The Work

You might have heard something like this:

We keep solving the same problem. 

There were people in that room who knew the answer and didn't say it. 

People float new ideas and the conversation just moves on. 

It was a good meeting and nothing came of it. 

They sound like different problems — onboarding, culture, innovation, follow-through. They're not. They’re all about how people relate to knowledge here.

Belonging is what it feels like when we can draw on and contribute to our collective knowledge, now and across time. 

Given enough time, we can look at people’s relationship with knowledge: What’s being built on? What cognitive resources are people drawing on to build? Which contributions are taken up? What lasts? 

But who’s got enough time? 

To observe quickly, we play a game. 

Not as metaphor and not as icebreaker: a game is a small culture you can watch from outside. Rules produce dynamics, and everyone in the room can see it happen in a couple hours instead of a couple years. Built well, a game pulls a group's real habits into the open — the deference, the shortcuts, the things that go without saying. We learn much more from what people do than from what they say they do.

What I do

I run workshops where a group surfaces its curriculum in miniature, reads it together, and then works out what it wants to keep and what it wants to rewrite.

The surfacing and reading are the hard parts, and that’s what I offer. I show you what your organization is teaching. 

But I can't make it teach something else. That work is slower than a workshop and it belongs to you. What I can do is make sure you're choosing rather than inheriting — and that when you choose, you're looking at the actual thing rather than a proxy for it.

How I do it

Two sessions with 5-12 of your people, about a day and a half of their time, over one week. 

One — Surface. Your group plays a game built for your setting, one that runs on the same knowledge dynamics your organization runs on. Recorded, with consent; the game also leaves a record of its own. About three hours.

Two — Reflect. Participants write up their experience while it's fresh. I work through those accounts alongside the recordings and what the game produced. An hour for participants, a few days for me.

Three — Read. I bring back a proposed account of what happened in that room, triangulating the three data sources against my model of belonging as accessing and contributing to shared knowledge. Your group argues with it, corrects it, and we arrive at a reading together. Morning of a full-day workshop.

Four — Revise. With the curriculum in view, your group decides what's working, what isn't, and what it wants to change. Afternoon of the same day.

Then — the document. You get a written account of the curriculum we read together and the revisions your group proposed. Not my recommendations; recommendations that are mine leave when I do.