, and maybe for some groups, these are the conversations they need to have.

But for most, they're a trap. The media, the AI companies, and every fresh-faced hustler promising that you can prompt your way to glory want you to focus here. Do you?

It’s like the AI industry has our flashlight, and now they’re projecting these conversations across our cave wall, expecting the rest of us to fixate on the shadow puppets.

What if we stopped staring where they’re pointing and looked around instead?

If you find that circling these loops is doing nothing to quell your existential dread:
Look at all that empty space!

What aren't we talking about?

When your current path leads in circles, it's time to take a new one.

Step back and consider the map, and you'll realize there are infinite possibilities.

And frankly, that's not useful either. Once we recognize the trap, a single different conversation can break the loop. We need to explore just enough to find one or two promising paths; conversations that look like they might lead somewhere good.
(If they don't, we can simply explore some more!)

Let's walk through how the three traps may be at play in the AI discussions and what opens up when we escape these doom loops.

Breaking Trap 1: See what you mean.

We bust out of this one by getting curious. Find out what people mean, and put your new understanding on the map.

When someone says "AI will destroy society," whose society? How will it be destroyed? What about it will be destroyed specifically?
I'd guess that their predictions for my mom, truck drivers, Wall Street bros, and dentists in Nairobi look pretty different, but I can't know until I ask.

Capturing the specific changes people have in mind fills in a lot of territory. Then, you can decide whether your group wants to explore the implications of those changes further.

Once you gain specificity, disagreements often dissolve or transform into something more productive.
For example, let's say you clarify that you're concerned about the prospects for newly minted software engineers. Follow that thread, and you'll soon uncover ideas for individual adaptation, job skill transfers, community support, and institutional change. That's a lot more to work with than you had at the start.

An aside, here's a delightful skills transfer: Using classic opera to sell cars!

Instagram post

Breaking Trap 2: Step gently outside the safety zone.

Several of these loops come securely swaddled in bubble wrap. While the first trap stems from confusion, we step into this one by avoiding discomfort.

The How-To loop, the Minimizing Loop, and the Efficiency Loop are all safe because they carry forward culture norms regarding the virtues of self-improvement, staying current, and increasing productivity.

You're getting more done, it's better, and now you're the in-demand AI expert everyone needs? Wow! Well done, you!

It's tempting to confront this trap by poking at the values (e.g., is doing more faster always a good thing? Really?), but lots of folks will feel personally attacked by this and shut down.

Instead, see what happens when you sway the conversation a few degrees in a new direction.

Take the Minimizing conversation. The assertion: AI is a tool.
That speaks to AI at the scope level of individual tasks. Now nudge it a bit.

• Do your options change when you think about different kinds of tasks, say writing a report vs directing air traffic?

• Do your options change when you think about all the tasks in a system? Is this a tool that you can use throughout a department, business, or school? What about for all the tasks across a city?

• What's great about its tool-i-ness? When might you want it to be more than a tool?

• Who is it a tool for? Who shouldn't use this tool? If some people won't use this tool, is that ok?

These questions invite us to expand the scope of our conversation, consider the positives and negatives, and the perspectives of other stakeholders.

They also reveal paths where we have agency, because while most of us don't get a say in what Anthropic or DeepSeek releases, we do get to choose how we use what they ship.

Speaking of what Anthropic and others say, here’s our biggest trap. But we don't have to accept that the options they're giving us are our only choices.

Breaking Trap 3: Find more viable options.

This week, Jack Dorsey laid off 40% of his employees and blamed it on AI. The CEO of Anthropic predicts that 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs will disappear in the next 1 to 5 years. The AI community says they're raising the alarm so all of us "regular people" can prepare for a future with 20+% unemployment.

They paint this future as the inevitable consequence of the Efficiency loop.

AI creates productivity gains →
You can do what you're doing today with fewer people →
You will reduce headcount.

First, we can push back on these claims and evaluate them in our context, just like we should when we suspect Level 1 & Level 2 traps.

But let's say they're right! Let’s accept that a lot of the work we do today could be done by machines now or in the near future.

Even when the gains are genuine, layoffs aren't automatic.

Leadership teams have so many options that don't get serious consideration in the media.

This is Trap 3 in action: a small group of CEOs and investors set up a one-move game, and everyone else is playing along.

Summing up, when you find yourself stuck in a conversation that everyone seems to be talking about but that isn't getting you anywhere, nudge the group into new territory.

That's nudging, though. Still reactive, still working to shift the frame someone else boxed you into.

With our map in front of us, we don't have to start there. We can see the blank spots and get ahead of the conversations they aren't having yet.

Exploring the Gaps: Can we talk about re-designing institutions?

Three areas fall in the empty space on the map, and they're where I want to go next.

• Lessons from History:
  Today's conversations focus on the technology and productivity changes, then doom-whisper that we're really facing a civilization shakeup. But what happened before when transformative technologies emerged? The six loops above are all future-fixated or present-obsessed. In the next part, we'll explore the paths other technological breakthroughs took before institutions adapted.

• All the Players:
  The loops center on tech leaders, executives, and anxious knowledge workers. Missing: communities, tradespeople, local institutions, entire industries outside tech. And those folks are not passive bystanders waiting to be disrupted: they have choices and are already making them. And if 20+% of the population does find itself unemployed? That's a lot of capacity set loose. Do we expect them to cry on the couch?

• The Institutional Layer:
  Between "learn to vibe code!" and "society will collapse," there's a whole layer of organizations, governments, professional bodies, schools, unions, and communities that set the constraints for large-scale change. That layer is barely in the conversation.

In Part 3, we’ll contrast historical changes with those we see today, highlight who's already working in these gaps, and get those missing conversations started.

Working with Us: We’d love to support your teams! Please check out our services here and get in touch.

Hi all,

This conversation comes in three parts. I've been thinking a lot about:

1. The surface-layer conversational loops that keep us stuck, and how to spot them.

2. The AI-related conversations we're stuck in at scale, and what we might be missing there.

3. The structural conversations that could provide paths through this existential miasma.

It starts when we're young. We get trained to misunderstand each other.

Part 1: Stuck on the Surface

I love when my teenage daughter tells me about her day (IYKYK).
This made my sudden rage a surprise to us both.

Her science class is studying climate. The assignment:

The class then got busy assembling their facts. For conversation C, they agreed that "educating others about climate change and their responsibilities" was one of the best things they could do.

I nearly succumbed to the white-hot impulse to be that parent, lashing out to "educate" this teacher about his responsibilities. Not because I'm a denier, but because the exercise assumed only one conversational path.

"Incorrect" statements must be corrected.
We must prepare our children to debate and defend right thinking.

Which leads to:

And around we go.

You may notice that all parties fully engage. They're included, they're in it, they're using their voice and sharing their thoughts! We can overcome all the bias and personality hurdles, and still find ourselves stuck in an unproductive doom loop.

Adversarial, yes, and I know many of you don't like conflict. And yet, these loops are more comfortable than the alternative.
They reaffirm our identity and invite the applause that drenches us in dopamine. Ooooh, 500 likes for that zinger!

And they shut down true curiosity, understanding, and the imperative to change.

As long as we stay stuck in these loops, there is no space for the productive conversations we could be having instead.

Lucky for me, my daughter knows better. She's heard my stories about helping people find better conversations. She said:

We rarely find the most useful path forward by bludgeoning each other with our superior opinions. The climate change debate is a great example of how closed conversational loops block progress.

I facilitated several conversations between people with opposing views about climate change, including some who see it as a positive thing. (Plants ❤️ carbon!) They all come armed with facts about historical rates of change, atmospheric carbon, solar activity, and the archaeological insights from eras gone by.

And as long as we debate which facts to trust or how to interpret all this data, we never get to the more important conversation.

What should we do?
We. Not they.
Do. Not think.

Now we can get curious.

For example, when we talk about local energy policy and the implications of voting to increase taxes on diesel, we learn that no one is in love with diesel fuel, but they do care deeply about whether farmers can afford to run their tractors and deliver crops to market without it.

As long as we lounge around in the debate about the origins of climate change, we never get to discover how to run farms on affordable, clean energy.

So how do we get unstuck?
In theory, we have many strategies for shifting our conversations.
In practice, most of these rely on an exceptionally skilled conversational steward.

The approach we used to unstick these climate conversations (and many others) requires a bit of prep, but doesn't rely so heavily on gifted individuals.

Finding the Missing Conversations

We use 5D thinking to make it easier to literally see missing conversations.
5D thinking is a way to visualize different perspectives on a topic. We ask everyone to place their ideas on a shared visual map, positioning them along dimensions like scope (big picture vs. concrete details), stakeholder (whose perspective?), and time horizon. When you can see where everyone's thinking lands in space, and how you place your ideas differently than I do, the gaps become obvious.

With these maps in front of us, we could see three common traps that catch us in these doom loops

Trap 1: We fail to understand each other.

People were saying the same words, but assigning them different meanings. This made it impossible to really get what the others were saying.

Example: The End of the World! 😱
Does this mean the whole planet and all life on it will crumble to space dust?
Or that your world—your current way of life—will go away?

When two people compared where they placed global impacts on a timeline, and the kinds of impacts they worried about, they could see that they were arguing about totally different things. No wonder the facts didn't line up!

Before we mapped out the conversation, this mismatch triggered a debate in which both sides were outraged by the other's ignorance. They demanded: What scientific evidence do you have to back up your claims?

Once they understood each other's perspective, they realized that they largely agreed. The world (and probably humanity) will survive climate change in the next 100+ years. But for many, it's the end of the world as they know it, and they're not feeling fine about that.

With this clarity, the conversation became:
What is the best way to support people whose lives will be significantly disrupted in the next few decades due to climate change?

There are a few really excellent things about this second conversation:

1. We don’t need to agree about everything to be productive. 
   You can hold different beliefs about the causes, the severity, or even the long-term benefit of climate change while jointly recognizing that people who have built ocean-front condos in Miami or live on tiny islands in the Pacific may soon lose their homes.

2. Understanding builds empathy. 
   The farmers and ranchers also worry about losing their homes, as desertification eats up rangeland, and new policies and overwhelming taxes threaten to force them out. Both parties can relate to each other's concerns because they're both facing exile due to forces outside of their direct control.

3. We open the door to change. 
   When they dropped the disdain (you're dumb for ignoring my version of science!) and established common ground (we are concerned about the loss of our homes, communities, and cultures), they could begin seeking ways forward that acknowledge the complexity involved.

Two things change after these conversations.
First, people change how they react when encountering opposing views going forward. They enter the next conversation less defensive and more curious.

Second, they seek new ways they can take action.

And that's the real opportunity our loops regularly miss.

Trap 2: We play it too safe.

Since my examples here start with heated debates, this may seem like an odd claim.

But let's revisit that science class assignment and the resulting loops.

a) Climate change isn't real.

This conversation focuses on comparing climate records over time. Is our climate different today than it was 50 years ago? Is this difference normal variation or an abnormal trend?

The other two loops follow the same pattern. Debates about global patterns in the past and potential futures.

And wow, isn't that a load of chickenshit?

As long as we argue the history and the future and all the big global what ifs, no one is looking at what we're doing right here, right now.

We avoid agency.

• What can WE do, here, this season?

• Which of OUR institutions must change? Government, sure, but also our businesses, neighborhoods, and communities?

• What tradeoffs can we accept?

• How can we build on the areas where we agree?

In our climate conversations, when they turned their attention to areas of agency, the beach dwellers shared experiments with sea walls, raising buildings, and how they're establishing a cultural center for the many islanders who relocated to the city.

The ranchers talked about converting from propane to solar, adding windmills, and adopting no-till practices that sequester carbon. They're seeking acknowledgement and tax credit for what they're already doing to reduce carbon emissions, which could help offset higher fuel prices while we wait for the spread of electric tractors.

Another person shared how their company is converting their packaging to eliminate plastic (they use packing material made of mushrooms now!) and the results from their annual ecochallenge competitions.

And, they talked about how our state's current regulatory and tax environment makes most of this harder.

They recognized what they were doing, what they could do, and the need for institutional change.

I'm using climate examples here because I can speak publicly about these experiences (see this related video).

I'm writing about this now, though, because you can see the same patterns in our conversations about AI.

Zoe Scaman wrote about the Six Loops she's hearing from leaders in conferences and boardrooms, nicely illustrating the third trap.

Trap 3: We let others determine our options for us.

In Part 2, we'll map Ms. Scaman's observations and see which conversations we may be missing. Stay tuned!

Working with Us: We’d love to support your teams. Please check out our services here and get in touch.

Great cosplay is performance art.

Lovingly crafted personas. A calendar of must-attend events.
Catch phrases and signature moves rehearsed and ready.
A relished escape from daily reality.

Sound familiar?
Swap the costumes for company swag, and you’ve got a typical team retreat.

ROI Reality Check

The big picture doesn’t look great.

The corporate training market pulls in around $361.5B in 2023 globally. In return for that investment, only one in four leaders rate their development programs as “high quality,” and industry surveys suggest most leadership training ineffective. The management consulting industry is even bigger. We spend $1T+ worldwide, but large-scale transformations still succeed only ~30% of the time.

But on a smaller scale, 86% of participants in CCL programs self-report leadership effectiveness gains, and this industry study claims a return of $3 to $11 for every $1 spent. That's pretty good!

Of course, the good news is mostly vendor-reported, not market baselines. 

Still - despite the murky success rates, we can clearly run projects that improve workplace culture. It's been done, it's do-able, and when it's done, we reap rewards.

But more often, companies invest in culture cosplay parties.

They bring in a vendor to host it. You get an invite and a quiz, so you can come dressed as your favorite personality type. You play "what if" games, imagining how you’d gracefully handle scripted conflicts. You all pretend that the workplace will change because you envisioned it. See? Behold your glorious sticky-note mosaic.

Maybe dressing like a mermaid will help you swim?

Business publications herald the importance of qualities like psychological safety, inclusion, trust, and agility. These qualities are real, measurable, and strongly tied to business outcomes.

But slipping into a mermaid tail won't teach you to swim. And a one-day workshop on psychological safety won’t make it feel ok to point out your boss's errors. If you want your team to trust each other when they dive into choppy seas, you'll have to spend lots of time in the water together first.

So why are so many culture services one-offs?

We're all complicit in this inflated cosplay economy.

• Vendors pretend workshops create lasting change.

• Leaders pretend they want lasting change.

• Everyone pretends the stickies on the wall mean something.

Meanwhile, nothing really changed since the last recession.

What makes an event cosplay, rather than a useful rallying point for aligning teams and inspiring change?

Follow-through, of course.

Is it the vendor's job to make sure people follow through?
No. Outsiders have no authority over how your team spends their day.

Is it the leader's job to make sure people follow through?
Well, maybe, but they aren't experts here and they've got bigger problems.

Practically, you get a positive ROI if, and only if, the managers and team members follow through with the change. And of course, they aren't in the room when the contract is signed.

So, we stick to the activities we can put dates and dollars on, and ignore the hard conversations about what real change requires.

Over the past three articles, we've explored this dynamic using Culture Math; a way of treating culture as a manageable strategic asset. If you’ve followed this series, you know Culture Math is a way to distinguish the performance art from productive investments.

As a reminder, here's the basic equation.

👉 The logic:

• TCC = total culture cost, aka what you spend, including:

  • A. One-time / Event-driven investments (resets, workshops, new systems, retreats)

  • B. Recurring spend (licenses, benefits, coaching)

  • C. Active maintenance (leader time, rituals, comms, lifecycle practices)

• Impact (±) = how culture shows up in business performance.

• RoC  = whether your investments are compounding into advantage, or furiously digging a dank hole.

Minding your Culture Math breaks this doom-loop. It helps you see:

• Where one-offs can be useful as signals or seed investments. Or when you’re using them as a perk, with no more expectations.

• When ongoing reinforcement is required to convert spend into impact.

• How to contract in ways that build internal capability rather than perpetuate dependency.

Let's dive into how to contract differently so your investment pays off.

How to Improve the ROI on Outside Culture Services

1. Beware of supplier-induced demand.

Vendors are really good at educating potential buyers about the problems they should worry about. At one level, this is marketing. That's what businesses do.

And naturally, the problems we see most clearly are the ones we get paid to fix.

Like the pharma ads convincing you that feeling tired is a disease, consultants are trained to define your pain and sell the cure. Before long, every company thinks it needs an “AI strategy” the way everyone with a backache once thought they needed Oxy.

As Maxim Sytch points out, a lot of that $1T+ spend is driven more by what we've been told we need than by real problems that need solving.

So before thumbing through HBR for guidance...

2. Start with the problem to solve, not the solution.

Culture cosplay begins with buying experiences. Meaningful change begins with defining problems.

Don’t begin with “We should do a retreat” or “We need psych safety training.”
Instead, ask: “How does our culture make it harder for us to achieve our goals?" and "What do we want to be true about our culture?"

Ideally, you should craft a clear problem statement that makes the gap between your current and desired state clear. As in: Today, (describe the current culture or practice). To help us achieve our goal of (goal goes here), we want to change our (culture/practice) so that (desired future state).

Examples:

• Learning waste: Today, we spend $2M annually on training but don't know which new skills get used. To help us achieve our goal of building a strong leadership pipeline, we want to change our learning approach so that every training includes on-the-job application with manager accountability.

• Decision bottleneck: Today, all decisions require executive approval, creating 2-week delays on average. To help us achieve our goal of launching products 50% faster, we want to change our decision-making practice so that teams can approve most decisions within 48 hours.

• Feedback void: Today, employees only receive feedback during annual reviews, with 68% saying they don't know where they stand. To help us achieve our goal of retaining top talent (currently losing 27% annually), we want to change our feedback practice so that everyone gets weekly support, coaching from managers, and clear performance indicators.

• Innovation theater: Today, we run quarterly innovation workshops but have launched zero employee ideas in two years. To help us achieve our goal of 20% revenue from new products, we want to change our innovation practice so that every workshop leads to funded pilots with 90-day success metrics.

This is difficult. If your culture isn't what it needs to be, you're probably facing a intertwined mess of problems.
Where do you even start?

You could call in a consultant to run a big discovery project for you. If you go this route, keep step 1 in mind and consider using separate vendors for discovery and delivery.

Alternatively, you could start with the problem that feels most pressing. The fastest way to learn what really needs to change in an organization is to try and make changes. The stickiest sticking points will quickly reveal themselves.

3. Match the project to fit the goal.

Disappointment comes from a mismatch between what’s purchased and what’s required. So how can you determine the right level of outside services for the result you need?

Look at your problem statement, then review the table below. It outlines typical levels of outside engagements with the impact you can realistically expect from each.

The Culture Contracting Scale

And right here you can see why it's so easy for us to fall into culture cosplay.
Most outside contracts are for Sparks to Recharge projects, while we know logically that to get meaningful change, we'll need to Develop & Maintain or an invest in an Overhaul.

But can you afford that?
And do you really want to be yoked to an outside vendor for the long haul?

This is really a build vs. buy decision. In some organizations, it makes better sense to own the capabilities for sustaining change by staffing internal coaches, OD practitioners, and facilitators.

For others, you'll want to:

4. Tailor the contract to fit your budget.

Juicy problems attract hefty proposals. They put it all in there! Assessments, workshops, training, coaching, comms support—a whole range of potentially useful stuff—and now the cost of "doing it right" exceeds your budget.

It will be tempting to delay the more complicated-but-necessary work and instead opt for a quick workshop. Why take on the expense and hassle of overhauling your internal communications and team structures when you can just run a "constructive conflict" training instead?

When you run into budget constraints, resist the urge to pretend a one-off project will have the impact you need.

