Turn The Ship Around!

by L. David Marquet

Starting condition: you’ve had a discussion with your leadership group and identified some sort of cultural change the group mostly agrees to. What you want to do now is embed it into the organization, independent of personality. Hand out five-by-eight cards. Have people complete the following sentence: “I’d know we achieved [this cultural change] if I saw employees …” (The specific wording in this question should move you from general, unmeasurable answers like “Have people be creative” to specific, measurable ones like “Employees submit at least one idea a quarter. The ideas are posted and other employees can comment on them.”) Allow five minutes. Then tape the cards on the wall, go on break, and have everyone mill around reading the cards. Based on the discussions and quantity of answers, you may want to give everyone a second shot at filling out the cards. Sort and prioritize the answers. Then discuss how to code the behavior into the company’s practices. For example: implementing the three-name rule. The final step is to write the new practices into the appropriate company procedure.