The practice becomes permanent

We describe our engagements in five stages. Discovery. Co-design. Build. Test. Re-design and leverage. People sometimes assume the fifth stage is the wrap: the bit where we tidy up, write a final report, hand over some files. It is not. The fifth stage is where the whole thing becomes real, or it does not. Everything before it is preparation.

I want to say something about what happens there, and why it takes the shape it does.

The first four stages build a thing. The fifth stage builds the capability to keep building it.

By the time we reach stage five, there is usually something working. A process, a strategy, a new way of running a meeting, a decision-making rhythm the leadership team has started to trust. It is fragile. It exists because we have been holding it in place, alongside the people who own it. Take us away too early and it will fall back to the previous shape, not because anyone wants it to, but because the previous shape is what the organisation's muscles remember.

Re-design and leverage is the slow work of shifting what the muscles remember. It is not flashy. It is not a workshop or a launch. It is a series of small, deliberate acts of noticing, together, what is working, what is drifting, and what the practice needs in order to hold.

Practice becomes permanent when the people doing it can recognise, in themselves, what they are doing differently.

The phrase I use with clients is that practice becomes permanent when the people doing it can recognise, in themselves, what they are doing differently. Not when we tell them. When they tell each other, without being asked.

Why slow.

We move slowly on purpose, in this stage especially. Slow is not indecision. Slow is the pace at which adult human beings, with full lives and other pressures, can actually metabolise a change in how they work. You cannot hurry it without bruising it.

There is a temptation, always, to declare victory early. To write the case study, tick the box, move on. We try to resist that. The engagement is not finished when the new practice appears. It is finished when the new practice has been tested (by a bad quarter, a difficult board meeting, a key person leaving) and held. That is usually a year, sometimes two.

Why measured.

In stage five we measure things we did not measure before. Not outputs. Outputs are easy to fake. We measure whether the conversations in the organisation have changed. Whether the questions people ask in meetings are different questions. Whether the leader interrupts less. Whether the board can name a risk that is not already on the register.

These are imprecise things. We do not pretend they are precise. We do pay attention to them, together, and we name what we see.

Why deep.

Deep is the part I find hardest to write about, because it risks sounding grand. What I mean is specific. There is a surface version of almost every change we work on: new meeting format, new strategy document, new board agenda. And there is the version underneath, where people's assumptions about their own authority have shifted. The deep work is the second version. It takes longer because it cannot be instructed. It can only be practised, observed, and named.

When the deep work has happened, the surface work sustains itself. When it has not, the surface work quietly reverts as soon as attention leaves the room.

And then we leave.

The fifth stage ends when we are no longer needed in the room for the practice to hold. That is the measure. Not when the contract ends. Not when the report is filed. When the organisation, tested, continues (in its own voice, with its own hands) we have done what we came to do.

It is not the last stage. It is the one that makes the others count.

Paul Steele