Instead, get creative.
You can:

• Look for boutique firms and independent experts. These small shops often provide senior-partner level expertise at a fraction of the cost of a big consultancy.

• Start smaller. One practice, one better meeting, one more beautiful workspace. Then, keep going. As someone who's led projects across the full range, I know that many small steps often move cultures more effectively than trying to force change in one big shove.

• Divide the project between outside and inside resources. Many providers offer advisory retainers for supporting internal teams, and train-the-trainer services for scaling projects.

Regardless of how much of this project you contract out, you'll want internal folks involved because you need to...

5. Invest in Maintenance.

The fastest way to waste money is to keep buying Sparks and Pilots without reinforcing them. A small, steady investment in Maintenance—the repeated actions and environmental cues that bring your desired culture alive every day—usually drives the biggest ROI relative to cost.

Good providers can help you figure out what to include in your maintenance plan.

Questions to Discuss When Scoping Projects

For those one-off projects:

• What value(s) is this meant to inspire or reinforce in our culture?

• What specific behaviors, skills, or conversations could this kickstart?

• What would need to happen for this to stick? What might prevent sticking?

For longer projects and fractional support over time:

• Which maintenance practices will you run, and what do we need to lead?

• What would we need to handle this on our own? How can we make that happen?

• What factors influence the expected payback period for this work?

• How will we measure progress across (the impact metric you care about: revenue, quality, talent, efficiency, innovation, reputation)?

Short Version: Cosplay vs Culture Change Projects

So let's do the math.

Pull up your projects from last year. Sort the time and expenses into categories:

• A (One-time): Workshops, keynotes, retreats, that design thinking bootcamp

• B (Recurring): Annual surveys, recurring events, coaching contracts

• C (Maintenance): Daily practices, rituals, regular check-ins, ongoing reinforcement

Check your ledger. What percentage went to C? If it's under half, you're putting on a show.

That’s buying the mermaid tail but avoiding the water.

Culture Math Invites Integrity and Fiscal Responsibility

If you're a consultant reading this, you know exactly which of your clients are cosplaying. You can probably name the ones who'll buy another Spark next quarter while the results from their last three workshops gather dust.
As one strategic planning facilitator said over drinks, "Another binder of shelf-shit out the door."

And if you're a leader, you know whether that "transformational" retreat left behind anything beyond the sweatshirt.

Over many years of relative prosperity, we've grown a $1T+ industry that could ignore this math. Leaders swimming in cash can afford to play. What's another $100k here or there? Pish.

And hungry consultants need to keep it simple. Exposing the math complicates the conversation, which kills deals.

As long as feeling like you did something matters more than making real change, only consultants willing to lose the deal can afford to challenge a project's scope.

But when budgets are tight, this math matters.

The era of generous discretionary spend is coming to a close. Unemployment, inflation, and interest rates are up, growth is slowing, and CFOs are asking harder questions. If you can't speak to ROI, you won't get funding.

Implications for leaders
Before your next project, answer these questions:

1. What problem are we actually trying to solve? (Not what solution are we buying)

2. Who will own making this real after the vendor leaves?

3. What percentage of our culture budget goes to maintenance vs events?

In other words, treat your culture investments like you would any other capital expenditure.

For everyone: The next time someone proposes a one-off workshop, ask them to complete this sentence:
"We expect this workshop to create lasting change because _."

If the answer is "because the content is really good" or "because people will be inspired," you're planning a cosplay.
Are you cool with that?

You know, sometimes, maybe so!
I have a client who hosts regular events because… well, because they said they would, and they can afford to do it.
That's it.
So we plan a bit of fun, some time to talk about current issues, and leave it at that. We're engaging honestly to put on a show that will maybe, hopefully, make people feel a bit better about staying with the company.

They also know that when they're ready to get specific about development, reinforcement, and daily practice, we can have a meaningful discussion about ROI.

We all know that real culture isn't a costume you put on for special events.
It's what you wear to work every single day.

Working with Us: If you’d like to explore how we can help your organization, please check out our services here and get in touch.

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This article is part of our series exploring Culture Math.

Dear friends and all who advocate for better ways of working,
We have a problem.

The leaders who green-light our work need to drive measurable business success. This means that when we propose a change, it should be designed to support their business success.

This is challenging for three reasons.

1. First, busy leaders like simple answers. No shade implied; I like simple answers to my problems, too! But for culture work, the simple answers are always inadequate.

2. Second, there isn't just one answer. Changes ripple. What seems like a wise answer today may become irrelevant or wrong tomorrow. There are no clean boundaries. Perhaps this is why we run into problem three.

3. We use liquid jello language to describe our domains. Change, inclusion, performance, culture...runny words that don't mean anything until they mold to a context.

We use the word culture to describe "what it feels like to work here." Culture is kin to "love", "home", and "puppy." Each person experiences it differently, and it's always changing. It is the wave and the ocean.

An organization's culture is also one of its more important strategic assets.
It eats strategy for breakfast, operations for lunch, and sales for dinner.

Culture chugs performance like light beer at a ball game.

Let's keep this in mind, because today we're going to address these challenges by putting numbers to "culture" work. Not because spreadsheets capture everything, but because they force critical thinking about what we're doing here.

Today's spreadsheet will capture culture math at a high level to help us answer questions like these:

• What is the current way of working costing?

• What do we need to invest to improve it?

• Are our investment choices complementary or contradictory?
  Are we creating value faster than we're eating it?

• What impact should we expect from the investments we're making?

If you missed the last two articles, you're all "Culture... math? What nonsense is this?"

Here's the basic idea.

People do things that they hope will make their organizational cultures better. Training, workshops, treats on Friday. All kinds of stuff they actively choose to spend time and money on.

People also do things every day that bring the real culture to life. Meetings, commutes, Slack emojis, and dirty looks in the lunch room. Maybe they actively decided how they'd do these things, or maybe not. Either way, the everyday things take time and money, too.

So we have all these things that impact culture, some in good ways and others bad. Thinking in culture math terms, these are additions to and deductions from our balance.

It's easier to achieve great top-line results when your cultural balance is high. Revenue, quality, innovation, retention, reputation, efficiency – all the usual suspects in the KPI lineup have ties to the organization's culture.

In the first article, we outlined a basic equation. Then we revisited six case studies through a culture math lens. Using this lens is like using 3D glasses to look at an anaglyph; it doesn't show you anything that wasn't there before, but it sure helps the insights pop out.

The basic culture math equation looks like this.

👉 The logic:

• TCC (A+B+C) = total culture cost, aka what you spend.

• Impact (±) = how culture shows up in business performance.

• RoC  = whether your investments are compounding into advantage, or furiously digging a dank hole.

Now, let's talk about what goes into the spreadsheet.

For those of you who prefer video (and want to hear folks challenge these ideas!), I discuss these ideas with a group of highly experienced practitioners in this recording.

The (Purportedly) Countable Stuff

In that equation, TCC adds up:

• A = One-time costs, like workshops and special awards

• B = Periodic costs, e.g., the monthly subscriptions and quarterly events

• C = Embedded costs, like the daily habits

Some of those costs are direct expenses, like paying for external training. Some are calculated in people's time, which you can translate to finance by multiplying those minutes by hourly burdened rates.

So - money.

Let's work an example.

Calculating an Investment in Better Decision Making

Assume you want to increase decision velocity and quality (i.e., make better decisions faster).

A typical investment would include:

• Decision Education: To learn effective decision-making processes, and workshops for teams to create their decision matrix

• Decision Software: For collaborating on decisions and reviewing decision performance

• Practice (i.e., Making Decisions): Time spent making and reviewing decisions, getting new employees up to speed, and periodically improving the approach

You can get pretty detailed with these cost estimates. The one-time training fees and the software licenses have explicit costs. It's easy to calculate the cost of time spent in workshops. And depending on the decision-making processes you select, you can also estimate how much time it should take to reach decisions going forward.

An Honest Implementation Cost 

Your total annual investment might look something like this.
(Assuming 100 people with an average burdened rate of $50, because make-believe math should be easy math.)

Add it all up, and the real investment number dwarfs the stand-alone training/workshop fee outlined in a typical proposal.

So:

• Workshop only: $40k (when you add in the cost of people's time, which no one does)

• Actual Implementation needed: $282k

And wow! The bigger number can be pretty daunting.

Until you compare it to the cost of an underdeveloped decision-making system.

The Cost of Ad-Hoc Decision Making

What's the current approach to decision-making costing? Teams that wing it typically:

• Discuss the same decision in multiple meetings.

• Invest hours polishing PowerPoints to convince the boss about a decision.

• Meet about decisions that don't require discussion.

• Make complex decisions without critical input, inflicting unforced errors.

• Reverse and revisit decisions because the "right" people weren’t involved the first time.

• Forget which decisions they made, or why, so they make them again. And again.

• Make decisions that they never write down, then fail to act on them.

• Wait for decisions to be made by someone else. Who? Not sure.

• Route all decisions through higher-ups, engorging the approval bottlenecks.

• Get frustrated with all of the above and just do it! 
  Seek forgiveness, not permission - amiright, cowboy?

If each person spends just 6 hours weekly on decision dysfunction (conservative estimate), you're already at $1.5M annually for a 100-person company. Makes that $282K investment look like a sweet deal, doesn't it?

If you could get this number, it would make the case for one helluva ROI.

How to Apply This to Your Scenario

Practically, you won't get an accurate cost for the before state, because no one tracks the performance of practices that just sort of happen. But you can quickly arrive at estimates.

Ask the team to review a list of common friction points (like the ones above).
Which sounds familiar? How much time would they estimate those take?

The conversation will be illuminating, potentially uncomfortable, and result in a fat-fingered ballpark guesstimate.

When the pain costs more than the cure, stop debating and start building. No brainer.

If it's close, maybe you wait. Maybe there's another part of the system that needs attention first.

That's easier to see when you expand to a full ledger view.

Building a Broader Ledger

In the example above, we looked at a decision-making project and used educated guesstimates to determine that we could save people hours every week. You could expect that to yield a commensurate productivity boost. Look at all the time folks got back for focused work!

Except projects never happen in isolation.

What if, at the same time you're improving decision-making, the CEO decides to mandate a 5-day return-to-office policy?

The CEO giveth, and they taketh away.

Creating a ledger view like this - even one based on educated guesses - gives you a way to think and talk through tradeoffs. Listing your concurrent projects and decisions in one place can reveal whether you're supporting a coherent system or just pitching a collection of random initiatives.

Many organizations manage each investment in isolation - a workshop here, a policy there - without tracking how they interact. The ledger encourages systems thinking.

The potential conflicts between decisions become even clearer when you expand your ledger to consider other forms of capital.

Capital That's Harder to Quantify, And Necessary for Success

Beyond money, business cultures trade in other forms of capital. These include:

• Social Capital → Trust, reciprocity, and networks of relationships that enable collaboration, faster problem-solving, and wider opportunity.

• Intellectual Capital → Knowledge, ideas, and intellectual property that fuel smarter decisions, innovation, and preserve organizational memory.

• Experiential Capital → Practical know-how, skills, and “muscle memory” built through lived experience, practice, and iteration.

• Shared Convictions → The collective sense of purpose, values, and loyalty that drives commitment, alignment, and reduced friction.

• Living Capital → Wellbeing, stamina, and clearheadedness that sustain energy, resilience, and long-term performance.

How are these forms of "capital"?

Consider this: If an organization wants people to speak up when they see a problem with product quality, workplace safety, or delivery times, what do they need?

• Money & time for training and reinforcement about how and when to raise the alarm.

• Shared Convictions: People have to share beliefs about where the bar is. You have to agree on what "good enough" looks like so you can call out anything that isn't.

• Social Capital: They have to trust that they won't be punished for highlighting errors.

You could fill the office with suggestion boxes, Andon cords, and "See something? Say something!" posters, but it wouldn't do a lick of good if social capital is bankrupt.

So instead, we'll assume they have adequate capital to run the training and reinforce the habits. You should expect increases in:

• Intellectual Capital: People will know how to assess, raise, and address problems

• Experiential Capital: They'll experience working and building better. They up their level of craftsmanship.

• Social Capital: Psych. safety increases, and problem-solving networks strengthen

• And if you focus on safety, Living Capital increases when there are fewer injuries.

We have reliable ways to quantify dollars and time. For other forms of capital, we're still developing those measures. Permaculture advocates have long recognized that healthy systems require multiple forms of capital working in balance. Business is slowly catching up.

Just because we can't precisely quantify your group's Social Capital doesn't mean you should ignore it when planning projects. Your ledger can acknowledge these impacts even when the numbers aren't exact.

Let's add columns tracking how our decision-making investment affects each form of capital. We'll use indicators showing the expected impact on each balance.

For decision-making implementation to work, you'll need baseline Social Capital and Shared Convictions. People must share a sense of what they're trying to achieve, what constitutes a good decision, and trust that others will engage in the process.

Then, once you've created decision-making clarity, you should enjoy increases in:

• Social Capital: by improving inclusion and autonomy, and decreasing decision-making conflict.

• Intellectual Capital: as the group improves its decision-making rigor.

• Experiential Capital: as they gain skills in proposing and evaluating decisions, and then improving their approach.

• Shared Convictions: as they align around how to decide, what's been decided, and what makes for a quality decision.

We’re using simple arrows to indicate expected changes in these forms of capital. In this example, we anticipate some increase in everything except living capital.

So that's cool! Better decisions and better relationships? Sign me up!

Now, you'd think we could use a sheet like this to make a great case for improving decision clarity, or for skipping an office mandate, but....

You can't eat Intellectual Capital, and shareholders aren't wowed by stockpiles of Shared Convictions.

In the business world, we need to take the next step and tie the investment to business impact metrics.

Calculating Culture's Impact on Performance

Unlike the upfront investments we've been tracking, most organizations already measure performance: revenue, productivity, quality, and retention. These are your lagging indicators, showing what happened after your culture work.

Here's the connection: your culture investments (training, new processes, policy changes) are leading indicators. You make those investments expecting specific performance improvements. Now you want to see whether those improvements show up.

They won't show up cleanly. Performance metrics are influenced by everything: market shifts, supply chain disruptions, customer behavior, economic conditions, and seasonal patterns. Excellent ways of working won’t save you if your market collapses.

So how do you tell if your culture work is making a difference?

Compare your performance against industry benchmarks or your own past performance. The gap shows where culture might be helping or hurting. Not definitively, but directionally.

Look for numbers like these.

In this example, most trends look positive. Revenue and expenses are outperforming the industry. Attrition is improving. But innovation is losing ground despite investments.

This is where the ledger proves itself. When you track both your culture investments (leading) and performance outcomes (lagging) over time, you can ask better questions:

• We invested $282K in decision-making. Did efficiency improve?

• We mandated RTO, claiming it would boost innovation. Is innovation up?

• Where are we outperforming the industry, and what about our culture investments might explain that?

• Where are we falling behind, and what might we need to change?

You won't get clean cause-and-effect. The world is too complex for that. But you can see patterns. You can spot when claimed benefits don't materialize. You can identify what's working well enough to double down on.

Why These Impact Areas

These metrics have two advantages: organizations already track them, and they have industry benchmarks for comparison.

Want to motivate change? Show leaders how they compare to competitors. Suspecting your innovation pipeline could be stronger is one thing. It’s quite another when you see your competitors make bank while you’re still moseying to market.

Research backs up the connection between culture and performance:

• Companies with top-quartile engagement see ~20% higher revenue per employee than bottom quartile (Gallup, 2017) Gallup Source

• Companies with strong cultures attract better talent at lower cost (LinkedIn Talent Trends Report, 2019). LinkedIn Source

• Companies that excel at innovation processes grow 3x faster than competitors (BCG). BCG Source

• High-trust companies outperform S&P 500 by 2–3x over 10 years (Great Place to Work).
  Great Place to Work Source

Do a bit of research and you'll find all kinds of studies showing that thriving cultures outcompete lousy ones.

Net Culture Impact

Add them up to see the overall contribution (or drag) of culture on business outcomes:
Net Culture Impact = Revenue Impact + Quality Impact + Talent Impact + Efficiency Impact + Innovation Impact + etc.

This won't give you a perfect ROI calculation.

It gives you something more useful: visibility into whether your culture portfolio is working as a system, where it's succeeding, and where you need to adjust course.

We've built the ledger piece by piece: costs, capital impacts, and performance metrics. Now let's talk about what this means for how we work.

The Complete Ledger Exposed

1. The current market incentives are backwards.

Clients want cheap, fast culture fixes. Consultants deliver what gets bought.

But selling a workshop as culture change is like selling a gym membership as fitness. The benefits only show up after the heavy lifting.

Notice something in that table? The training by itself has zero intended impact. That's not a typo. Workshops don't change cultures on their own. Only sustained practice does.

This isn't news to any of us, but it might be to those we serve.
We can make it easier for people to understand what they need to do to build on the workshop’s good start.

2. Leaders who call culture work "soft" are either ignorant or negligent.

The ROI is calculable, the impacts are measurable, and ignoring both is incompetent.

Looking at the return to office mandate, we can record the CEO's claim that it will increase innovation and productivity, while also acknowledging the impact on employee well-being. We can also recognize that just commuting into an office isn't enough to positively impact Social Capital, unless you also ensure people talk to each other while they're there. To get the talking guarantee, you'll need scheduled events, meeting space, maybe an on-site café... adding several more lines to your ledger. These are real business tradeoffs that deserve thoughtful consideration.

Finally, we have industry evidence that suggests remote and hybrid employees faced with these policies are more likely to seek a new job. This may also be an intended impact. Do you intend to impact retention? That deserves a spot on the ledger, too.

3. We can do better. But only if we stop managing culture as individual initiatives and start treating it as an integrated system.

The ledger reveals whether investments reinforce each other or work at cross-purposes. That's the difference between culture work and culture systems.

Think about what becomes possible when you can see a bigger picture. You can spot when well-intentioned policies undermine each other before you implement them. You can make the case for culture investments using the same language leaders use for every other strategic decision. You can show stakeholders exactly what they're trading off when they make policy choices.

Most importantly, you can finally move beyond hoping your workshops will stick. Instead, you're designing systems where the follow-through is expected, the contradictions visible, and the impact trackable.

For those of us who got into this work to make organizations more human and effective, this approach offers a way to translate good intentions into measurable change and be more accountable to the people we serve.

This article is part of our series exploring Culture Math.

Working with Us: If you’d like to explore how we can help your organization, please check out our services here.

This article is part of our series exploring Culture Math.

Enough with the make-believe. I mentioned in the previous article that I’ve met or worked with folks who lived through well-publicized business case studies. Now I want to revisit those stories through the culture math lens.

Before we do, let’s clarify what this lens is and why we’d use it.

We use “culture” to describe the vast, ever-changing, emergent quality of what it’s like to be in an organization. It isn’t mystical, but its complexity makes precise measurement both impractical and unwise. So we use metaphors to explain how cultural systems operate.

When teaching meeting design, I compare the flow of information through a company to the flow of water in a landscape: some teams flood while others desiccate.

Diet and fitness metaphors are also popular. The book Strategy and the Fat Smoker makes the point well: it’s not enough to know you should eat well and exercise, and it’s not enough to have a brilliant strategy. In both cases, the benefits only come after months of consistent follow-through.

Culture Math applies a finance metaphor. It views culture as an asset you invest in, maintain, and either grow or deplete over time. Unlike the water or fitness metaphors, this one uses the language organizations speak natively: money, time, and return.

These six stories illustrate different cultural investment profiles: business-as-usual drift, turnaround, engineered failure, erosion, compounding success, and misalignment collapse. Since this is a lens to think with and not an accounting exercise, you won’t see detailed equations or balance sheets here. That data doesn’t exist.

