Cultural Transformations: Act your way to new thinking

I received a question recently from George who is a supervisor in a global oil and gas company about starting a cultural change initiative. And he added, "Oh, and by the way I have a sense we should start with language."

Yes, exactly! Remember, we act our way to new thinking (not think our way to new action). So here's a three step activity that I recommended for George to start with his team.

We call it the WWISLI activity. WWISLI stands for "What Would It Sound Like If."

Step one, in a normal brainstorming session, invite your team to complete this sentence: We would like a culture that is more ________ or, the characteristics of the culture that we want at work is more ________. People come up with things like collaborative, innovative, inviting of feedback, respectful of dissenting and outlying opinions, easier for people to speak up, especially if it's not what the group thinks, things like that.

Step two. Imagine you're writing a script for a TV show where you need to put the words in the actors mouths that would show the culture that you picked from step one. The reason this works is because now we're coming up with specific words, phrases and sentences that we are going to practice speaking.

Step three is we narrow it down to one or two phrases and then we invite ourselves to make a commitment to practice that language. Through the practice of language, it will then feel, over time, like we have the culture that we described back in step one.

Finally, changes should be couched in terms of experiments because that will activate people's senses to notice what is happening and enlist the team in the process of the change. Describing them as "initiatives" or "transformations" will likely trigger negative reactions against the change.

Remember: we act, our way to new thinking, and this comes by using this specific phrases.