Christine Hudson

I am so excited to be here. It's been a couple years since I've been at this conference, and it's been so fun to learn from all of you, amazing humans, and we're excited to get to share some stories too.

So I'm going to get you jumped right in. If you're inspired so far in this conference by what you've learned so far this week, will you raise your hand for me? Thank you. We are too.

Now, different question. If you think that the culture of your organization will support the changes you want to make, raise your hand. Right, right, right. Okay. Well, if your hand was up — which a few of you was gently up — we hope we'll accelerate you. And if it's down, we totally get you. Like we've had that feeling of stuckness, right? It sucks.

So we have found that you can add like super small changes to single meetings to start kicking off culture change. So that's what it's all about today. And Bria's going to kick us off.

Bria Schecker

Thanks, Christine. Sorry, hold on, I went twice. There we go.

"I don't know." That's what our leadership team was afraid to say to each other for a really long time. That's what they were afraid to say to me, to their boss, amongst their peers. And it was causing all sorts of problems. I, as a change agent, wasn't even comfortable saying "I don't know."

If we can't admit when we don't know something, we're not sharing difficult information. We're not sharing a potential risk, a potential cost savings, or even a potential great idea or innovation. If we want a learning culture, if we want a safety culture, we have to feel comfortable saying "I don't know." Changing to a culture where this is psychologically safe, obviously is not an overnight thing.

But I did take my first small step towards this in a meeting just a few months ago with our executive leadership team. I used an activity from Patrick Lencioni's book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team — some of you're probably familiar with this — where I asked the group in an icebreaker to name how many siblings they had and where they grew up, what their birth order was, and then most importantly, a story from their childhood where they overcame adversity.

Now, as you can imagine, this activity brought in just a little bit of vulnerability to this group. And even though that exercise didn't immediately lead people to saying things like "I don't know" or "I don't know yet" — that would be my measure of success: how often did I hear members of this executive leadership team saying something like "I don't know"? How often did I find myself feeling comfortable saying that? And how often did we hear that echoed throughout our entire organization?

Throughout this talk, I'm going to share with you some of the practices to help us get there. But this simple icebreaker was our first practice.

My name's Bria Schecker, and I care deeply about evolving culture and guiding change in a way that brings the joy back into the work that we do every day, through vulnerability, authenticity, and the valuing of diverse perspectives. During this talk, I'm going to be sharing some real-time stories with you from Humana's cultural journey, and all three of us are going to draw on the experiences that we've had leading and coaching in other organizations too.

Ronica Roth

I'm Ronica Roth, and I'm passionate about the art of purposeful gathering, and about building teams and communities that are caring and energizing. And today I'll be sharing some accumulated knowledge along with an experience report from a mid-size company I've been working with the last couple years.

Christine Hudson

And I'm Christine Hudson. I have a background in leading and coaching large-scale transformation, but also in technology startups. I love helping humans become the next most amazing versions of themselves. So that's my MO. I'll be sharing a particular experience from a Fortune 500 FinTech that I worked with for a couple of years.

And today, again, we're all sharing stories of improved culture in hopes that you'll be able to use these as examples. They're really small, so maybe you can use them as soon as tomorrow. That's our hope. So we'll also be sharing many of these stories in an upcoming book called Practice Makes Culture.

So all three of us coach that practice makes culture. What you practice every single day as an individual and with other leaders — it shapes, it defines, it can redefine your culture. It really does make your culture: your practices, your modeling, your behaviors, your language.

So we leverage ways of working, facilitative leadership, modern value flow — and we add it to meetings.

Ronica Roth

Woo, meetings — so exciting, right? I know that you guys were like, "oh, I wish I could just go there and talk about meetings and more meetings." But honestly, meetings — it's where your culture is most visible, right? It's also most reinforced there. So good news — that makes it easiest to change, right? You can leverage group practice, positive peer pressure, and learning by doing. Learning when you're doing real work is the fastest way to upskill your leaders.

So every day, every meeting we have this opportunity to practice, and most people aren't taking advantage of it. So our goal is to change the culture, to have better business results and happier, more engaged humans.