Instead, each story explores how choices about A (one-time), B (recurring), and C (maintenance) determine results over time—and whether culture becomes an asset or a liability.

1. Business-as-Usual: You know how this goes.

This is what I see most, and what I hear from my peers.
“Culture work” consists of new initiatives: a re-org here, a new platform there, a hottest-hits-in-training event each year. They spend real money on perks, surveys, and software, and managers do some of the right things — an occasional 1:1, sporadic recognition — but it’s inconsistent. There’s no coherent maintenance practice. Employees learn to keep their heads down, wait out the next initiative, and assume nothing will stick.

Culture Math:

• Active Spend = A (big events) + B (recurring expenses): 
  Frequent, sometimes costly investments in tools, vendors, and events.

• Active Maintenance = C (habits, rituals, daily ways of working): 
  Negligible or uneven focus across the org.

• Impacts:

  • Revenue: Flat relative to industry.

  • Quality: Errors and rework persist.

  • Talent: Attrition and engagement average.

  • Efficiency: Bureaucracy cancels out gains.

  • Innovation: Incremental at best.

• Timeline: 
  Initiative brings a spike of energy → Which quietly fades → Repeat every 6 to 12 months

Looks like: Uneven, random, sporadic, expensive!
Turns out like: Poor value - no real gains across any metrics

Lesson 1: You can’t get results without coherent follow-through.

👉 Apply your math here:

• Which A+B spends are you repeating with no sustained C to lock in the benefits?

• Where are you mistaking activity for development?

• If you paused new initiatives for 90 days, which C practices might raise performance?

2. My First Real Job in an Internet Startup

By 2006, the startup's future looked bright from the outside. We survived the dot-com bust and had a growing staff, $5M in revenue, and big contracts in the pipeline.

In reality, the company was split at the top.  One founder disliked working with people and continually talked of shutting down. The other loved building teams and serving customers.

The board sent a coach who tried to help: values work, DISC, StrengthsFinder, and even new titles. But the gap never closed. Tools meant for empathy became ammo. “I’m a big D—deal with it.” 

Investments meant to mend the culture instead exposed the fracture, aggravating conflict. After key talent left, the business rode a slow slide down until it was ultimately sold off to a competitor.

Culture Math:

• A + B: Investments in outside coaching, values work, formalized leadership roles, assessment tools (DISC, StrengthsFinder), staff growth, and revenue scaling.

• C: Reinforcement mechanisms were weak and contradictory. Partners never aligned, so trainings and titles only magnified dysfunction. Tools meant to bridge gaps became ammunition in conflicts.

• Impacts: Increased conflict, eventual company dissolution

• Timeline: 2000–2006 (initial growth) → 2004–2007 (alignment attempts, external coaches) → 2007–2014 (internal conflicts escalate, staff exodus) → 2014–2017 (decline and dissolution).

Looks like: Intense, dysfunctional, bad actors
Turns out like: Increased conflict leading to splintering and breakup

Lesson 2: You can’t get results that scale or stick without aligned support from leaders.

👉 Apply your math here:

• Are your leaders actually aligned on what a good culture should look like?

• Which tools are becoming weapons in disguise?

• What would you stop funding until leadership alignment is real?

3. Wells Fargo: Be Careful What You Wish For

Wells Fargo didn’t drift off the path into cultural failure. It steered straight for that cliff. For years, leadership pushed an internal sales model where every branch employee was expected to sell multiple products (“Going for Gr-Eight”), or risk job consequences.

Between 2011 and 2016, employees opened approximately 3.5 million unauthorized accounts—checking, savings, and credit cards—without customer consent, simply to hit quotas. The fraud became public in 2016, triggering immediate consequences:

• Wells Fargo was fined $185 million by the CFPB, OCC, and Los Angeles city officials.

• Broader penalties, settlements, and legal costs climbed toward $3 billion by early 2020.

• Around 5,300 employees were fired due to misconduct.  

• CEO John Stumpf resigned in 2016 and later received a lifetime industry ban and a $17.5 million fine.

• Wells Fargo was placed under a Federal Reserve asset cap that froze its growth capacity. The cap was just removed this year. (2025)

Source: Business Insider article detailing the scandal

Culture Math:

• A + B: Heavy, consistent investment in sales training, incentives, compliance systems.

• C: Clear, daily focus. Managers lived and breathed quota enforcement.

• Impacts: Short-term revenue growth; quality, talent, efficiency, and reputation all collapsed. $3B fines → visible “negative RoC.”

• Timeline:  2011–2016 (quota pressure) → 2016 (scandal/fines) → 2017–2020 (fallout, ~$3B settlement) → 2018–2025 (asset cap) → 2025 (cap lifted; reforms continue)

Looks like: Systemic maligned cultural interventions.
Turns out like: Short-term gain, long-term loss of quality, talent, and reputation. Fines = negative ROI!

Lesson 3: Alignment + follow-through gets results. That isn’t always a good thing.

👉 Apply your math here:

• Where are incentives pushed hard enough to warp outcomes?

• When the pressure’s on, which values hold and which give way first?

• Which “wins” today will become tomorrow’s brand liabilities?

4. Intel: From Operational Excellence to National Embarrassment

Andy Grove transformed Intel (CEO, 1987–1998) into a culture focused on operational excellence and survival-driven discipline. Under Grove, Intel invested in culture with the same rigor it put into dominating semiconductors. Grove himself often taught courses on effective meetings and constructive confrontation, modeling what discipline looked like in practice.  

Grove was always evaluating the full culture equation.

But post-Grove leaders started chasing financial engineering and expansion, letting bureaucracy seep in. By missing mobile and AI shifts (Intel famously declined to supply chips to the first iPhone), Intel lost its edge. Execution faltered, and competitors pulled ahead.

Fast forward: Intel’s 2021 revenue peaked near $79B. By 2024, revenue had plummeted to roughly $53.1B, with net losses hitting $18.8B in 2024. It was their first annual loss since 1986.

Even with a recent US government investment, not enough customers remain to fill its fabs. Cash isn’t their only issue, and you can't buy simple fixes for a culture of misaligned incentives and shoddy decision-making.

Culture Math:

• A + B: Massive investment in disciplined culture under Grove; later years shifted to financial playbooks and expansions.

• C: Maintenance faltered. Meetings turned political; direct feedback faded. Routines atrophied.

• Impacts: Data center share tumbled from ~61% to ~11%. Revenue shrank 33% (from ~$79B to ~$53B). 2024 saw a net loss of $18.8B.

• Timeline: 1987–1998 (Grove discipline) → 2000s–2010s (bureaucracy build/strategic misses) → 2021–2024 (sharp decline) → 2024–2025 (substantial public subsidies/incentives; turnaround efforts proposed… we’ll see!)

Looks like: Rigor, focus, consistency, vision (followed by absence)
Turns out like: Thriving culture, thriving revenue (followed by a plummet)

Lesson 4: Culture work is never done.

👉 Apply your math here:

• Do you treat culture like infrastructure or like decoration?

• Which routines worked in the last era but are toxic now?

• Flip side: what benefits were lost when routines changed?

• Who is empowered to challenge inertia, and how often do they win?

5. Campbell’s Soup: From Dysfunction to Great Place to Work

When Doug Conant took over Campbell Soup in 2001, the company was stuck. Market share was slipping, morale was shot, and the Camden, NJ headquarters felt like a fortress in one of the most dangerous cities in America. Trust in leadership had evaporated.

Conant didn’t start by swinging the axe. In his words, “When you’re a new leader, you get three years. In year one, all the problems are the other guy’s fault, and you’re learning. In year two, you try some things, and they don’t quite work yet. But by year three, if things are still not working, that’s your fault.”

By year three, the verdict was clear. Many of his top executives couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt. That’s when he replaced 300 of the top 350 leaders.
(Remember this example when you get to story 6).

Image Source: The John Gordon Podcast interview with Doug Conant

But the real turnaround wasn’t the purge. It was what he and his team did every day. Conant wrote over 30,000 handwritten thank-you notes in his decade as CEO, recognizing specific behaviors tied to quality, teamwork, and accountability. Leaders were measured on engagement, and employees saw that recognition and accountability. Within five years, Campbell’s went from the bottom of the Fortune 500 in engagement to one of Gallup’s Great Workplaces. Shareholder return also leapt to 64 percent, nearly five times the S&P 500's 13 percent return at that time.

That energy rippled across their ecosystem. With strong results supporting them, they could authentically adopt Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives, including investments in solar energy and environmentally friendly farming practices. This gave employees even more reason to say they were proud to work for Campbell's.

Read more

Culture Math:

• A + B: Heavy upfront investment — leadership turnover, training, engagement programs.

• C: Daily leader reinforcement (notes, accountability for manager engagement scores).

• Impacts: Engagement soared, quality improved, reputation recovered, financial performance stabilized. Engagement shift → 20% higher productivity potential

• Timeline: 
  2001 (Conant arrives) → 2003–2004 (top-team reset) → 2004–2008 (daily reinforcement + engagement rise) → 2008+ (compounding, CSR scaling)

Looks like: Energy, accountability, fastidiously sustained, and people-first
Turns out like: Spiralling engagement scores, financial stability, and market leadership

Lesson 5: Strong leaders willing to take decisive, consistent action can enable radical positive transformation.
It’s doable.

👉 Apply your math here:

• Where are you expecting Year-1 outcomes that actually take three?

• What small, repeated act could become your drumbeat of trust?

• Are you holding leaders accountable to adapt or letting resistance stall the org?

6. Zingerman’s : The Not-So-Surprising Upside of Consistently Giving a Damn

Zingerman’s began in 1982 as a small Ann Arbor deli founded by Ari Weinzweig (a former anarchist who believes “every cook can govern”) and Paul Saginaw. Their guiding ethos: build a great place to work driven by deep respect and equality.

In the early 1990s, growth slowed and the culture began to fray. Around 2002, in search of resilience, they adopted Open Book Management, which teaches every employee, from partners to potato peelers, to understand finances, service metrics, and operational basics. CEO Ari Weinzweig himself often leads this training, emphasizing shared ownership and agency.

Image: founder Ari Wienzweig poses in front of their mission statement. Feature article by edibleWoW

They continued to evolve, tune, and adapt their culture through rituals, peer reinforcement, and feedback loops. When they saw the results of their approach (higher revenue, happier customers, loyal employees), they established ZingTrain as a business line, extending those values to other companies.

Today, Zingerman’s Community of Businesses comprises over 11 businesses, employs roughly 750 people, and brings in more than $80 million in annual revenue. Attrition is low; many people start as dishwashers in high school and grow into multi-decade careers, exemplifying the long-term benefits of a rigorous dedication to stewarding a strong culture.

Culture Math:

• A + B: Regular focused investment in training, values modeling, Open Book programs, rituals, and feedback loops.  

• C: Continuous modeling from leaders (Ari takes a shift refilling customer's water), peer reinforcement, weekly debriefs, openness in finance.  

• Impacts: A thriving, values-rooted company: ~750 employees, $80M+ annual revenue, near-zero turnover, and a new revenue line in ZingTrain.  

• Timeline: 1982 (founding) → 1990s (growing pains) → ~2002 (Open Book) → 2000s–today (compounding + ZingTrain)

Lesson 6: Ongoing investment in culture sustains and grows positive results that can survive leadership changes.

👉 Apply your math here:

• What would happen if every person in your org understood exactly how your company's finances worked?

• Which of your company's values do leaders demonstrate every day?

• Could your culture investments yield your next new business line?

Quick Caution: Looking Back Is Not The Same As Looking Forward

I shared the second mini-story about the software startup because my husband and I often revisit the lessons we learned there. That company's breakdown was painful to live through.

But we don't regret it. How could we? That experience brought us together.

Ours is one of four businesses risen from those ashes (all of which are still active), and our wonderful daughter is one of the six new babies born to parents who met there.

Contemplating the grand circle of life, we can see that the impact this company had is overwhelmingly positive for many of the individuals involved.

And that's the trap!
Recognizing big picture value in the past does not excuse sloppy culture math now.

Time and time again, folks use this fuzzy big-picture filter to justify investments that have no meaningful positive organizational return.

We ❤️ to assess and workshop and train because it's a great break from the day-to-day. At the startup, I enjoyed learning my strengths! 

But that didn't mean the company benefited.

Culture Math helps us keep organizational Return on Culture in view.

Takeaways for Leaders

1. Culture is always an investment.

• These stories reflect real decisions and real costs, whether intentional or passive.

• Choosing not to invest (leaving culture to whatever pops up) simply means you’ve chosen hidden liabilities instead of visible spend.

2. Culture is a portfolio.

• A/B (one-time + recurring) investments start the engine; C (maintenance) keeps it running and compounds returns. Most orgs overspend on shiny A/B and underfund C.

• Not every ritual, perk, or tool yields equal impact. What matters is the mix.

3. Values drive returns.

• You can reinforce extraction (Wells Fargo) or respect/accountability (Campbell’s). The returns — and risks — follow the values you practice.

• Over-optimizing for financial capital while ignoring social/intellectual/experiential capital erodes innovation, trust, and competitiveness.

• Balanced, regenerative values can produce surprising upsides (e.g., Zingerman's training business).

4. Consistency compounds.

• Sustained investment changes the cost/benefit equation over time.

• The lag to positive return depends on the starting point and scale, and is often measured in years.

• Reset mode (Campbell’s) requires years of heavy investment. Maintenance mode (Zingerman’s) sustains benefits daily at a lower cost.

• Once values and practices become embedded, they’re hard — and costly — to unwind. Neglect leads to decay; resets are expensive.

5. Measurement doesn’t have to be perfect.

• Perfect data is impossible in a dynamic system, and chasing it only distracts.

• You don’t need to calculate culture with decimal-point precision to know whether it’s helping or hurting.

• The act of debating what's contributing to your return is itself culture work. Those conversations reveal your priorities, surface trade-offs, and make values visible. This “math” is a lens for discipline, not an accounting exercise.

6. Culture is contagious.

• Healthy practices ripple outward (Zingerman’s training business).

• Toxic ones spread too (Wells Fargo’s sales practices, Intel’s smug market dominance).

• RoC ripples. It shapes your ecosystem and the lives of everyone involved.

Now I’m curious — did you apply the math to your own organization?

What surfaced when you did?

In the next article, we get more concrete. We explore how to calculate Culture Math: the kinds of investments and returns to track, and why any organization planning to last more than five years should take a lesson from permaculture.

See the full series exploring Culture Math.

Working with Us: If you’d like to explore how we can help your organization, please check out our services here.

This article is part of our series exploring Culture Math.

Numbers are my persistent frenemy.

I lose focus when counting past 7 and snooze drooled through calculus.
When asked how we'll measure the success of a workshop or culture improvement program, I cringe.

I'm not cringing because I believe culture work can’t be measured.

No matter how vast the ineffability might be, there's always a before and an after and some kind of countable difference between them.

40% meeting time saved. Employee engagement up by 32%.
Measurably zippier delivery and happier customers.

I cringe because I know leaders want me to promise them results.

I could. Just like the tabloids promise that you can drop 30 pounds in 30 days.
The claims are true, and the promise could come true. For some teams.
If the circumstances are just right.

(I lost 30 pounds in 30 days once, so it's doable!
But I'm not sure if giving birth is an option for everyone?)

The Method Behind Most Case Study Math

Here's how those nicely quantified claims come to be:

1. Before: surveys or a discovery project.
   We count everything we can count, and turn all the subjective "strongly disagrees” to “strongly agrees" into tidy charts.

2. We run the project.

3. Then, we check the numbers again.
   More surveys, more reports. Tada! There’s our After number.

4. We adjust our graphs and highlight the positive changes.
   The others? Boring. Nothing to see there.

For example, here's how Atlassian showed the benefits of a team retreat.

Source: Atlassian Office attendance doesn’t drive team connection. So what does?

Before you send that angrygram, I’m not saying that these numbers are faked (often), or that they don’t represent a real improvement.
I know (many) folks apply significant methodological rigour here.

But can we tell if these numbers represent a lasting change?
Are we even sure it was the retreat that made the difference? Or might it actually be the departure of Evil Ellen, “the Demon Queen of HR”, that has them all so cheery?

Most organizations today can't answer these questions.
They just don't have the data.
Instead, leaders talk about the bigger culture picture as if it were intangible.
A vibe, a mood, or something HR handles on the side.

This is a mistake.
Culture isn’t free, and it isn’t soft. It is built through choices, time, and money.

Measuring Culture Over Time

I've been looking at how to nurture great cultures for over 20 years. Like you, I love the inspiring stories from visionary companies.

I've met many leaders featured in these stories. I’ve heard them complain about their multi-year "zero attrition" challenge. Success does indeed reward leaders with a better class of problems, which they’ll happily share in detail if you’ve got the time.

But who has time for the whole story?

No problem. These luminaries converted their experience into catchy anecdotes. From the messy mash of hard choices, real problems, and monotonous follow-through, they distill a pure elixir of leadership quips and conference talks.

We see their version of the Michael Jordan training montage from Space Jam.
In the keynote, the journey to GOAT runs about 30 seconds.

In reality, it takes years to build great cultures, and the job is never done.
It's also not one job, but instead, a series of coordinated and interwoven efforts.

The best organizations I know continue to invest heavily to keep their culture strong.
They know that as soon as they back off, the energy drains away.

Case in point: Atlassian has the data, and they saw that the boost from a retreat lasts about four months. Without a fresh injection of energy after that, you may land in a worse place than you were at the start.

Source: Atlassian Office attendance doesn’t drive team connection. So what does?

I also know several once-great organizations that now hurt my heart to visit.
Where leaders who kept the story alive moved on, and new leaders must have thought the culture thing took care of itself.

As it always does. There's always a culture.

Of course, it could be a corpulent and diseased culture. Turnover, bureaucracy, rework, churn, backstabbing... that's culture too.

We’re always paying for culture.
The question is: what return are you getting?

This is an awkward conversation to have, because:

• We want and need to believe in the 30-second magical stories!
  These spark hope and help us commit to action.

• Our society prioritizes financial capital above all other forms. 
  We're not so good at talking about deficits in the other forms of energy an organization needs to thrive (social, experiential, etc.). We're even worse at thinking about how those deficits compound over time.

• Most orgs have few resources explicitly dedicated to culture design and maintenance. 
  Even when present, those folks often lack the necessary influence and insight required to ensure their efforts yield results.

So, instead of talking about the hard truths, the consultants, and trainers, and productivity tool vendors sell what overwhelmed leaders can easily understand and buy.

I know this because I’ve been all of the above: the consultant, the trainer, the tech vendor, and the leader, trying to figure out how to invest in my teams.

Survey -> project -> survey: blip!
Survey -> project -> survey: blip!
On repeat.

Which is often far short of what the organization needs.

Here's where Culture Math comes in.

Culture Math is a way to turn those hard-truth conversations into "no duh" conversations about expectations, tradeoffs, and investing wisely.
It shows:

• Where you actively spend to build and sustain culture.

• How those investments convert into impact: revenue, quality, talent, efficiency, innovation, and reputation.

• Whether your culture is compounding into a durable advantage, stuck in blahs-ville, or killing you softly.

I've been playing with this idea for some time. It's changed how I think about past experiences, how I read case studies, and how I structure client work.

I think you might find it handy too, so I'm putting it out there for your comments and critiques in a five-part series.

