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Skylines and Street Signs

communicate at the right altitude

Working out what needs to change is one part of changing your culture. The hard part is getting time with someone senior enough to back it, and not losing them.

Of course, you know what needs to change. You’ve probably seen it for months, in the same recurring complaints, survey comments, the same people leaving for the same reason. Then you get a short window with someone senior enough to act, and the message just doesn’t cut through.

This is one place I often see culture change stall. The plan is good, and the exec team wants it. But it stalls in a conversation where the person bringing the idea and the person who could resource it stand in completely different corners of the room (mentally), and nobody notices.

Those corners come from two things: whether you’re in a plane or a car. Looking forward or backward. A reflection of altitude and time.

Altitude and time

When you’re in a plane, you can see the skyline. You get a high-level lay of the land, which suburbs touch, where the river runs.

From a car you see the street signs. The name of the road, the number on the door, how far to the next turn. Both are valuable, but different.

The first question to reflect on is about altitude. Am I in the car, or am I in the plane?

The second is about time. Time decides which direction you look: forward or backwards.

The car has a mirror and a windscreen, so you can look behind and ahead when you need to. The plane has the horizon, which is hard to look away from at that height. What the plane doesn’t have is a mirror. To look back, you need to look out the window, at the ground you’ve already crossed.

Put the two dials together, and you get four corners of a room. These are places we tend to stand in a room rather than types of people, and you move between them inside a single conversation often without noticing.

You have a default corner, the one you fall back to under pressure. So does the person across the table. When they match, the meeting feels easy, and you assume you’re good at this. When they don’t, you can leave certain you explained it well, and they leave certain you missed the point.

Four corners of the room

Each corner buys you something different, and each one has a failure mode that shows up when it’s the only place you ever stand.

Nobody’s wrong for having a default corner. It becomes a problem when people can’t leave it.

I’ve labelled the four corners Promise, Pattern, Proof and Plan. Two from the plane, and two from the car.

From the car, Proof and Plan typically look after themselves, because they’re made of things you can point at. In the plane, Pattern and Promise are the two that often get overlooked, and yet they’re the two that are much more likely to turn an update into a decision.

Pattern

The ground you’ve already crossed, laid out underneath you, the whole shape of the trip visible at once.

“The team isn’t just struggling. We’ve rebuilt it three times in four years.”

Their first question: “Is this happening anywhere else?”
What it does to them: An incident gets noticed. A pattern can’t be ignored. This moves it off your desk and onto theirs.
When it’s all you’ve got: It reads as commentary: sharp, accurate, and nobody’s job to act on. You become the smartest person in the room that nobody puts on the project.

Promise

Not where we are but where we’re pointed. At this height it’s hard to look anywhere else.

“If we get this right, in eighteen months you stop hearing problems about this team and start hearing solutions from it.”

Their first question: “Where does this go?”
What it does to them: It tells them why this is on their desk. Promise is about relevance, not just vision.
When it’s all you’ve got: It sounds inspiring, and then nobody can tell you what to do next. The room nods, and nothing gets funded.

Proof

The signs on the road we came down. Names, numbers, exact distances, all of it behind us.

“Nineteen of our twenty-two managers have run the conversation. The three who haven’t all report to the same person.”

Their first question: “What is the actual number?”
What it does to them: It makes them believe you. Nothing else you say survives without it.
When it’s all you’ve got: It reads as justification. Look how busy we’ve been. They start scanning ahead for the point, and you can feel them disconnect.

Plan

Left at the lights, then second right. Just the next two turns.

“Six workshops, two facilitators, first cohort in October, and one decision from you: whether it’s optional.”

Their first question: “Who owns it and by when?”
What it does to them: They can stop carrying it, because someone else now is.
When it’s all you’ve got: It reads as asking permission at the wrong altitude. You sound like the person doing the work, not the person leading it.

It’s tempting to read all this as a model about them. Work out their corner, adapt, win. That’s half of it, and it’s the half that gets taught. The other half is harder. Your default corner is where you feel most capable, so it’s where you’re least likely to notice you’ve lingered.

Nobody at street level feels lost; they feel precise. And nobody at altitude feels vague. They feel visionary.

The tool

Find the two of you

Ten quick questions. Six about you, four about the person you need a yes from. None of them ask what you’re like, because people answer that with the corner they admire. They ask what you did last time, and what they do. Answer fast and watch where the two dots end up. The dashed line is the distance you have to cross.

them · drag either dot

About you · 1 of 6 · Preparation

Leadership meeting on Thursday, forty minutes to get ready. What do you open first?

Answer and your dot lands on the grid.

The lap

When you know your material, the instinct is to tell it in the order you learned it. What happened, what it means, what we should do. Chronological, logical, and the wrong way round for a room where you’ve only got four minutes. It starts at street level, the one place the senior leader usually isn’t standing.

Try running the lap instead. Same four corners, in the order a senior leader takes them in. Promise, then Pattern, then Proof, then Plan. Four sentences, roughly a minute, before anyone has interrupted you. You descend on purpose (or when invited). The detail still gets its turn. It just has to wait.

Write your lap

Four sentences, one per corner, in their order. The grey text is a real one, a people leader asking for a day on culture with their team. Write over it.

1Promise the horizon · why this matters to themYou’re buying permission for the next three sentences. Ask for a day without this one and you’re asking for a day out of the business.2Pattern the window · why this keeps happeningThis turns a story into a case. One difficult team gets managed by whoever raised it. A pattern gets a day in the calendar.3Proof the mirror · why you’re worth believingPick one piece of evidence: the smallest true detail that carries the most weight.4Plan the windscreen · what happens next and what you needName the decision, then stop. You’re asking for protection and ten minutes. Money can come later.

What it costs

I’m not sure culture gets rejected as much as it gets deferred or put in the too-hard basket. The initiative you’ve been pushing for probably didn’t lose an argument. Somebody would very likely have backed it. They just heard it at the wrong level, amongst eleven other things, and they filed it as an update.

You might not need to craft a better idea. You might need the same idea, from the altitude they’re already flying at. Get that right, and a problem you’re ready to solve turns into a decision.

Shane Michael Hatton · Team culture, by design.More free tools The Team Culture Model Work with me

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