Skylines and Street Signs · Shane Michael Hatton

One of the hardest parts of changing a culture isn’t figuring out what needs to change. It’s getting ten minutes with someone senior enough to back it, and not losing them.

I’m assuming you’ve seen what needs to change. You’ve probably seen it for months, in the same recurring complaints, the survey comments, the same people leaving for the same reason. Now you have a short window with somebody senior enough to act, and the message just doesn’t seem to land.

This is where culture change usually stalls. Not in the plan, and not in anybody’s appetite for it. It stalls in a conversation where the person carrying the idea and the person who could resource it were standing in completely different places, and neither of them noticed.

Two dials

From a plane you see the skyline. The lay of the land, which suburbs actually 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 true. Neither one is the other, and you can’t get from the car to the plane by driving faster.

The first consideration is altitude. Am I in the car, or am I in the plane?

The second consideration is time. Time decides what you look at once you’re there. The car has a mirror and a windscreen, so you get behind and ahead for free. 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 have to look out of the window, at the ground you’ve already crossed.

Put the two dials together and you get four corners. Not four types of people. Four places to stand, and you move between them inside a single conversation without noticing.

You have a home 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 leave certain you explained it and they leave certain you missed the point. You both did.

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 home corner. The trouble starts when you can’t leave it. Proof and Plan look after themselves, because they’re made of things you can typically point at. Pattern and Promise are the two that get easily 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.

“It’s not that this team is struggling. It’s that we’ve rebuilt the same team three times in four years.”

Their first question: “Is this happening anywhere else?”
What it does to them: An incident gets managed. A pattern gets decided. This moves it off your desk and onto theirs.
When it’s all you’ve got: It reads as commentary. Insight with nothing attached. 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 about this team and start hearing from it.”

Their first question: “Where does this go?”
What it does to them: It tells them why this is on their desk. Promise isn’t vision, it’s relevance.
When it’s all you’ve got: It reads as hand waving. A skyline with no streets under it. The room nods and nothing gets funded.

Proof

The signs on the road we actually 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 go.

Plan

Left at the lights, then second right. The next two turns, not the whole route.

“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: It lets them put it down. They stop carrying it.
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 home corner is where you feel most capable, so it’s where you’re least likely to notice you’ve overstayed. Nobody at street level feels lost. They feel precise. 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 actually did, and what they actually do. Answer fast and watch the two dots land. 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 got four minutes. It also starts at street level, which is the one place the senior person isn’t standing.

Run the lap instead. Same four corners, in the order they actually get processed. Promise, then Pattern, then Proof, then Plan. Four sentences, roughly a minute, before anyone has interrupted you. You descend on purpose. The detail isn’t removed. It’s earned.

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 is real, not a one offThis 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 believingThe smallest true detail that carries the most weight. Not all your evidence. One piece of it, chosen.4Plan the windscreen · what happens next and what you needName the decision, then stop. The ask isn’t money. It’s protection and ten minutes.

What it costs

A lot of culture change doesn’t get rejected. It gets filed. The thing you’ve been carrying probably didn’t lose an argument. Somebody would very likely have backed it. They just heard it from the mirror, at street level, in among eleven other things, and they put it where updates go.

You don’t need a better idea. You need the same idea, from the altitude they’re already flying at, in the four sentences you actually get. Get that right and a problem becomes a decision. Get it wrong and it stays yours, which is another way of saying it stays.

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