Series Overview

1. This intro

2. Six real-world mini case studies, and the lessons we can learn from them

3. How to calculate Culture Math, and what you might put in the equation

4. A leader’s playbook for getting a return on culture services, outlining the kind of investment and return you can expect for common projects, and ways to increase mutual accountability in contracting

5. Managing the culture portfolio: a thought-experiment about why orgs need a Culture GC on hand

Let's dive in.

The Math: Calculating Return on Culture Over Time

This equation recognizes two truths:

1. Culture functions like a metabolism.
   Every organization has a baseline energy requirement to stay healthy. Events and programs inject energy. Systems and maintenance routines keep it circulating. Positive relational habits regenerate it. Dysfunction and friction, on the other hand, burn energy faster than you can replenish it.

2. Money is our best measurable proxy for energy.
   Finance is the one measure that translates value across the whole system, making impacts visible across boundaries. For example, we can measure the cost of team retreats and compare that to gains in productivity, efficiency, or retention. Just like currency lets the baker turn bread into pedicures, money lets us translate culture investments into comparable returns.

The Equation

1. Calculate Active Spend (TCC)

TCC = Total Cost of Culture.

We get this number by adding up:

• A. One-time / Event-driven investments (resets, workshops, new systems, retreats)

• B. Recurring spend (licenses, benefits, coaching)

• C. Active maintenance (leader time, rituals, comms, lifecycle practices)

📌 I'll share examples of what you might include and how to quantify each item in Part 3.

2. Calculate Impact

Measure performance against industry benchmarks (preferred) or your own past performance. Look for positive or negative changes in measures such as:

• Revenue: revenue per employee, repeat business, deal size

• Quality: error rates, customer satisfaction, rework

• Talent: recruitment, retention, engagement

• Efficiency: decision cycle time, throughput, collaborative overhead

• Innovation: new revenue share, time to market, R&D yield

• Reputation: brand strength, customer/partner trust

📌 We'll go into this more in Part 3 as well.

3. Calculate Return on Culture (RoC)

👉 The logic:

• TCC (A+B+C) = what you spend.

• Impacts (±) = how culture shows up in business performance.

• RoC  = whether your investments are compounding into advantage, or eroding into hidden liabilities.
  

An Example: 100-Person CPA Firm

This make-believe example is based on industry stats and assumes:

• 100 staff: 10 partners, 70 CPAs, 20 admins.

• Average billing rate = $250/hr, target = 1,600 billable hrs/year.

• Firm revenues ≈ $28M baseline.

Their math:

CPA Firm Example Math

1) Active Spend (TCC)

• A. One-time / event-driven
  Leadership development program + upgraded audit workflow system: $200,000

• B. Recurring spend (annual)
  Coaching retainers + learning subscriptions + survey tools: $150,000

• C. Active maintenance (annualized)

  • Partner time for recognition, team coaching, and mentoring (10 partners × 2 hrs/wk × $150/hr × 52): $156,000

  • Rituals/comms/supplies: $10,000

  • C subtotal: $166,000

TCC (A+B+C) = $200,000 + $150,000 + $166,000 = $516,000 (≈ $516k)

2) Impact

Quality (error/rework reduction)

• Error rates on tax filings/audits drop from 4% to 2%.

• Each error = ~10 hrs rework at $250/hr = $2,500.

• If 70 CPAs handle 200 filings each = 14,000 filings.

• 2% reduction = 280 fewer errors × $2,500 = $700,000 saved.
  Talent (retention)

• Attrition improves 5 heads (from 18% → 13%).

• Avg salary ≈ $90k, replacement cost ~50% = $45k each.

• 5 × $45k = $225,000 saved.
  Reputation (client loyalty)

• Net Promoter Score rises, client retention improves by just 1%.

• 1% of $28M = $280,000 retained revenue.
  Net Culture Impact = $700,000 + $225,000 + $280,000 = $1.205M (≈ $1.2M)

3) Return on Culture (RoC)

👉 For every $1 invested in culture spend, the firm sees about $2.30 in measurable returns.

When you look at that example, what do you notice?

I see:

• Bottom line: a decent return. Double your money, baby! Who wouldn't like that?

• But - notice how unsexy the gains look compared to the miracle claims on LinkedIn. I mean, 1% better client retention? 3% more employee retention? 🥱

• I see one easy way they could quickly improve those retention numbers.
  Do you see it? It isn't something an outside contractor can force.

• ….
  |
  |
  |

• Ok, ok - it's the partner's time! They're each investing just 2 hours per week for mentoring the other 90 people. I bet they golf more than that. 🏌️‍♂️

This Culture Math example raises questions you know leaders face.
Like: what about the opportunity cost?

• Are the partners losing billable time?
  In a pure “billable hour” model, high-dollar partner time spent mentoring looks ruinous. Every 2 hrs/week invested in people = thousands in foregone revenue across the firm. Factor in lost revenue, and the gains quickly shrink.

• But - are those hours a critical capital investment?
  Those same 2 hrs/week may prevent rework, retain clients, and keep talent engaged. That creates a stronger platform for partners to land and grow the big-ticket clients they’re best positioned to serve.

• Does it make sense for partners to remain billable? 
  Or is it time for them to move fully into leader/manager/rainmaker roles?

• Most importantly, how could we make it easier for these leaders to make an informed choice?

About the "Math" in Culture Math

Don't you love how tidy that example is? How every bit of it is backed by a super clear, easy-to-track, standard metric?
Reminds me a bit of all those business case studies...

Getting tidy numbers won't be so easy in practice. That's OK!

The Return on Culture equation doesn't need precision to do its job.

Any attempt to calculate culture’s impact will be approximate, because the whole exercise is a proxy measure for energy. Much of the value (or damage) from cultural investments shows up indirectly across revenue, quality, talent, efficiency, innovation, and reputation. It's a complex dynamic system full of active choices, emergent results, and unintended consequences. Trying to measure it precisely would be like trying to measure hot jello on concrete; messy, slippery, and not the point.

The value is not in chasing decimal-point accuracy, but in forcing clarity. To arrive at an initial equation, you have to ask:

• What are we actually spending to shape culture (A+B+C)?

• Where do we expect to see benefits or risks show up? What do we see?

• What are the assumptions behind our choices? What changes are we willing to consider?

In practice, how you arrive at your figures is part of the exercise. The conversations about which indicators matter, which assumptions are reasonable, and what trade-offs you’re willing to make are themselves acts of culture design. The "math" illustrates the approach; the discipline of working it through reveals the value you intend to create.

You know what's even more useful? When the math doesn't pencil out.

Let's say the CPA firm in the example was making that $516k investment, but getting a negative return. Revenue down, error rates up, employees slipping away faster than a teen at chore time.

Then they'd need to figure out what they missed!

Are they also investing in asshole leaders, dehumanizing working hours, and ugly offices at the end of torturous commutes?
That's an AI-data center's worth of energy drain!
If so, all those coaching dollars are disappearing into a cultural money pit.

With these examples in mind, what else would you factor into the equation?

For those who think this is "too corporate"

Because I focus on team collaboration and ways of working, and at the same time acknowledge that leaders are held accountable for business results and must often make finance-driven decisions, I'm regularly accused of being "too corporate."

Here's what I think about that.

The training, facilitation, and consulting industries are in a hot load of trouble right now because for decades, we haven't been corporate enough.

We KNOW that a 3-hour workshop on psychological safety doesn't do anything on its own.
Sure, you can teach the concept in three hours, but can you learn it? Can you LIVE it? No! Abso-f'ing-lutely not.
And it's only in the living where it counts.

Whether we’re external providers or internal change leaders, when we propose a project that we know can't help teams on its own, without also having a conversation about what they'll need to do to get the benefit - what their total investment needs to be - we're no better than the tabloids.

I want my clients to understand that they need A, and B, and C.
They need the events, and the ecosystem, and the rituals.
I want them to understand the value, which means I need to talk about it in the same language that they use when evaluating all their other investments.

I'm not interested in repeating HR’s mistake.
We are not auxiliary to how organizations create value.
What we do matters. It matters to people's lives and it matters to organizations’ success, and when we fail to talk about the math behind WHY it matters so much, we make this work optional.

Easy to skip. Like, no more free t-shirts, no more workshops.

So if you truly care about the teams you serve, do the math.

Figure out how you can tune your investments to create the most amazing, most loving, most successful energetic culture around.

That's not "being corporate."
It's respecting everyone’s energy and being accountable.

Of course, those conversations are easier when you have relatable stories to back them up. So, here are six culture math examples from real-world organizations, showing how different investment approaches impact culture over time.

This article is part of our series exploring Culture Math.

Have you ever played hide-and-seek with a toddler? They're not very good at it.
Mine believed that if they couldn't see us, we couldn't see them. Like little pink ravenous bugblatter beasts of Traal.

Sometimes they manage to hide most of themselves. But it doesn’t take much seeking to spot the rest.

Adults do the same thing with their opinions.
They hide their "no" under a thin towel of "yes."

But the signs peek out. Projects that never go anywhere. Slow replies. A raft of new questions. Ghosting. Imaginary blockers.

I recently led a session on The Hidden Language of 'No', where we explored ways to uncover objections and address resistance. People asked for more, so here we go—a four-part series on finding the hidden No.

The Series:

• Part 1: Why No Hides ← you are here

• Part 2: Inviting No Into the Conversation
  Asking questions that uncover objections.

• Part 3: Reading the Layers of No in Real Time
  Decode disagreement in the moment using this model.

• Part 4: Mapping Resistance After the Fact
  Reveal what’s stuck and chart a path through the freeze.

Let’s start with why No gets hidden in the first place.

Why No Hides

I'm based in the U.S. West, senior in my profession, and was raised with blunt Norwegian grandparents.
I usually say No when I mean No.

Leaders comfortable sharing a straight-up Yes or No can have trouble interpreting the more opaque ways others say No.

Interpreting the Wonderful Diversity of No

First, there are the silent Nos that we take as Yes.

As master facilitator Nancy Settle-Murphy shared:

Then a participant from an Eastern culture shared that:

In some cultures, disagreement is confrontation. And confrontation is disrespect.
Erin Meyer documents this beautifully:

I saw this firsthand years ago, building voting software for standards orgs. The options included "yes with comment." We’d get 80% yes votes and celebrate—until we read the comments from Japanese and Taiwanese teams.
Twelve serious issues. Clear blockers.
That was not a Yes. That was a diplomatic No.

You don’t have to cross oceans to see this.

Robert Hodge described working with Midwest college leaders:

His takeaway:

Exacerbating Obfuscation: How Leaders Ensure No Stays Hidden

So sometimes Yes means No, and No means Not Yet, and some people are raised to believe that No is never, never okay. No, it is not!

Our cultural and personal differences make discovering true objections tricky, and leaders often seem determined to make their lives even harder by:

1. Not Asking for Real Input

• We forget to ask.

• We worry about how to ask without derailing the conversation.

• We don't feel like we have time.

• We don't want to put people on the spot. 

• We don’t want to offend.

• We ask an unclear question.

Or, as several people noted,

There's an art to asking questions that yield rich answers.
But even when you know how to ask for feedback in a way that helps diverse groups share honest feedback, you might find that you're:

2. Missing the Window for Transparency

That boat has sailed, riding high on a wave of popular opinion.

3. Reacting Without Understanding

People act on the stories they tell themselves.
Even when their understanding is based solely on rumor, assumptions, and best guesses.

This blade cuts both ways.
Leaders happily assume that silence means approval.
Employees may interpret a lack of information as a signal that leaders have greedy plans to profit on the broken backs of their employees.

A 2002 study highlighted how small truths withheld compound into serious resistance:

4. Circling the Validation Vortex

I typically work with leaders, and they claim there's been a significant increase in the level of validation and "hand holding" their newer employees seem to require.
They say it's exhausting.

But it's not just the junior folks. Leaders are more anxious, too.

Pressured, spread thin, second-guessing, trying to keep everyone trucking happily along as the economic highways crumble beneath them.
Leaders are also seeking more validation than in the past.

Ask an anxious leader, "What time does the meeting start?" and watch the spiral:
"I thought 9 AM—wait, is that too early? Maybe 9:30? I know traffic is bad. You could work from home that day if needed. Does that work?"

This is anxiety masquerading as consideration.
Each interaction drains a little more energy as people attempt to assuage each other's insecurities.
Eventually, teams learn:
Stay quiet, avoid triggering anyone's spiral, and preserve your energy.

Bottom line: When teams adopt silence as a survival tactic, resistance festers.

So given all that, how can you break the silence and ask for critical input?

🧊 This article is Part 2 of the series: Find No Sooner, Unfreeze Progress
Strategies for spotting resistance early and understanding what’s stalling your team.

• Part 1: Why No Hides
  The social, cultural, and structural reasons people hide their objections.

• Part 2: Inviting No Into the Conversation ← you are here

• Part 3: Reading the Layers of No in Real Time
  Decode disagreement in the moment using this model.

• Part 4: Mapping Resistance After the Fact
  Reveal what’s stuck and chart a path through the freeze.

Ideally, you want to create conditions that make disagreement speakable—and useful—before it becomes resistance.

Psychological safety doesn’t appear overnight. It’s built through consistent leadership, team rituals, and structural support.

It starts with how you invite critical feedback.

Let’s start with what doesn’t work.

• "Hey, everyone, here's the plan. Any questions?" →
  That’s checking for understanding, not agreement. 🐓💩

• "Do you agree with this decision?" →
  That’s a test, not an invitation. Conflict-averse blood pressure spikes. 📈🧐

• "Why do you have a problem with this?" →
  That’s not curiosity. That’s cross-examination. 😠🫵

If you want honest input, you can’t blow past the moment, ask binary questions, or come across as combative.
Instead:

• Approach the conversation with curiosity, not control

• Ask to understand, not to convince

• Address concerns with respect, not dismissal

Duh! 😄 
Easier said than done, of course, so here are three simple strategies to get you started.

1. Make Room for Objections Every Time

In every 1:1 and team meeting, build in time to discuss questions and concerns.

Leadership expert Paul Axtell suggests throwing the feedback doors wide open by asking:

2. Ask for a range of opinions.

Binary choices shut people down. Instead, offer a range.

Standards committees do this by allowing a “Yes with comment” vote.
You can do the same with:

• Thumb Voting (👍 thumbs up, sideways, or 👎️ or down)

• A 0–5 Check

• Or Kaner’s Gradients of Agreement

Each option gives people a way to say: “I’m in—with reservations.”

If you’re new to asking for feedback this way, download this guide to learn more.

3. Dive into the details.

If you hear yes but get a whiff of no, ask a follow-up question.

🌶️ Hot Tip:
Avoid questions that put people on the defensive, especially those that begin with Why.

Instead, use what, when, and how to invite explanation:

• When will you have time to work on this?

• What’s involved in making sure this goes smoothly?

• What might cause us to miss this target?

• How are you planning to resolve the client's concern?

The more specific the response, the easier it is to spot misalignment before it derails your plans.

Which leads to your next challenge.

No is such a No word. It's all stop, can't, won't, don't.

It sounds final.
But in reality, most resistance starts quietly. A pause. A delay. A reschedule.

These strategies invite “No” into the open before it turns into ghosting, burnout, or sabotage.

But then what?
You've made space for disagreement, and now there’s a No in your Yes! Go, Go! world.
How do you handle that, especially when the conversation gets tense?

🧊 This article is Part 3 of the series: Find No Sooner, Unfreeze Progress
Strategies for spotting resistance early and understanding what’s stalling your team.

• Part 1: Why No Hides
  The social, cultural, and structural reasons people hide their objections.

• Part 2: Inviting No Into the Conversation
  Asking questions that uncover objections.

• Part 3: Reading the Layers of No in Real Time ← you are here

• Part 4: Mapping Resistance After the Fact
  Reveal what’s stuck and chart a path through the freeze.

So you’ve made space for feedback, and someone says No. Now what?

In a world that celebrates speed, certainty, and momentum, hearing “No” can feel really weird. It’s just not the done thing!

But not all disagreements are the same. Some are based on missing facts. Some run deeper. Some disagreements have nothing to do with what you’re discussing.

To work with resistance in the moment, you need to understand where it’s coming from. That’s where the ICE Model comes in.

Apply the ICE Model to Cool Heated Disagreements

The ICE Model is inspired by Michael Wilkinson's excellent guidance to facilitators who encounter disagreements in a workshop. Beyond workshops, I've used these ideas to navigate disagreements in conversations ranging from meetings with the executive team to a casual chat over beers.

(My husband read this and thought I must be talking about him, because he’s the person I chat over beers with most often. Sure, I am! Him and everyone else, because keeping this model in mind is a great way to prevent cordial disagreements from escalating into unhappy arguments.)

The Layers of No helps us navigate three sources of disagreement.

Yes, it's an ice berg—but this one's flipped from what you might expect.

The traditional iceberg metaphor suggests that there are massive hidden challenges below the water, while the visible surface area is small.

That’s not what we see in practice. Information disagreements (the surface ice) are the most widespread conflicts you'll encounter at work. The deeper issues—Convictions and External Factors—affect fewer situations but are much harder to resolve.

This inverted structure reflects the reality of workplace disagreements.

Rick Mauer suggests making a Magic List of all the objections you hear and coding them to show which level they’re at. Then, instead of a wall of objections, you have a discrete list of items matched to appropriate resolution strategies.

Information: The Surface Ice

Unclear, missing, and misunderstood information causes most of the disagreements you'll encounter at work.

When people lack key details, they fill in the gaps with assumptions that send everyone down different paths.

A Few Examples

I met a local government official who assumed farmers were opposing a new gas tax because they were climate deniers. She didn’t realize that the tax would put farmers practicing carbon sequestration and solar farming out of business. The farmers were actively combating climate change, AND they still need fuel for their tractors. What looked like ideological opposition was really a practical concern about an unintended consequence.

Jack Stack realized information disagreements were at the root of his leadership challenges when he was the CEO of an engine manufacturing firm in the '90s. 

Things were rough, and when he'd push for efficiency measures, workers pushed back. His employees told each other stories about where the money was going, and assumed management was just eager to pocket bigger profits.

So, Jack began sharing financial statements and educating employees about the company’s finances, making sure that workers didn’t need to speculate about how much money was going to the ownership group, "since the numbers were right there.”

Once everyone was looking at the same information, much of the old resentment dissipated. It became much easier to collaborate on improvements. Ensuring everyone had access to information proved so powerful that it gave rise to Open-book management model, which has been successfully adopted by companies around the world.

Mr. Stack found that radical transparency radically reduces Information conflicts.

Duolingo’s CEO is learning this lesson the hard way.

In May 2025, Mr. Von Ahn sent an “AI-first” memo announcing that the company would require AI for all roles and stop using contractors for work AI could handle.

This triggered weeks of anxiety and backlash from employees, concerned about job security and the company’s direction, and a massive outcry from the public.

Two weeks later, with users fleeing the platform in droves, Von Ahn posted a second memo internally and on LinkedIn, saying:

The second memo emphasized that no employee's job would be harmed in the coming AI revolution. Instead, AI would be used to accelerate and enhance their work.
Employees remain skeptical.

These are loud, public examples of how missing information can create conflict.
Smaller examples – "Oh, you want it next Friday, not tomorrow? Ok then!" – abound too.

What to Do

Regardless of the scope, the first step in breaking the Ice is to slow down and clearly outline the details.

Get granular. Map assumptions. Michael recommends delineating alternatives, which works great. I’ve found that 5D Mapping works even faster, and I’ll share more on that this summer. (And if you’re curious now, let me know! That’s my favorite tool.)

Regardless of your approach, the key is to move past generalities into the specifics.
As a participant in our workshop on this topic noted:

Convictions: Beliefs Below the Surface

Even when everyone has all the information, people may hold different values and/or experiences, which lead them to a different answer.

Here, disagreement stems from what people prioritize or believe matters most.

Two executives might agree on all the budget numbers yet still clash over whether to invest in customer service or product development. They share the same data, but their past experiences and core beliefs about what drives business success point them toward different choices. The conflict lives in their fundamental approaches to solving the problem.

Classic Example

Sales and engineering teams.
Sales will happily promise the moon because that's what gets the customer in the door. Engineering prefers to under-promise and over-deliver.

Do they both want awesome products and happy customers? Absolutely. But their roles require prioritizing different values, which can bring teams into conflict.

When you've outlined the details behind a conflict and learned that the issue isn't one of missing information, but rather of convictions, it's time to figure out what those experiences or values are.

Sales values satisfied customers, but not as much as they do new revenue.
Engineers value company growth and profits, but often place higher priority on product quality.

What to Do

Resolving disagreements like these requires finding new alternatives that respect both priorities and build on their shared values. Once again, Michael posted a great example of how you might address a disagreement rooted in convictions.

External Factors: The Deep Dark Freeze

Sometimes it isn't about information or competing values.
Some disagreements run much deeper, rooted in bad history, personality conflicts, or factors completely unrelated to the issue at hand.

Down here, you're dealing with purely emotional objections.
The “I just don't like your stinking face,” type.
When two leaders hate each other and object to anything the other proposes.
When the nurses oppose every doctor's initiative because of years of being dismissed.

Example

A workshop participant shared:

What to Do

As Nancy Settle-Murphy observed:

In the short term, you can try mediation or coaching. For disagreements that need to be resolved yesterday, you can escalate to a higher authority. (That’s Michael’s advice, too.)

And sometimes, you can acknowledge the deep disconnect, then design around it.

Caution: This is ice, not a parfait.

The layers give us a useful way to consider the sources of disagreement and clues about how we can attempt to resolve them. But just like with real icebergs, the boundaries between these layers aren't clean, and sometimes people disagree at multiple levels at the same time.

It’s ice all the way down.

I saw this when helping run a Braver Angels Common Ground workshop on abortion.

First, the obvious Nos were on the table.
Participants represented opposite sides of this polarized issue, declaring either “I am pro-life” or “I am pro-choice.” The workshop involved several chances for opposite pairs to exchange views as we discussed:

• What are the values and concerns you think that you and the other side might share?

• What are some policies that you and the other side might be able to agree on?

Everyone was asked to speak from their personal experience, and to raise questions about anything they felt was unclear.

When someone asked, “Wait—what do you mean by extended benefits?” we discovered people assumed different policies were already in place.
We uncovered several information-level disagreements like this.

Then, during a breakout, a pro-life and a pro-choice pair were stunned to discover that “we have the exact same policy preferences!” Once they turned from generalities to details, they found a shared preference for policies limiting abortion after “somewhere in that 13-to-16-week window.”

But they framed it differently. One spoke of “protecting the life of the child” and the other of “protecting the autonomy of the woman,” reflecting their differing Convictions.

Finally, External Factors emerged: participants noted influences ranging from where they were raised, who they’re married to, and stories they’d heard. Those outside pressures—family, local norms, extreme examples in the media—drove each person’s activist stance. Those stances often had little to do with real abortion policy details and more to do with group identity and belonging.

A Time and Place to Disagree and Commit

The Layers of No model encourages us to get curious about disagreements, then use the most appropriate strategy to attempt resolution.
One workshop participant asked, "How does this balance with the idea of disagreeing, but committing to the collective choice?"

I shared my Braver Angels experience to highlight that:
Some disagreements can't be easily resolved. It doesn't always matter.

That Common Ground workshop revealed a lot of agreement between the pro-life and pro-choice attendees. With this to build on, we could remain aware of disagreements and still commit to moving ahead on those areas where we do agree.

In 2 hours, the group unanimously agreed to the statements above. That’s a good start.

This kind of "disagree and commit"— where groups carve out areas they can agree on and commit to joint action even though they still disagree about other things—is a different beast from the way it’s used in companies.

The corporate call to disagree and commit is a norm where someone voices objections, then agrees to support the final choice anyway.
It's supposed to be invoked when a leader wants to elicit people’s input, but needs to prevent lengthy debate.

When used appropriately, an invitation to disagree and commit can yield:

• Faster decisions: By capping debate, teams avoid paralysis. Once objections are out, the group picks a course and moves.

• Better decisions: By creating an opportunity to share concerns, leaders are more likely to hear information pointing to a better alternative.

• Clarity on ownership: When you commit in front of a group, it encourages accountability.

The Open Practice Library includes a great primer on how to effectively apply the Disagree and Commit approach to decision making.

Unfortunately, too many leaders think,
"I need to be decisive and go, go, go. This is BUSINESS! We don't have time to worry about everyone's feelings. Disagree and commit! Get with the program!"

(Can you tell I spent years working as a woman in tech? Does it show?
Let’s just say there were executive man-boys in my past who liked to beat down objections with their disagree and commit stick whenever they were challenged, and I’m still cheesed.)

When used to shield a decision that's being rammed through, disagree and commit increases groupthink and creates the same problems as not asking at all.

If you invite No and then dismiss it, you’ll soon find that valid concerns are suppressed, resentments hidden, and people quietly resist acting on their supposed "commitments."

So let's say the horse is out of the barn. You missed the chance to find No early, and now the growing ice is slowing your teams down. What can you do?

That depends on the kind of resistance you're facing.

In Part 4, we’ll shift from real-time conversations to after-the-fact analysis.
When momentum stalls and you’re not sure why, it’s time to map the resistance.

🧊 This article is Part 4 of the series: Find No Sooner, Unfreeze Progress
Strategies for spotting resistance early and understanding what’s stalling your team.

• Part 1: Why No Hides
  The social, cultural, and structural reasons people hide their objections.

• Part 2: Inviting No Into the Conversation
  Asking questions that uncover objections.

• Part 3: Reading the ICE in Real Time
  Decode disagreement in the moment using the ICE model.

• Part 4: Mapping Resistance After the Fact ← you are here

Three months after the "successful" launch, the project stalls.
Meetings get rescheduled. Action items linger. The enthusiasm from that final planning session has evaporated, replaced by growing unease.

Before the launch, you asked for input.
You worked through disagreements. You got buy-in.
And now you’re watching progress freeze in place while everyone maintains the polite fiction that everything is fine.

Late resistance is harder to spot and even harder to talk about.
That’s where Resistance Mapping comes in: a way to make what’s freezing the work visible, so you can decide what to do next.

What Resistance Looks Like

Nancy described the worst kind of resistance:

Some decisions immediately fail the water cooler test.

But more often, you only notice resistance when your project begins to fail.

When I ask groups what resistance looks like on their teams, they all have answers.

• Most commonly: no replies and rescheduled meetings,

• "A barrage of questions and philosophizing and justifying and this whole dance. It's like a wrestling match. Exhausting."

• "They give up easily. They don't sit and struggle with it. It's so easy to go do something else instead. Email, go talk to your friend, that other project..."

• "Or like a person who just can't say no, so takes things on. I can see that from the outside that it's too much, but okay! They said yes, so I hope they follow through..."

The easiest way to say no is to say nothing at all and hope the question goes away. When objections are never voiced, or when they're dismissed, quiet resistance becomes a way to reclaim power.

Finding the Freeze

We uncover resistance using classic discovery techniques.
Interviews, observations, data analysis, and surveys. Talking to people.

You'll bring the same spirit of curiosity and care that we recommended when we talked about questions to ask before making a decision. Only now, you're playing catch-up on a project going wrong.

Sample questions that reveal resistance

• What will you need to support this (project/initiative/change)?

• What, if anything, will make this challenging?

• What might cause this to fail?

• How confident are you in this deadline?

(Which questions do you find most useful? Let us know in the comments.)

As you learn more, you'll realize that not all resistance needs to be eliminated.
Some of it simply needs to be understood well enough to work with it, or to realize your plan needs rethinking.

As one workshop participant said:

True that! Most of the time, though, you'll need to take action.

Resistance Mapping:
When One Solution Won't Thaw the Freeze

Resistance to large initiatives rarely comes from just one source or stakeholder group.

Consider what happened when Duolingo announced their AI-first strategy in 2025.

The executive team was clearly excited about what they saw as a bold strategic move to position the company for the future. But when they announced their intent to be AI-first, different groups raised completely different concerns:

• Contractors worried about job security and timeline confusion

• Employees questioned whether this meant layoffs despite reassurances

• Customers raged about losing the human touch in language learning

• Analysts wanted clarity on revenue impact and market positioning

Each group's resistance stemmed from different barriers and would require different solutions. You can't address contractor concerns about the timeline with the same approach you'd use for angry customers threatening to delete the app.

Most leaders facing this kind of multi-stakeholder resistance default to one of two extremes: whack-a-mole problem solving (tackle issues as you spot them) or massive discovery projects involving extensive interviews, panels, and organizational network analysis.

Resistance mapping sits between and alongside these approaches. It's substantial enough to capture the complexity of multi-group resistance, but focused enough to guide decision-making without getting lost in analysis paralysis.

What Is a Resistance Map?

A Resistance Map visualizes the different barriers causing various stakeholder groups to resist your change or initiative. It's structured as a simple matrix: stakeholders across the top, common resistance barriers down the side.

As you discover resistance through interviews, surveys, or observation, you capture representative examples in the appropriate cells. Then you color-code based on urgency and threat level, highlighting which combinations of stakeholder and barrier type pose the biggest risk to your project's success.

The map's power lies in what it reveals: different stakeholder groups often need completely different solutions, and a single communication strategy—no matter how well-crafted—won't address everyone's concerns.

Example: Resistance to Duolingo's AI-First Strategy

Click to see this larger, or download the template linked below, which includes this example.

How to Use A Resistance Map

The map highlights two critical insights for leaders:

Urgency and Resource Allocation: The color-coding shows you where to focus first. Darker colors indicate barriers that could kill your project if left unaddressed. Lighter or no color shows the ones you feel can be easily addressed or revisited later, after you’ve put out the fires.

Multi-Pronged Strategy Necessity: Looking at the Duolingo example, you can see that managers who need resources require a different solution than contractors who need clarity, which is different from the approach needed for customers who are fundamentally opposed to the direction.

Some resistance can be addressed with targeted communication—hold briefings for confused analysts, send detailed timelines to contractors. But other resistance, like an enraged customer base, signals the need for significant program changes: product modifications, pricing adjustments, or even finding new markets that aren't hostile to your approach.

The map prevents you from thinking a better memo will solve everything.

Final Tip: Blank Cells Help Leaders Focus

You can see that I left many cells blank in the table above.

For example, the top row for Information Gap only includes generalized comments from Contractors and Investors. This doesn't mean that everyone else felt the information was clear. Far from it. In fact, there were so many angry comments on these memos that we could easily fill out all of the cells in the map.

That would defeat the purpose.

The map's job is to highlight the types of resistance you've found, the strength of that resistance, and the areas that you believe leaders need to address most urgently. Adding only one or two representative examples of each barrier makes the map easier to read and a more useful decision aid.

That said, you may find it useful to supplement these qualitative examples with a count of the number of comments/observations expressing each concern.

In that case, our Duolingo example might look something like this (with totally made-up numbers):

Just be sure to keep your map to the simplest useful level of information needed to support a conversation about next steps, and have the full details ready to reference should questions arise.

In Conclusion:
I Hope You Learn to Love an Easy No

One theme has run through this whole series:
The longer you wait to surface a disagreement, the harder it becomes to resolve.

The simplest moves—inviting feedback early, asking clarifying questions—often prevent the need for the more complex moves we explored here.

But if resistance surfaces late, tools like the ICE Model and Resistance Mapping give you a way to work with what’s real, rather than getting stuck in wishful thinking.

Every clear “No” you hear early is a gift.
It gives you choices.
It earns trust.
And it can turn skeptics into allies by showing them that you care enough to ask.

So next time you see those little feet sticking out from under the blanket of “Yes,” don’t pretend you can’t see them.

Get curious. Ask questions. Welcome the No.

That’s what it takes to clear the ice so real progress can flow.

Thanks all!
I’m looking forward to your questions and suggestions for improvement!

Ah! There it is.

Curious about how this connects to broader collaboration and decision practices?
Our work on designing collaborative ecosystems and 5D Thinking offers more ways to keep your team moving forward. Explore here.

Organizations are Alive.

This is not a metaphor.

I mean alive quite literally, but not in the same way that you are.
Organizational boundaries are too porous for that.
Yes, I know that your boundaries are scientifically fuzzy too, but your experience is distinct. So's mine.
You stop there, I begin here. Separate.

At least that's the story I tell myself.

When we decide to do something together, though, we share a story.
It isn’t just in my head or yours.
It lives between us.

When we agree to form an organization and invite many others to join us, we create an even bigger story.

Organizations Are a Story We Agree to Live In.

In this way, organizations are alive.
They are formed from an initial story and grown.

Their story attracts people, shapes culture, and drives behavior.

Organization stories exist beyond the component people.
They have opinions and momentum. They change the world around them.

Where Do Stories Come From?

You may as well ask, Where do thoughts come from?

Scientists can detect simple decisions in our brains seconds before we’re aware of them.

If awareness is informed of our choices rather than making them, who’s really driving the bus?

Physically, you and I are made of the same stuff as oceans and puppies.
At the subatomic level, there’s no difference.
So what makes matter configure into the experience of you?

Debates about consciousness, free will, and the true nature of the universe remain unresolved.

Whatever the deeper truth:
You are a story the universe agreed to tell.

So are organizations.

Sentience = a configuration of space-time capable of experience.
Humans and organizations have experiences. They hold perspectives.
Interpreting those perspectives creates meaning.

Meaning manifests as story.

True Stories are Still Stories.

Birds built a nest above our BBQ. They hatched chicks—noisy, messy, delightful.
We love cooking outside in summer. It's getting hotter every day.
I hope the chicks leave soon.

All of that is true.

It’s a snapshot of now, how I feel about now, and a mini-dream for the future.

• Contentment = enjoying the story as it is

• Goal = a story we intend to make true

• Happiness = a story that comes true

• Delight = an unexpected happy truth

That's my frame on the birds in both fact and narrative.
I'm sure your frame is different and also true.

Strategy Is a Story.

I love Vivid Visioning.

It’s a strategic practice where a group writes a story about the future after they’ve succeeded. It might begin like this:

Sometimes it's an epic, full of fame and fortune.
Sometimes it's a cosy story about a product that makes people happy.

Vivid visions tell us a story we can agree to live into.

I also love Premortems and Future Backwards, which invite darker, more bizarre narratives. They help us agree on what we don't want.

Strategies may be handed down from leadership to the rest of the organization, like Moses with his tablets. Moses carried important truth.

But even the truest stories are not all the way true.
Every strategy is limited by the storyteller’s perspective.

Strategies shaped by listening across the organization carry more truth.
They’re harder to write, but easier to believe.

Collaborative Overload Signals Clashing Narratives.

Quick syncs. Touch base. A chat.
Microsoft recently reported that 60% of meetings are now ad-hoc.
This number has been climbing for years.

I’ve researched and catalogued the types of meetings where decisions are made, issues resolved, and plans formed.
Our taxonomy details sixteen ways to run quality meetings that move work forward.

Ad hoc syncs didn’t make that list.
No clear output. No obvious progress.
We label them "wasteful."

But I missed their role.

An ad hoc sync literally gets us back in sync when:

• I don't get the strategy. How is that supposed to work?

• Plot twist! The story changed.

• I forgot. What was that again?

• Oooh! But what about...

• Wait. What? I wasn't listening.

This is narrative repair. Lots and lots of it.
When stories drift, fragment, or confuse, we gather to reconcile our sense of what’s going on.

Pain Reveals a Mismatch Between Our Story and Our Experience.

I should be. But I'm not.
Thin. Fast. Successful. Strong. Still. Polished.
Wise.

As individuals, we feel pain when there’s a gap between the story we tell ourselves and the reality we live.

Organizations feel pain when their stories don’t line up.
We say we care about quarterly profits and inclusion, and sustainability, and innovation, and well-being.
But when people’s experiences don’t match these claims, the pain gets new names:

Disengagement. Friction. Misalignment. Dysfunction.
Conflict.

Stories Change.

Startups don’t need a lot of meetings or processes. They’re chasing one story.
And while they’re constantly testing and rewriting it, everyone’s crashing on the same draft, usually in the same room.

A startup is an organizational first draft.

As organizations grow, their story grows too.
It branches, deepens, and accumulates lore.
How we started.
→Who we are now.
→Where we’re headed.
Why the IT crowd is secretly cool.

Stories evolve:
Article → Short story → Novel → Series → Universe → Wiki of fan fiction

Growing a company is real-life world-building.

We ask people to believe—imagine—that the organization has a future worth paying attention to.
We need them to want to see how the story turns out.

Leaders are Story Stewards.

Tom Nixon observed that in the most progressive organizations—where authority is distributed, teams are self-managed, and the mission is alive—there’s usually one person at the center holding the story.
Too often, that story dissolves when leader leaves.

When that happens, it’s tempting to blame the structure.
“Self-managing organizations are fragile,” they say.
If a single person’s departure breaks the structure, how good could that structure be?

But it’s not the structure that’s fragile.
It’s the story.

The business world hasn’t yet told itself that self-management is a viable way to work.
So when a leader leaves, no pool of obvious successors shares a narrative for what happens next.

New leaders bring their old stories with them.

The same disruption plays out in traditional hierarchies, too.
New CEO, new org chart, new playbook.
The difference for hierarchical orgs is that both old and new CEOs believe in org charts. That story stays intact.

Whatever story leaders hold shapes the organization.
So what happens when the CEO’s vivid vision is focused entirely on profit?

I think we know.

Supplier-Induced Demand = an Outsider’s Story About You That You Believe.

Maxim Sytch recently noted that consultants and thought leaders share many narratives about what your organization is probably doing wrong.
Then, they (we) sell you fixes.

Of course we do. You call a consultant when you're in pain.
You ask us to dig into it, name it, and make it better.
The view outside our window is full of leaders and teams with problems.

We tell stories based on what we see. And it’s not wrong. It’s just… filtered.

Read our research, and it’s clear. Things are complex.
There’s nuance, context, and layers.

But nuance doesn’t sell. And thought leaders gotta eat.
So the message gets distilled.

Marketing and media exist to spread stories.
The short, emotional ones go farther, faster.
Tiny CRISPR snippets of the original story’s DNA—extracted and delivered straight to your feed.

We say these ideas go “viral.”

So—how many of your organization’s problems are homegrown?
And how many were injected from outside?

Try this:

• List your organization’s key problems.

• Ask: Who noticed them first? How were they identified?

• Count: how many only became obvious after an outsider taught you how to see them?

When We Stop Believing and Sharing Stories

Ours is a pattern-matching intelligence.
2 + 2 = 4. That’s a bird. That’s a bully.

We feel certainty when what we experience is congruent with the story we believe.
When the patterns line up enough, the story feels true.

Thirty years ago, most of the stories we heard were congruent with our experiences.
MTV was the coolest thing ever. Butter would kill you.
Personal computers were for hobbyists.
Even if you weren’t allowed to watch MTV, you knew it was cool. (Thanks, mom 🙄 )
We shared enough context to believe roughly the same things at the same time.

Since then, culture has fractured.
AND we rely more heavily than ever on the media to give us context.
But not on the same media.
My husband and I don't even read the same news.

We rely on the same media that exists to distribute viral ideas for profit.

All this fracturing means we have fewer shared patterns.
More and more, the stories we hear don't ring true.
They aren't congruent with our experience.

This is obvious in our politics, but also applies to the stories organizations tell.

The Bizarre Gospel of AI

Many organizations now seem to believe they must integrate AI into everything.
They take it on faith that:

• AI will increase productivity.

• AI will free people from tedious tasks.

• AI will make companies more competitive.

• AI will solve intractable problems.

And somehow, all of that is supposed to benefit everyone.

But these claims feel incongruent for many, because:

• Productivity gains of the past made richer rich people and poorer poor people. Why should we support that?

• Productivity of what, for whom? We’re already drowning in stuff and info.

• Who determines tedium? And what replaces it? Constant engagement? Performative creativity? Exhausting.

• What do ALL the people freed from tasks do? No one seriously believes we'll all manage teams of AI robots, do they?

• Do companies need to be more competitive? Is that what helps build a better society?

• Intractable problems - cool!
  If AI solves cancer, will the cure be freely available, or sold to the highest bidders?

The story doesn’t ring true yet. So, where did it come from?
Who started the rumor that universal, rapid AI adoption is both mandatory and good?

And maybe it will turn out great.
I really hope this starts to make sense, because I love working with AI.
But as someone with very blue-collar roots, the story from tech-bro land isn't yet congruent with the patterns I recognize.

Also
Our popular imagination is full of good AI intentions gone wrong. Many, many Star Trek episodes show us that there's a good reason the United Federation of Planets banned sentient computers.

I just can't square how what we're doing now is so different from what the stories foretell.

Maybe that's just me? But I don't think so.
Things feel off.

The new AI gospel is just one example of what seems to be a pervasive dissonance.

We need a better story to live in.

One that feels hopeful.
And TRUE.

Stories End.

Stories can be rejected. The Earth isn't flat.

Stories may be lost.
Who built the pyramids? Who first lived below Cappadocia?
How did Grandma make her gravy?
We'll never know.

Every failed organization began as a failed story.

Big companies grow, sprawl, and lose the heart of their narrative, making them easy prey for a sharp competitor.

Startups tell a story that fails to spread.

Organizations die when we stop believing they should exist.

But then...
this leaves room for a new story.

A Note on Influence
This article felt like something I should jot down as it arose. It sits in the shadows of other people's stories, which in tiny ways here are retold, recombined, merged into, evolved out of, rejected, befriended, and lightly swirled together.
Appreciation and apologies to Maxim Sytch, Ari Weinzwig Norman Wolfe, Frederic Laloux, AllSides, Yuval Noah Harari, Gary Klein, Tom Nixon (via Stowe Boyd), Dave Snowden, Annaka Harris (via Helen Edwards), Ajay Reddy, the AI Tinkerer's Club, Jennifer Garvey Berger, and Gene Roddenberry.

There’s a tipping point in every new project when the conversation shifts from “Should we do this?” and “Am I willing to participate?” to “Which shade of blue should we use in that diagram?” 

This isn't a metaphor. Every new team and company I've joined or started in the past 25 years has, at some point, debated which blue to use.

Some of the many blues we’ve debated over the years.
I’m struck by how none of them are very blue blues.

The Ways of Working Operating System (WoW OS) initiative is ambitious. A growing group of dedicated volunteers is shaping the system, and we've recently crossed the Shades of Blue threshold.

We're now starting to tackle tougher questions, like:
What makes one idea distinct from another?

Let's explore this using the Zero to Five (0 to 5) technique as an example.

What’s that? 👉 Download this 0 to 5 Guidebook to learn more.

If you're just here for the guide, enjoy! Zero to Five is one of the nine meeting techniques I unabashedly love. You should absolutely add it to your repertoire.

And if you’re mostly here for the how-tos, feel free to skip the rest of this article.
Because we’re about to get geeky.

Ready to get your collaboration geek on?! 
Let’s go.

🌰 WoW OS in a Nutshell

The WoW OS initiative is collecting expertise regarding effective ways of working in an open platform so that we can:

• Quickly find useful practices.

• Identify overlaps and gaps.

• Iteratively improve approaches.

• Clarify how multiple frameworks relate.

• Connect organizations with experts based on substance, not branding.

Sounds handy, right? It will be!
But first, we need to collect and organize all that expertise.

We know that humans work best together when there's a clear structure, and that the human brain loves a good pattern.

So, we've established high-level categories for organizing our ideas. We're calling the smallest building blocks Elements. This is where we'll publish individual practices, methods, design guides, models, e.g., this stuff:

Click to enlarge. (FYI: the color scheme is provisional. Our blue debate remains unresolved.)

Now, it's time to add Elements. Steph Gioia, who leads the spiritual twin project either/org wisely warned:.

As many studies show, however, multiple discovery happens all the time, and true creativity is exceptionally rare.

And in many ways, every idea is unique. But sometimes the differences are mostly cosmetic. Minor variations shouldn’t get separate entries.

That’s why Steph recommends training curators—people who can help sort, categorize, and occasionally say: “That already exists.”

Which brings us to the big question…

What Counts as a Variation?

Let’s use the Zero to Five (0 to 5) method as a case study.

I first wrote about it in 2014 and have since trained approximately 1 billion people in the many ways this technique comes in handy.

Here’s how I described it back in the Lucid Meetings glossary.

What is Fist to Five?

The Fist to Five is a technique for quickly getting feedback or gauging consensus during a meeting. The leader makes a statement, then asks everyone to show their level of agreement with the statement by holding up a number of fingers, from 5 for wild enthusiasm (Jazz hands!) down to a clenched fist for vehement opposition.

This graphic shows one way to define the Fist to Five scale.
Make sure to clarify what 0 to 5 means for your group.

I copied my 2014 definition verbatim for two reasons:

1. So you know what I'm talking about and,

2. So you can see the first potential source of duplication.

Now, did you notice the caption below the graphic? It says to "Make sure to clarify what 0 to 5 means for your group." That implies that you might define 0 to 5 differently.

We assume the starting question will change, because groups will need consensus for different decisions. This makes 0-to-5 a go-to technique for everyone from software teams agreeing on estimates to boards approving investments. But is it still the same technique if you change the question and what each rating means?

The ROTI (Return on Time Invested) variation does just that by asking people to raise fingers to rate an experience, with 0 = it was terrible and 5 = best thing ever.

Then there's this gem from a recent training:
“What about people who don’t have hands?”

First, if you know you're meeting with handless folks, use a different technique! Seriously.

But should you only learn about an accessibility challenge in the moment, don't fret.

I see all of these as variations on the same technique. When we add these variations to the WoW OS:

• We can list different names as aliases, or "also known as."

• We can supply a set of sample questions and ratings that work well with a 0 to 5 scale, showcasing variations.

• We can share alternate ways for people to post their ratings, accounting for different ability levels or settings.

I would advocate for a single entry in the WoW OS catalog covering all of the above, and I'll contribute the content from the guide as a start.

When Is It a Different Technique?

People learning 0 to 5 often ask, "Why not just use a poll or survey?" 

Good question. This is a change to both the interaction AND the channel, and more importantly, a change in how the group can use the results.

Polls provide anonymity, making them feel safer to some, especially in larger groups. But anonymity sacrifices the social synchrony and real-time visibility that make 0-to-5 powerful. Polls generate charts to review later, but they don't spark immediate dialogue or alignment.

The purpose is different.

I also see techniques like Kaner's Gradients of Agreement and Roman Voting as distinct.

Gradients of Agreement, developed by Sam Kaner and colleagues, asks participants to share their level of support one at a time using a 10-point scale. It’s designed to surface nuance and prompt discussion, but takes more time and usually requires a visual guide.
(Just to confuse things, here’s a description of Gradients that uses a 6-point scale and suggests collecting replies in a poll. And we wonder why folks get confused!)

Roman Voting is fast and informal: thumbs up to agree, thumbs down to disagree, sideways for abstain/meh. It’s easy to run but forces people into broad categories. That’s fine for low-stakes choices (thumbs up for pizza!), but less useful when real concerns need air.

Given the WoW OS Element categories shown above, here's how I would organize 0 to 5, Gradients of Agreement, Polls, Roman Voting, and others like them.

And yet... this is far from perfect. Check-ins are used to see how folks are feeling today, which is clearly different than checking for consensus on a decision.
But you can use a 0 to 5 check for both, so...

Judgment calls will need to be made.
WoW OS curators will have their work cut out for them.

Testing Our Way to Living Taxonomies

Blue is not teal, nor is there a perfect boundary between them.
The same holds for our many wonderful ways of working.

By examining how a representative technique supports groups across four dimensions—purpose, content, interaction, and channel—we can begin making informed distinctions.

Of course, those four dimensions only tell part of the story. We will also want to describe structured interactions using additional metadata, like:

• Time per activity

• Materials needed

• Accessibility

• Cultural context

• Project lifecycle phase

• Complexity

• and more.

Detailed metadata won’t tell us whether two approaches are the same, but it will help us understand when and how to use them, and for whom they’re most appropriate. With enough of these descriptors, we’ll be able to group and discover techniques based on similarity and situational fit, not just structural form.

As I worked through this article, a final insight emerged:

Our classification challenge doesn’t resemble the work of librarians or patent officers nearly as much as it mirrors the dilemmas faced by biologists. While librarians work with clean metadata and patent officers seek to make definitive pass/fail calls, our landscape is far more organic.

In our ecosystem, the same technique might evolve independently, show up with a dozen aliases, and serve wildly different purposes depending on the context. Some tools, like group rating methods, live best in a real-time group setting. Others, like visual thinking frameworks, can be used solo, with groups, in the moment, and over time.

Like biologists, we must accommodate mutation, hybridization, and environmental adaptation. We'll need to examine structural dimensions—not just names—to guide classification. The living nature of the work we do and the organizations we serve means that clarity here won’t come from enforcing limits, but from nurturing a system flexible enough to allow for emergent patterns and structured enough to highlight that which helps us thrive.

We must never devolve into the imposition of rigid boundaries. Instead, we must aim for just enough curation to make solutions discoverable, variation encouraged, and practice easier to share, adapt, and evolve.

What You Can Do With All This

0 to 5 is a fabulous, versatile team ritual. Grab the guide, and get in touch if you’d like to schedule a one-hour hands-on (or rather, hands up!) practice session.

The WoW OS project is picking up steam. Learn how you can get involved. 

Thoughts, comments, questions, disagreements? Reply by email or in the comments. We openly, warmly welcome your thoughts.

Did you find this useful? Know someone else who might enjoy it and contribute to the conversation?
Please forward, share, subscribe, and help us spread the word. Thank you!
Interested in bringing Elise to work with your teams or clients? Get in touch.

I was enjoying the Beastie Boys, and it reminded me of you and my in-laws.

First, my in-laws.

They believe it is both proper and obvious to serve casserole on Fridays.

Casserole, every Friday.

If they subscribed to a newsletter that featured a casserole recipe they loved, they would find it irritating to receive culinary travel tips or a deep dive into the origins of bubble tea¹ .

My in-laws believe in the power of simplifying decisions and consistency.
If you’re doing casserole, you do casserole. No fuss, no muss, no debate.

Me? Not so much.

Casserole every Friday for the rest of my life? Hell on earth.

My inlaws seem perfectly happy, though. While I can’t understand how they endure the drudgery of their relentless meal plan, they can’t understand why I’d subject my family to one-time experimental meals.

They don’t believe my occasional masterpieces excuse any of the inedible disasters.

Is predictability better than variety? We disagree. Still, we get along just fine. 

We’ve enjoyed several lovely casseroles together, too. I love the occasional Friday casserole, and they tolerate culinary excursions on Saturdays.

So that’s my in-laws.

What about you?
Do you prefer predictability or variety? 

I think we can still get along just fine either way.

But I realized that this publication isn’t serving our predictability-loving friends as well as it could.

We don’t have a consistent publication schedule. And while the articles all relate to working with other people, that’s a giant circus tent under which we showcase a variety of wonders.

Our fabulous parade of newsletter acts includes:

How-Tos
We’ve published activity guides, tools, and recipes, such as:

• Tackling Team Overwhelm Together: Conversation Guide and Reader Tips

• Tailor-Made WoW: The Why, When, and How of Team Agreements

• The Engagement Decoder: Know Before You Go!

Interviews
We’ve highlighted fascinating thinkers, including:

• Ashley Goodall on The Problem with Change

• Alison Wood Brooks on the Science of Conversation

• André Martin on Finding Fit at Work

Mini Experiments
We invited you to try out:

• A Thought Experiment: Create an API for Working with You

• From Your Future, with Love: Run a Mini Experiment to Hone Your Intent and Shape What's Next

5D Thinking
We’re very excited about the power of perspective-taking and reframing using 5D Thinking. We plan to share much more about this going forward, adding to existing articles like:

• When Creativity Plays Hard to Get: The Framing Challenge

• Intentional Collaboration: Building Framing Skills Using the Tesseract

• Exploring Perspectives, Not Elephants

• Same is good. Same is bad. So is different.

Rethinking How We, As Collaboration Experts, Serve Organizations
Most recently, we’ve been questioning how we and other collaboration experts go about our jobs.

• The way we’ve been talking about teams is too one-size-fits-all. Instead, we need to recognize the Three Truths About Teamwork (and their Collaborative Twists).

• The way we promote one tool over another or focus on solving one layer of the problem without regard to the others doesn’t work. Instead, we need to Pay Attention to the Ripple Effects Across the Collaborative Ecosystem.

• The way we fight to promote each special framework and secure a budget for one precious methodology over another leaves clients with partial solutions and drains energy, value, and time from the expert community.
  Instead, we should consider Open Sourcing Our Expertise.

The point of this recap?

First, in case you missed something, check out the links above! The Labs archive is rife with good stuff, including the occasional masterpiece and only a few duds.

Second, we want to give you a choice.

This newsletter platform lets us segment subscribers based on survey replies. We recognize that, just like some folks only want casserole on Fridays, others may only be interested in the How-Tos.

What about you? Share your interests in the poll below, and we’ll try to send you only the articles you’re interested in going forward. (Sorry, there’s no multiple choice option.

Let us know in the next few days, especially if you DO NOT want to learn more about Open Sourcing knowledge work.

Because that’s what's coming next!

With very fond regards to everyone who expects casserole each Friday, and everyone who really, really does not,

Elise

P.S. For those who do not know the Beastie Boys, please enjoy this introduction.
And for all my Gen X friends out there, I see you.

1. Surprising fact: Bubble tea and the Beastie Boys were invented at roughly the same time!

Did you find these articles useful? Know someone else who might enjoy it?
Please forward, share, subscribe, and help us spread the word. Thank you!

The New Rules for Work Labs is hosted by Lucid Teams. Learn more about our work with organizations at: lucidteams.com

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In 2008, I co-authored an article on meetings for the International Standards Organization (ISO). I don't fully agree with everything I wrote back then, but no worries - no one's reading that article anymore anyway. Why bother updating it?

Come to think of it, that's true for the bulk of the ideas with which I've wallpapered the universe. I know I'm not alone. Many of us published lots of great guidance that could use refinement, but with it just sitting in our libraries, does it matter? Very few of the people who could benefit from these ideas will ever see them.

Yet we persist because this is supposedly how we advance our thinking. I throw something out there, you do, the big five consulting agencies do, and the university professors do. All of these ideas recombine and reproduce, giving birth to the next generation of great ideas. That's just happy sticky evolution doing its job!

Only, when it comes to ideas about how organizations can lead teams and get stuff done—their ways of working—we aren’t evolving all that much. Instead, we’re often iterating, proliferating, or straight-up regurgitating old ideas that rarely make it into practice.

Collaboration is Broken

Does this imply that practice has advanced beyond what thought leaders recommend? Hardly. The status quo involves an unholy pairing of straightjacket policies with wild West management, leaving 84% of workers unhappy with their core workplace interactions. We've poured 50+ years into business management books and productivity tech—uncountable hours and insane bags of money—only to find that collaboration remains mostly broken in most organizations.

What's that saying about the definition of insanity, again?

Sure, some of the brokenness stems from people being people, and yes, societal changes play a role. But I believe much of the dysfunction starts with how we design, train, and implement ways of working in organizations. We've set ourselves and the people we serve up to fail.

I believe we can do better. Over the past several months, I've been chatting with many others who feel we can do better, too.

We believe adopting an open-source approach to how we publish and evolve our thinking is a good first step. We believe it's a step we need to take now.

Here's why.

The Misaligned Incentives Behind the Business of Expertise

First, we should acknowledge that the incentive structure behind the publication of business management know-how is fundamentally misaligned with the needs of modern organizations.

Academia: Insights Without Integration

Academic research has deepened our understanding of collaboration, particularly in areas like individual behavior and market dynamics. However, the systems that govern academic success prioritize discovery over application:

• Novelty over utility: Academic careers are built on producing new theories, even when they address niche problems or lack relevance to real-world complexities.

• Frequency over depth: The pressure to publish frequently discourages long-term, systemic studies, favoring controlled experiments that fail to reflect organizational realities.

• Locked knowledge: Even the most relevant academic findings are often hidden behind paywalls or presented in inaccessible jargon, limiting their practical impact.

While academia excels at advancing knowledge, these incentive structures result in fragmented insights that rarely translate into scalable, actionable solutions for organizations.

Consulting: Simplicity Without Flexibility

Consultants and industry thought leaders, by contrast, focus on creating frameworks that are practical and easy to adopt. Many of these frameworks deliver value, but the underlying incentives often prioritize marketability over adaptability:

• Proprietary models as differentiation: Unique, trademarked frameworks signal expertise and generate revenue, but discourage collaboration across practices.

• Simplicity as a selling point: Frameworks are designed to be easily taught, but this simplicity often limits their ability to address complex realities.

• Forcing false choices: Organizations feel pressured to choose between competing frameworks—SCRUM, SAFe, Kanban, Design Thinking—as if adopting parts of one precludes integrating aspects of the others. This rigidity undermines innovation and customization.

• Claiming success without shared benchmarks: Consultants can measure results at the case-study level but lack common standards to compare outcomes across engagements or against other methods.

• No iterative infrastructure: While some thought leaders publish under open licenses, there is no systematic way for others to refine or build upon these tools, leaving each framework static and siloed.

These dynamics reward consultants for creating polished, standalone solutions rather than contributing to a shared, evolving ecosystem of practices.

Case in Point: 50 Unique Perspectives with No Incentive to Change

Take a look at the Thinkers 50 list of top thought leaders from academia and consulting. The lists include many friends and people I admire for their amazing work. These are great lists!

Now, how do you think a team leader could use the Thinkers 50 list to make their workplace better? They can check out books and interviews. Perhaps they could take a class. Maybe their company could bring one or two of these luminaries in to give a talk, but they'd have to be selective because this talk isn't cheap. How to choose?

Each thought leader focuses on just one or two pieces of the management puzzle, which doesn't get you very far when your team believes 84% of the picture is missing. Right now, even if these thought leaders wanted to build something bigger together, there's no shared space or system for that.

The Smoking Tinder of Growing Discontent

This misalignment between what organizations need and what current solutions offer hasn’t gone unnoticed. Regarding consulting, the media increasingly features stories about the ineffectiveness of change and training programs, the rise of employee frustration driven by “consultant of the month” change fatigue, and the outright immoral harm perpetuated by consultants like McKinsey in pursuit of profits. Academia is also under threat, with recent scandals involving high-profile papers that reportedly include plagiarism and “fudged” data, popular findings that can’t be reproduced, and a growing number of retracted papers.

Despite these widely acknowledged criticisms, there’s been little motivation for changing the status quo. Without an outside reference for quality or viable alternatives, what choice do clients seeking insights have? How else are those of us who support these clients supposed to reach them?

AI: Pouring Gas on the Fire

Ah! Ok then. Hello, AI. It looks like clients have an alternative after all!

With access to an unprecedented trove of academic research, proprietary frameworks, and real-time organizational data, AI breaks down the silos that kept academic, consulting, and organizational intelligence apart. It ignores role and organizational boundaries, offering:

• Rapid, context-specific recommendations that integrate insights from multiple schools of thought.

• Scalable, on-demand solutions at a fraction of the cost of traditional consulting or training.

• The ability to iterate in real-time based on feedback and new data.

AI highlights the inadequacies of legacy approaches and renders many of them obsolete. Proprietary models lose their economic drivers when AI can replicate or combine their principles into more flexible, adaptive solutions. The barriers created by exclusivity and silos are collapsing, leaving academics, consultants, and organizations with a stark reality: we can no longer solve new problems using old approaches, nor can we make a living by clinging to them.

We’re in very early days, yet AI's impact on consultants is already beginning to play out. As organizations integrate AI and train people to use it, the likelihood that managers will rely on AI instead of human experts will also rise. This will work well often enough that the downsides won’t be immediately apparent.

AI is designed to provide concise, "good enough" solutions to the questions it is asked, satisfying immediate needs without considering broader implications. For example:

• Among competing approaches to structuring a team, AI has no reason to advocate for the most rigorous or effective approach. Instead, it will provide a satisficing answer based on incomplete context, especially when users are unaware of existing research or best practices.

• Diagnosing collaboration challenges isn’t the same as other areas where AI outperforms humans, like predicting the weather or reading radiology reports, because there’s no objective way to determine what constitutes a “correct” answer.

• AI will only give people answers to the questions they know to ask. Left unchecked, this dynamic risks devolving further into the lowest common denominator, where organizations adopt fragmented, shallow solutions simply because they lack the expertise to ask better questions.

Without human experts actively shaping shared standards and refining collaborative practices, we risk outsourcing decision-making to AI tools that lack the depth, empathy, motivation, and long-term contextual understanding required to address complex organizational challenges. And with AI dismantling the economic underpinnings of proprietary models, the need for human experts to take a new approach becomes essential.

A New(ish) Approach: Building an Open-Source Ecosystem for Business Management Knowledge

To meet these challenges, experts must rethink how we design, share, and evolve the tools and frameworks we provide. The old models—fragmented, proprietary, and competitive—are no longer sufficient. Instead, we need to adopt a new-to-us approach: an open-source ecosystem for collaboration frameworks.

What This Approach Looks Like

• Integrated Development Across Silos
  Break down the barriers between academia and consultants. By contributing to a shared framework, we can combine the best of both worlds:

  • Academia’s deep, research-driven insights.

  • Consulting’s practical, actionable tools. This integration would unlock modular, adaptable frameworks that organizations can combine and tailor to their unique needs.

  • Technology’s ability to rapidly integrate, synthesize, distribute, and transform knowledge.

• Collaborative Iteration
  Build infrastructure for experts to contribute, refine, and iterate on knowledge collectively. Inspired by open-source software, this approach would allow:

  • Continuous improvement based on diverse perspectives and real-world feedback.

  • Frameworks that evolve alongside organizational challenges.

  • Greater innovation driven by collaboration rather than competition.

• Accessible to All
  Ensure that collaboration knowledge is open and widely available:

  • Remove barriers like journal paywalls and proprietary restrictions.

  • Create free or low-cost tools that organizations can implement directly.

  • Foster transparency and shared ownership.

Learning from Open Source Software

This approach mirrors the transformation seen in software development. The open-source movement revolutionized technology by unlocking collaboration across boundaries, sidestepping proprietary silos, and accelerating innovation.

Now, young engineers can build experience and reputations by contributing to open projects. Senior developers provide mentorship and oversight. Contributors exercise their intellectual autonomy and find meaning by contributing to projects they value. Demand for developers who build with and on top of open-source ecosystems remains high. Robust markets connect clients with people who provide open-source software training, hosting, customization, and support. Open-source components are the building blocks of the modern internet, accelerating an explosion of software startups.

Open-source software didn’t eliminate competition; it raised the bar for what success looks like. From Linux to GitHub to WordPress, and most recently, Deep Seek, open-source software projects have proven that openness and collaboration can drive progress at a scale no single company or individual could achieve alone.

How Taking an Open-Source Approach Can Benefit Experts

This approach addresses key challenges faced by business management experts:

• Better Benchmarks: Shared infrastructure enables more meaningful comparisons of outcomes across frameworks and engagements. Transparent usage and feedback information will elevate the truly great practices over those that merely look good on paper.

• Sustainable Innovation: Collaborative iteration creates a continuous feedback loop, allowing contributors to stay relevant and refine their methods. Buhbye, dusty shelves of ancient PDFS!

• Defensible Expertise: People who help develop shared frameworks and have their approach vetted in the fire of critical scrutiny gain reputational authority that exceeds any conveyed by marketing alone. 

• Succession Rather Reinvention: Experts nearing the end of their career can see their work actively maintained and updated by a new generation, instead of appropriated and then “rediscovered” under a cloak of modern language.

• Application Through Transformation: Open knowledge can take many forms. People can contribute alternate presentations for existing material and use technology to adapt material into formats that integrate directly into the workplace. Do you want that guide in a document, as a poster, or as a configured template in your project management system? Those options are on the table, increasing the odds of teams accessing knowledge in a form they can use.

• Smarter Marketing: Contributing to a shared ecosystem lets experts pool their outreach efforts, dramatically reducing individual marketing costs while reaching a far bigger audience. Instead of each thought leader building their platform and audience from scratch, the collective effort creates a rising tide that lifts all boats.

Re-Asserting the Value of Human Judgment

An open-source ecosystem does more than solve practical challenges. It reasserts the irreplaceable value of human judgment in shaping how organizations work together. Unlike AI, humans can:

• Advocate for Excellence: Experts can elevate the best frameworks, ensuring solutions are intentional and rigorous.

• Establish a Quality Baseline: A human-curated open-source framework creates a recognized benchmark for excellence, making it harder for both human and AI practitioners to justify poorly conceived or unvetted approaches.

• Provide Contextual Understanding: Humans bring empathy, story, and creativity to decisions, aligning solutions with organizational values and goals.

• Ensure Collective Evolution: Open collaboration invites experts to challenge assumptions and improve practices over time.

By embedding human expertise in a transparent, collaborative process, we ensure that AI remains a tool, not the driver of organizational decisions.

Interested? Let's Talk.

Collaboration experts—academics, consultants, and system providers—let's band together to create this new ecosystem. The need is clear, and the opportunity is immense.

We can redefine the game. We can liberate proven practices from those that prioritize profit over organizational health. We can build a commons that creates a new marketplace for experts and better serves leaders who genuinely want their organizations to thrive.

Our First Steps: Refine the Concept and Build a Founding Team
If you're interested in contributing to this initiative:

1. Add your comments and questions below, by email, and on LinkedIn. Carrie Goucher will kick off the LinkedIn conversation, so follow her to chime in there.

2. Watch for the next few articles. We'll share our initial answers to questions we've heard, like 'How is this different from a wiki?', 'Won't this just be a big mess?', 'What happens to all the certification programs?', and 'Hasn't someone tried this already?'"

3. Join us for an open conversation about the next steps on February 26th and 27 in the MIC.

Looking forward to exploring the next possible with you,
Elise

Adaptability is the name of the game for modern businesses.

Change has become so constant that 'change management' now feels like just another Tuesday. With every leader driving rethinks and reworks and reorganizations, we're even hearing a call for Chief Stability Officers. But whether you're driving change or trying to protect the well-functioning parts of your organization from all the change junkies, it helps to know how things work now.

You’re more likely to adapt successfully when you understand what needs adapting and can see how far your current state is from your goal.

Some organizations maintain a centralized online repository containing everything employees need to know about how the organization operates. If an employee believes the company should adapt their approach, they can go to this single source of truth and read about how things are meant to work, who to contact with questions, and how to suggest improvements.

While the content varies, these modern operational handbooks (or playbooks) share these traits:

• There's one and only one handbook per organization, which puts the word "single" in Single Source of Truth (SSoT).

• They're digital, providing access to every employee from anywhere.

• They're living. People regularly CRUD the crud out of 'em. Create, read, update, delete: these documents are continuously updated in concert with changes in the workplace.

Remote-first companies, self-managing organizations, and other companies that were early adopters of non-conventional ways of working pioneered this approach to company documentation. Remote-first and remote-only companies discovered that when you can't look around the office to figure out "how things work around here," you’d better have another way to make it easy for folks to figure it out. If you don't, you can't scale since all your newer employees will either drown your team in questions or go rogue and break way too much shiznit.

Clear operational guidebooks make hybrid and remote scaling possible.

To see what these look like, check out these public examples:

• The Handbook from GitLab

• The 37Signals Employee Handbook

• Atlassian's Team Playbook

Companies embracing flatter structures and self-managing teams also found they needed centralized guidebooks, because, contrary to what you might suspect, process clarity needs to increase dramatically as you eliminate management layers. At least, that's the case for successful self-managing groups. Otherwise, just like remote teams that haven't clarified their operations, those workplaces devolve into disjointed yahooery right quick. See more about these ideas from Loomio, Buurtzorg, and Mondora

Both all-remote and self-managing organizations must make it fast, easy, and natural for employees to quickly find correct, self-serve answers about how to get things done.

Today, every business shares that same need. Things are changing too fast and too frequently for your communications group to successfully cascade the news. While a few major initiatives may require detailed communication plans and staged rollouts, most operational changes should work more like Google Maps’ real-time traffic updates rather than Apple’s polished iPhone launches.

Today, Every Organization Needs a Living Operational Handbook

I know I’m preaching to the choir. I also know that when I work with more traditionally structured companies, they’re not there yet. Instead, they’re still wrestling with a cacophony of disjointed, siloed systems that are all too outdated or locked up by the gatekeepers to be useful.

So, where do you start? How do you transform a dusty three-ring binder of HR policies into a dynamic, living operational handbook?

Our network of remote operations experts recommended we ask Laurel Farrer. You can listen in on our conversation below. Then, scroll down and share in the comments.

• What strategies have worked well for achieving operational clarity across your organization?

• What challenges have you faced and solved when creating a centralized handbook?

🚀 Episode Title: From Dusty Binders to Living Operational Guidance
🔍 Episode Description: An insider's guide to transforming outdated employee handbooks into modern operational documentation. Learn how established companies can build living knowledge systems that work for everyone - from the warehouse floor to the C-suite.

🎧 Listen on YouTube here.

👉 Episode Timestamps (45 m total)
00:37 The Importance of Operational Handbooks
02:31 Challenges and Solutions for Remote Work
07:22 Creating Effective Modern Employee Handbooks
24:10 Navigating the Review Process
24:52 Building a Comprehensive Handbook
27:44 Empowering Employees Through Documentation
30:34 Future of Work and Managerial Evolution

🎧 Listen on YouTube here.

About Laurel

Laurel Farrer is the Founder and CEO of Distribute, an internationally renowned management consulting firm specializing in remote and hybrid work strategies.
Throughout her career, Laurel has collaborated with global organizations and governments to transition business operations from physical to virtual environments, develop products for the remote work market, and leverage workplace flexibility to address global challenges. She's helped brands like Zoom, Microsoft, Gallup, NPR, Logitech, BBC, The New York Times, Vistaprint, Fast Company, Upwork, and more.

To learn more about and connect with Laurel Farrer, visit her website at: distributeconsulting.com

Share Your Expertise

Now we’re all curious to learn from you.

• What strategies have worked well for achieving operational clarity across the organizations in your world?

• What other examples should people know about?

• What challenges have you faced and solved when creating a centralized handbook?

P.S. Speaking of learning from each other, we’ve been puzzling over how to better collaborate with the wide world of workplace experts.

We have an idea. Check this out.

Did you find these articles useful? Know someone else who might enjoy it?
Please forward, share, subscribe, and help us spread the word. Thank you!

The New Rules for Work Labs is hosted by Lucid Teams. Learn more about our work with organizations at: lucidteams.com

I love this quote from Jim's latest newsletter because it drives home the criticality of ensuring people have accurate information throughout an organization. Decisions hinge on a blend of factual knowledge, insight, instinct, and, more often than anyone would like to admit, assumption. Every employee’s decision impacts your organization’s success—but how many of those decisions are backed by solid knowledge?

You've probably been there yourself. As a front-line employee you may have paused, ready to decide on a customer request, and searched for guidance. The answer should have been clear. You knew it was probably somewhere in an email, or you could check with your manager, but she was in a meeting. So in that moment, you made your best guess only to find out later that you guessed... poorly.

Why do employees so often lack the information they need? Why do CEOs so often assume they know what's going down in the employee's world?
The pipes that keep organizational information flowing leak badly. Sometimes:

• The questions are never asked, so the information goes unshared.

• The answer was given but wasn’t clear—or was misunderstood.

• It was clear but forgotten, with no record to refer back to.

• It was recorded but tucked away in a personal notebook that left with a former employee.

• It was recorded in a shared file that was never updated, leaving outdated answers in its place.
  And so on. Clarity leaks away, leading to missed insights, misalignment, redundant questions, and decisions based on half-truths or guesswork.

This is the problem underlying Jim's work to bring visual work management to teams, and why we're such fierce advocates for Way of Working Team agreements. These strategies ensure the questions get asked, the answers get documented and regularly refined by many eyes, breaking the cycle.

Things get a bit trickier at the organization level, though. As they grow, companies develop multiple teams, departments, and hierarchies full of information. Each employee is only informed about a tiny fraction of the sum total. The CEO doesn't know what the front-line folks know, and vice versa.

The Problem with Traditional Ways of Sharing Organizational Information

To bridge these knowledge chasms, companies host Town Halls, internal webinars, and all kinds of events designed to share information and answer questions.

The number one complaint about these events? People don't ask many questions.

Why not? Some of it is poor meeting design, but I think Steven Sloman, a cognitive scientist at Brown University, is keyed into a more fundamental challenge.

I sat next to Steven at a conference this month, where we compared notes on how to best help groups think together. When it comes to ensuring employees have accurate information, one of the greatest challenges is what he calls the "knowledge illusion."
In the book he co-authored with Philip Fernbach, he states:

In other words, when we know that someone in our network knows a thing, we come to believe that we know it too. We act as if we have all the "facts" without questioning whether our assumptions are correct or our sources knowledgable in their own right.

In the public sphere, should we become aware of our knowledge deficit, we can seek out the missing information. Want to know how a toilet works? Google it! Want the more nuanced and full story behind the latest bit of outrage bait? Check a broader suite of news sources. We live in an information-abundant age. The hive thrives.

But if our ‘hive minds’ make us smarter, why do so many employees feel uninformed?
Often it's because their company hive only dribbles out information in a Town Hall, and they weren't really listening.

The Rise of Dynamic Company Guidebooks

Early adopters of hybrid and remote work realized that, while their remote employees could easily look up the latest TikTok influencer strategies, they often lacked an easy way to look up their company's latest strategy. In those environments, relying on people rather than documentation for every answer forces folks to meet all the time. For remote companies especially, documenting critical information where every employee can easily find it is a must.

But this raises a host of age-old documentation dilemmas.

What should we document? Who documents what? Where do we put documents? Where can we find the documentation we already have? What if it's out of date? What if we disagree with what's written? What if people ignore it? You know they will, so what's the point?

Organizational documentation has long been a source of frustration and debate. On one end of the spectrum, we have companies drowning in their bureaucratic soup, with bloated shelves of moldering documentation overflowing backrooms or putrefying in SharePoint repos. On the other end, we have the enthusiasts' quest for agile "people over process" purity that derides documentation but takes it too far, leading to confusion, inconsistency between teams, and a lot of unnecessary back-and-forth.

The key is to strike the right balance between structure and spontaneity. Too much rigidity, and you suck the life out of the experience. Too little, and you end up with a messy free-for-all, like toddlers with noodles set loose in white halls. Teams are craving a balanced approach—one that provides clarity and consistency without stifling creativity or flexibility. 

Pioneering remote-first companies found a better balance by ditching dead-tree binders (and the many layers of formal approval behind their creation) and embracing dynamic online guidebooks. Each company’s living online guidebook looks and operates a bit differently, but they all seek to embrace these ideals:

1. SSoT: Single Source of Truth. There’s one true, current copy of each guideline, available at a reliable URL.

2. Easy, anywhere access. Employees can easily access the guidelines anytime, anywhere In some cases, companies make their documentation transparent by default, and publicly accessible to anyone on the internet. (See GitLab’s Handbook for an example.)

3. Active tending by many gardeners. Documentation is regularly seeded, developed, weeded, and pruned. In some companies, anyone can suggest changes, which are incorporated into the guidelines after a brief review. Just like anyone can contribute to Wikipedia or Wikitree, documentation improvements come from many sources, with a smaller crew of master gardeners on hand to correct errors, untangle confusions, and clear out last season's detritus.

4. Heavy, regular use. Unlike the new hire packet that most people skim once then never open again, teams don't have a chance to forget about these guidebooks. In email, chat messages, and meetings, team members consistently point back to the guidebook for answers.

In the next few articles, we’re going to explore how these living resources make it easier for organizations to navigate the complexities of collaboration.  This rounds out our investigation into the documents that support effective collaboration, which started at the individual level with Personal User Manuals and Quickstart Guides, then explored the team Ways of Working document, and now moves up to the organizational Living Guidebook.

A Peek at What’s to Come

Chris Butler's fascination with the employee handbook of the future inspired him to catalog and analyze the best of the best. We'll draw on his insights, favorite examples, and what he's learned about the key ingredients to making these resources effective.

We'll also talk with Laurel Farrer, an expert on setting up new guidebooks. She’ll walk us through the process as if she were consulting with an established company seeking to turn their dusty binders into a living guidebook.

Finally, we'll wrap up with thoughts about how to keep the life in living documents and share test-case scenarios to think through as you create your own documentation strategy.

But before we dive in, let's take a moment to acknowledge the valid reasons why organizations abandoned traditional documentation in the first place. The expense, the maintenance challenge, the inflexibility, the way they can go rancid faster than milk in the sun—these are all legitimate concerns. And yet, as we'll see, the dynamic guidebook has the potential to overcome them.

Moving from static documentation to dynamic, accessible guidebooks can bridge knowledge gaps and support smarter, more cohesive collaboration. These living documents foster clarity and adaptability, giving every team member access to a single source of truth.

What strategies have you seen work best? Are the teams you work with achieving a healthy balance between structure and adaptability, or do information gaps still get in the way? Share your insights, strategies, or challenges in the comments below.

Did you find this useful? Know someone else who might enjoy it and contribute to the conversation?
Please forward, share, subscribe, and help us spread the word. Thank you!
Interested in bringing me to work with your teams or clients? Get in touch.

When were you first told the story of the blind men and the elephant?
Not had the pleasure? Behold:

Sages, educators, pastors, and parents have retold this fable for more than over 2500 years.
"Oh silly person," it says. "You're so confident that you know what's what, but your confidence is foolish. No one can see the whole picture. Hold what you know humbly. Listen to those around you to learn more. "

I've heard this fable shared in talks covering everything from critical thinking to resolving personality conflicts to religion. I then repeated it in my book on meetings and used it when teaching decision making, because it gave me a well-trodden way to discuss the importance of considering other people's perspectives.

Reframing the Elephant and the Blind Men

Despite the many times I've quoted it, the fable has always bothered me for two reasons.

First, it's told from the perspective of an independent observer who supposedly can see the elephant and therefore knows that these blind dudes are idiots. Sometimes this independent observer is described as the universal trans-dimensional consciousness (aka God). In which case, OK. Fair enough.

Other times, though, the observer is a boss who is testing the blind men's wisdom. Secular venues tend to use the smug dude in power who's testing you version of the fable, which reinforces great-man hero myths. I've seen self-proclaimed "great men" go on to weaponize the fable, using it to point out how their peers are blind to an elephant which only they are wise enough to see clearly.

Fools! How can you not see that it is clearly an elephant?!

Wow. Backfire! That's not the message we're after.

The second reason I dislike this tale is that it's just dumb.

Do you know any people who can't see? If you do, you know that they're usually pretty good at listening, smelling, and exploring a space by touch. How many scent-free, silent, motionless elephants have you encountered? Especially ones that stay calm while being mobbed by a bunch of fumble-fingered fools? The whole setup is preposterous.

Beyond the need to seek broader perspectives, the fable sends a clear message that you, the listener, are like the blind men in the tale. If you attempt to assert any position with authority or conviction, you must be a nincompoop. The result? Some people shut down – "Oh no! If I speak up, they'll know how ignorant I am!" – and others get even cockier. "Nincompoop? Ha! I know you are, but what am I?"

When our task is to become humble before a higher power, perhaps we should continue cautiously palpating the elephant. Otherwise, though, I've found it does more harm than good.

If we want to encourage collaboration and understanding, we need a better metaphor—one that invites exploration and curiosity, rather than making everyone feel a little dumb.

If not the elephant, then what?

If you look back at previous articles, you'll see that our 2023 experiment reinforced the importance of framing for problem solving, creativity, and more. Coming out of that experience, I developed the 5D Thinking Map as a tool for exploring possible framing (i.e., perspectives) for any topic. Since then, I’ve introduced it to hundreds of people.

But If you don't have a sense of why mapping perspectives might be useful, the 5D Map just looks like a weird cube and a line with some vague labels: Topic, Sentiment, Scope, Stakeholder, Time.

One version of the 5D Map

I needed a way to easily convey the value of perspective-taking and make perspective mapping intuitive for vastly different kinds of thinkers. I wanted a quick intro that would work equally well for my kids, my parents, my international colleagues, and my business clients.

The elephant fable wouldn't do, because it's designed to humble the listener. Instead, we need a new metaphor that lets everyone know their perspective is just as valid as everyone else's, that everyone is working with an imperfect understanding, and that when we share and compare what we know, we can make better choices together. Exploring perspectives should be an interesting voyage of discovery, rather than a walk of shame.

After many trials and iterations, I've found a new story. This story consistently gets groups sharing and discovering together. And while my purpose was to introduce 5D Thinking, I've learned that the story stands on its own.

Here you go.

New Story: Welcome to Clearview Tower

What can you see out your window right now? If we could all compare, I'm sure we'd hear about many wildly different views.

Now, let's imagine we are all visiting Clearview Tower, a tall building overlooking a lush park full of winding paths and tall trees. The building has windows at every level, each framing a unique view into this lovely space.

Clearview Tower, courtesy Midjourney

Imagine you are on the top floor looking into the park. What do you see? You can see the treetops and, if the light is right, maybe you can see over into other elegant offices across from you, or even out to the horizon beyond. The view from the top floor is great - expansive, breathtaking, and inspiring.

The building is full of people who can see through the windows where they are.
Some look right onto a tree, making it easy to see the details on each leaf and an old balloon caught in the branches. Windows on the other side of the building look away from the park entirely. What do these show? The city beyond, the beach, or the concrete backside of another building? It's impossible to know from where you're standing because walls block your view.

Next, imagine you're in the basement looking through one of those barred half-windows near the ceiling. It's a little tiny bit of hazy glass looking into the park. What can you see there? Maybe not a lot, because that view is blocked by a garbage can, where you see trash overflowing and rotting behind it. That view is awful, dirty, and dark. 

Finally, imagine looking out of your favorite window, but at a different moment in time. What did the park look like 50 years ago? In the morning or at sunset? How might it change 50 years from now? Time shifts the view, just as much as your position does.

We know that all these views are true. All the windows show reality as it is, but the people looking through those windows do not see the same reality. 

Like the people in this building, we are all looking at the world through one of many windows.
When it comes to understanding the world around us, there are as many windows as there are people to see through them. We each have easy access to the windows where we sit, but the full view is blocked by walls. And, just like the people in the building, we're each capable of looking through other windows. We simply must remember that the other windows are there, and move a bit so we can see the view they offer.

Every view is one of many.

Exploring Your Windows and Walls

As you reflect on this story, what does it bring to mind for you?

What does your unique window on the world show that might prove valuable to someone else? How could you share what you see?
And how might your familiar walls and go-to window be limiting your view? Where do you need to go exploring for a different perspective?

Perspective sharing is about telling others what the world looks like to you, from your eyes through your windows, without denying the validity of anyone else's view.

Perspective taking is all about listening and learning to see through other people's windows. This is the root of empathy and understanding.

At Braver Angels events, an organization dedicated to bridging the US political divide, I've seen people come together when they commit to sharing and listening to each other's views. The key is for each person to share only from their own experience - the view from their window - and not about a rumor they heard on social media or why their 'facts' are more factual than other people’s. When people on opposite sides of an issue recognize and speak as folks who simply have different views of a broader landscape, they quickly drop their hostility and become more curious together.

Perspective shifting is about noticing that you have access to other windows and moving your view to gain a new understanding.

After a Braver Angels event, the most commonly reported insights are "I realized that we're more alike than we are different", and "All the terrible things I'm hearing on the news - that isn't the full picture." When people have an opportunity to curiously share and take perspectives from folks who see things differently than they do, two shifts occur. They shift their view of the situation, seeing their "park" from a broader vantage point, and they shift how they feel about one another.

I'm using a Braver Angels example today because we've run dozens of events (like this one) leading into the 2024 election, and it's fresh on my mind. This is what that shift looks like.

Exploring different perspectives reduces affective polarization. Sweet! Source: https://braverangels.org/our-impact/

Beyond learning to appreciate people we disagree with, these shifts come in handy in so many ways. Once we notice that we can look at a situation from a different vantage point, we're better able to see opportunities and find creative solutions to our problems.

Reframing is about choosing the windows that give you and your group the best view for achieving your goals and directing the group's attention to look through those windows together.

Some examples.

Same parks. Different windows.

If you or your group could benefit from perspective sharing, taking, shifting, and reframing, tell them about Clearview Tower. I've been delighted to hear groups embrace the metaphor and spontaneously discuss which "windows" they need to go look through, where they're worried that "walls" might hide important information, and in several ways make this story a useful part of their shared language.

I hope you find it useful too. Please share your experiences with this story; I’d love to hear your perspective on it.

It's so much better than the elephant!!

Hi {{first_name|friend}}!

My goodness, there’s so much we could be doing better.

Change for the better feels great, especially when it’s a change that you choose and that benefits you in simple, direct ways.

More often, though, change at work can feel overwhelming—whether you're managing it, living through it, or leading others through it. Adding insult to the disruptive injury, many workplace changes fail to benefit anyone.

Knowing how often these grand change initiatives bring more pain than parties, Ashley Goodall decided to dig into a disquieting truth. We have a problem with change.

Last week, I hosted an insights exchange with Ashley about his new book The Problem with Change. Check out the recording below to hear what he’s learned about how organizations can create stability amidst disruption, the power of rituals in reinforcing values, and why we should rethink the role of middle managers. This conversation is packed with practical insights on how to navigate change thoughtfully and in a way that’s good for all us humans caught in blender.

🚀 Episode Title: The Problem with Change: Insights Exchange with Ashley Goodall

🎧 Recording Available: Watch on YouTube here.

👉 Episode Timestamps (1 hr 3 minutes total):

• 00:57 The Problem with Change

• 06:22 Maintaining Belonging During Change

• 11:38 Leadership Challenges and Solutions

• 34:46 Exploring Holacracy and Organizational Design

• 35:14 The Challenge of Articulating the Middle Ground

• 36:07 Understanding Team Dynamics and Leadership Roles

• 37:42 Convincing Leaders with Evidence-Based Approaches

• 44:04 The Importance of Purpose and Meaning in Work

• 52:11 Ritualizing Values and Team Practices

• 58:28 The Role of Middle Managers in Organizations

• 58:58 Rebranding Middle Management

• 1:02:00 Balancing Change and Stability

🌟 About Ashley Goodall

Ashley Goodall is an executive, leadership expert, and author with a focus on exploring large organizations from the inside, most recently as an executive at Cisco. He is passionate about uncovering real-world lessons that help teams thrive and make work a more human experience.

Ashley co-authored Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019) with Marcus Buckingham. The book was named the best management book of 2019 by Strategy + Business and was selected as one of Amazon’s best business and leadership books. He also co-authored two Harvard Business Review cover stories: The Feedback Fallacy and Reinventing Performance Management.

His latest book, The Problem with Change, explores why change is challenging for people and offers insights on how to ease its impact.

Learn more at: https://ashleygoodall.com/

Thank you for following along with us, and thank you for all your thoughtful feedback. I’m curious: what stuck out to you?

Until next time,

– Elise

Do you find this useful? Know someone else who might enjoy it?
Please forward, share, subscribe, and help spread the word. Thank you!

A Spoonful of Love
That was the title of Great American Recipe Season 3, Episode 3, a reality cooking show on PBS featuring great home cooks. This episode asked the seven cooks: "What would you cook for someone you love?"

Before reading further, pause for a moment.
What springs to mind when you think of cooking for someone you love? 💝 
(And for those of you who don't cook, take-away counts! :) )

It's a high-level question, but I'm sure your mind could fill in the details and deliver an answer.

The Great American Recipe judges provided more context, too. The episode included two competition rounds.

Round 1: Recipe Remedies

Sixty minutes later, each cook presented the judges with a meal and story about the many, many, many times they'd served that same dish to their beloveds. In this case, food conveyed love by giving familiar comfort.

Comfort = Same = Good.

Round 2: A Love-Filled Dish for that Special Someone

For this round, comfort and familiarity gave way to excitement and special treats. Special = Different = Good.

So sometimes serving the same meal you've made a thousand times is a good thing, and there are other times when the same-ol' same-ol' would be ultra lame-o.

In the cooking show, the chefs traversed the line between comfort and excitement, balancing what they knew their loved ones would appreciate with something that would delight the judges. This mirrors a common tension we face in professional settings—familiar processes vs. the competitive pressure to stand out with something new.

But simply recognizing the tension between these polarities (same vs. different, old vs. new) doesn’t help us figure out the best way forward. The context, the people involved, and the moment all shape what’s needed.

This struck me when I played with mapping out the themes from A Spoonful of Love one day, revealing a pattern that’s become clearer to me as I explore 5D Thinking Maps with others.

A blank 5D Thinking Map

Beyond Good & Bad: Adding Dimensions

A bit of background for those new to the 5D Thinking Map. We originally called it a "framing tesseract" because it was inspired by three observations.

1. The results of our 2023 creativity experiment, where we found that the only variable that had a big impact on a group's creativity was the way that they framed the creativity challenge.

2. Adam Grant's "Meetings Suck" podcast episode, where he framed meetings negatively to attract a large audience to his discussion of how to make meetings better.

3. The realization that, although we have plenty of methods to help groups reframe conversations in specific ways, we lacked a tool for exploring the full range of framing options.

The first version invited people to list ways to frame a discussion across four dimensions: sentiment, scope, stakeholder, and time. When assembled into a model, this created a four-dimensional cube or tesseract.

The very first “tesseract” shows perspectives on meetings. Yes, people complained it was ugly.

Then, as I worked with Dave to create a prettier model and outline how it might be applied to other use cases, I realized we were missing an important element. The fifth dimension, represented by a dot, is the topic at the center of the conversation. It anchors the discussion, and everything else—sentiment, scope, stakeholders, and time—expands from this core.

That dot. It's just a dot, right? To fill it out, simply decide what you want to think about, and write it down. Easy peasy.

Mind the Dot

Since it was created, we’ve used the 5D Map to expand and compare different ways of looking at a wide range of topics, including:

• Personal finances

• Relationships with their parents

• Career options

• Conversations with a spouse

• Conversations with a boss

• How to handle a creative disagreement

• How to navigate urban-rural disagreements

• Differing views on using AI

• Differing views on the 2024 election

• Different ways to lead a workshop for sad clowns who aren't funny anymore

• and more.

In each of these cases—from navigating tough conversations to exploring new career possibilities—we find that every conversation is riddled with assumptions. When we make those assumptions visible by mapping out our unique perspectives on the 5D Map, it becomes much easier to spot and correct any misalignment.

We also find that much of the time, we weren’t very clear about the topic in the first place. What exactly were we thinking when we set that dot?

That challenge became apparent in a recent 5D Thinking Map session for facilitators and leadership coaches. We picked a topic to map – LinkedIn Posting – then spent 5 minutes adding ideas about:
• Sentiment: How do we feel about LinkedIn Posting?
• Scope: What about posting? What are the details, and what's the big picture?
• Stakeholders: Who are we thinking about related to LinkedIn Posting?
• Time: When are we thinking about? As it was, as it is now, as it might be?

In the debrief, one participant admitted she wasn’t excited about the topic. It didn’t ‘fork her jaws,’ as my friend Doug would say.

But then we looked more closely at the topic itself. While most of the group shared ideas about using LinkedIn for brand-building, we noticed that this was an assumption. The topic wasn't "Using LinkedIn to Build Your Personal Brand" - it was simply stated as "LinkedIn Posting." Participants could just as easily have focused on LinkedIn as a learning or sales platform, or on how LinkedIn posting influences the overall quality of our public dialogue.

When we recognized that potential reframing– the question about how LinkedIn influences the quality of our thinking and work that we show publicly– the apathetic folks found they had plenty to say!

This brings me back to the Great American Recipe's "Spoonful of Love" episode.

Balance is nice. Clarity is better.

When we talk about something broad, like ‘food for loved ones,’ it’s easy to stay high-level and abstract. We might discuss the benefits of balancing familiar/same meals with our special/different meals, and find other general guidelines to keep in mind.

Yawn. This doesn’t help me with my menu plan at all.

Starting high level can prove illuminating because sometimes we're so scattered and so new to sharing our ideas on a topic that we need to start in the fuzzy zone before we can see where to focus in.

Then if we can make the topic more specific, things snap into place. In the two rounds of recipe challenges, Same and Different have clear places on the Sentiment line.

And, while you might think increased topic clarity would remove options and the potential to exchange rich, diverse perspectives, often the reverse is true. We all interpret topics based on our own experiences. The home cooks came from different backgrounds, so the comforting recipes included the following: tortilla soup, chicken congee, pesto pasta, a fennel sausage frittata, chicken potpie, classic beef cutlet with duchess potatoes, and a goat pepper soup.

While they all looked delicious, none of these are my go-to comfort food recipes. Are they yours? (Also, I love recipes! Please share yummy ideas in the comments.)

Obvious / Not Obvious 5D Thinking Takeaways

As you can see, I'm learning and re-learning as I work with this model. Every single time, I see something new about the topic under discussion. Often, I gain a deeper understanding of the complexity underlying thinking in groups. Today, I'm pondering these insights. Like so many "insights," they were unexpected and felt revelatory in the moment, and now look obvious when captured in hindsight.

1. Broad topics lead to safe assumptions and generic answers.

Broad topics surface safe answers. When discussions start with vague prompts, people tend to stick to surface-level responses. This was clear in the 2023 experiment that inspired the creation of the 5D Thinking Map and in last week's "LinkedIn Posting" exercise.

When a topic is too broad, creativity and engagement suffer, as people are unsure how to contribute. Especially as group size grows, we lack the time it would take to explore and move past all our assumptions using natural conversation. So, like we saw in our LinkedIn Posting example, those who weren’t excited by what they assumed was the focus waited for others to define the conversation, leading to a narrow range of ideas.

How many of our business-speak conversations center on high-level topics like innovation, creativity, engagement, progress, and so on? Too damn many for us to make meaningful sense out of them.

While natural conversation proves a slow boat to clarity, I'm finding you can get deeper more rapidly (and reliably) by using a quick 5D map as a starting point. Then with this first-pass map in hand, ask questions like:

• Was this topic interesting to you?

• Did someone post something that confused or surprised you?

• Did you have an idea but weren’t sure how it fit? What does it depend on?

Want to take this further? Challenge the topic directly by asking:

• What assumptions do we seem to be making?

• What if the opposite of our assumptions were true? How would that shift our perspective?

• How might the downsides be seen as the best possible outcome? And the reverse: how might the positives turn into serious negatives?

• Who might view this entirely differently, and what might it look like to them?

The answers will uncover alternative perspectives, opening a path to more specific, actionable topics.

2. Clarity unlocks creativity and alignment.

When the conversation shifts from broad to specific, everything snaps into place. The clearer the focal point, the more insightful and creative the outcomes.

In our experiment on cool uses for empty spaces, teams that narrowed their topic—focusing on financially viable uses or specific campus spaces—generated much more compelling ideas. The same dynamic played out on "A Spoonful of Love." Heck, it's the basis of all my work on meeting performance, where I encourage people to ditch the word “meeting” entirely in favor of more specific alternatives. Once the topic shifts to clearly defined challenges—like comfort vs. special occasion meals or client demo vs team retrospective—the cooks and the collaborators can deliver thoughtful, exciting experiences.

3. Clarity doesn’t limit diversity—it invites it.

Even when the topic is clearly defined, people interpret it through their lens, bringing a wealth of diverse ideas to the table. The home cooks in "A Spoonful of Love" all responded to the same challenge—recipe remedies—but their backgrounds and experiences produced wildly different dishes. A clear focal point doesn’t flatten the conversation; it invites deeper, richer contributions because everyone knows where to begin and feels free to bring their spin.

I've seen these dynamics play out in conversations between people on opposite sides of the political fence, too. Clarity is especially powerful in situations where different perspectives give rise to mistrust and hostility. When the topic is too broad—like "conservative vs. progressive values"—the discussion tends to stay polarized and abstract, reinforcing stereotypes and assumptions, and yielding only grudging acknowledgment of the grains of goodness in the opposing viewpoint.

But when the topic narrows to specific policies or personal stories, the conversation changes. People often discover they share similar hopes and dreams for their lives and communities. For example, in discussions I’ve hosted between political opposites, participants are often surprised to find agreement on issues like healthcare, education, and climate when they get specific about how they would like to see policy play out in practice. The most common reflection from these conversations is "I learned that we're more alike than different." By minding the dot and focusing on clear examples, these conversations shift from adversarial debates to productive exchanges that end with common ground and nuanced thinking, rather than enmity.

Putting It In Practice

5D Thinking Maps offer a path to deeper understanding by minding the dot—the central focus that drives everything else.

If you are using a 5D Map to explore a topic with a group, consider running two back-to-back mapping rounds before deciding on your next step. Keep the first round fast, then discuss what you see. A more specific topic may emerge that you can then put at the center of a second map.

Once you clarify that dot, the dimensions around it (sentiment, scope, stakeholder, and time) come into sharper focus, leading to clearer alignment, richer perspectives, and more meaningful outcomes. By staying aware of when topics are too broad and intentionally narrowing them, you can unlock the kind of insights that move conversations and ideas forward.

I’m curious to hear what you think.

• Do you agree that we need to get more specific more often? If so, where would you start?

• What are your favorite recipe remedies and date-night favorites? Bonus love awards go to everyone who shares a link!

All the best to you all,
Elise

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