So what about you? We're all here at a ways-of-working conference. You're probably here because you want to change your ways of working, or improve them, for you and your business. What's the culture you're looking to create to do that? Maybe you're wishing for some of the cultures you've heard about this week. Maybe you wish it was safer to share hard news, or that your company nurtured those empowered product teams, or that they welcomed diverse perspectives. How do you wish things worked in your organization?

Your answer will probably require a shift, maybe a big shift, in behaviors, language, skills, and mindset. And I think people often believe or think that culture just kind of happens by magic. It just is. But it isn't. We actually all make it every single day.

So we've tried many times to create or change our work culture, and it turns out we've realized we've been following a few steps as we do that. So first, we name the culture change. And as leaders, we get really clear by writing a destination postcard — a postcard from the future where we describe what that future culture looks and feels like.

Then we identify one next behavior or language change that supports that desired culture. We've learned to get specific — and like Christine said, get really small — and we have to think: what's something we can do to help people act differently right now?

Then we choose a meeting in which to practice just one, and a meeting where we can adjust the agenda. And then the next step is the real work: we design cycles of training, practice, and feedback into that meeting agenda. And it doesn't need to be complicated. We just want to create a space where people can practice and kind of reinforce that behavior — that is what that culture looks and feels like.

And also, by the way, the meeting still has to do what it was meant to do, right? We're not hijacking the meeting, we're just borrowing pieces of it. Then we run that meeting with that agenda. And this part sometimes takes a little courage. I found it's helpful to remind myself: it's just a small step, and "oh yeah, I've actually seen this work before." Confidence of my convictions.

And then to complete the cycle, of course, I want to reflect on it and kind of claim our wins. Make sure we appreciate people for practicing, and then take a look at how it went. What did we learn, and what's next? Help us choose our next behavior change and our next path through what turns out to be a loop.

And that all may sound very basic, and that's the idea. It's a very practical approach to make real culture change. And again — got to start small.

So in this, we've learned that the easiest way to start practicing is in an everyday meeting — a standup, a team meeting, a demo, something you do every week. And we're going to share some examples where we adjusted an everyday meeting to also be a place to practice an element of our desired culture.

Bria Schecker

So let's come back to that activity that I shared with you — that icebreaker with our leadership team — to demonstrate how this practice and culture-change loop looks like in practice.

So we had observed as a leadership team that a lack of psychological safety was really impacting our ability to innovate and to learn pretty much at every level of our organization. Everyone from interns and developers all the way up to our CIOs didn't often feel comfortable saying "I don't know," or pushing back on the status quo, or admitting when they make mistakes — because we all do — or testing and learning. This really impacted every single level of our organization.

We also took a really long time to make decisions. They were often over-centralized. And when things didn't go according to plan, we fell victim to that "single throat to choke" mentality — which is a term that I really hate. But it just doesn't feel good. None of this felt good to anyone.

So what we decided to do with this leadership team was focus on building psychological safety with their group first. So that hopefully would create a ripple effect for the rest of the organization, and they would start to lead by example with their own teams as well.

So the behaviors that we worked on to start this transformation — or start this little shift — was to have that leadership team practice vulnerability and empathy together. And the reason we focused on these two behaviors first was because these are the most critical ingredients for psychological safety to thrive in any organization or any setting.

So if you think about that icebreaker, the reason why that one was so important to use is because it builds the right type of trust for psychological safety to thrive. It's more than just the predictive type of trust — where "I believe you do what you say you're going to do." It's the type of vulnerability-based trust where I trust that I'm safe to say that I made a mistake, or to admit when I don't know the answer to a hard question, or to just say "I'm sorry, I was actually totally wrong about that."

And in order for that type of inherent trust to really form within a team, it's usually necessary for the senior-most leader to share first. And as I'm sure you can imagine, convincing a really senior leader to show up that way for his team was a little difficult. And he was pretty resistant. And if I'm being honest, I kind of had to put my job on the line a little bit. And I told him that he would never have to do anything I asked of him ever again if it didn't work. And I actually told him that I'm not just telling you that to get a laugh out of you.

So anyway, we moved on to the training stage of this. And all I did was just share my own example of what I've used in the past for this activity with him, and helped him brainstorm a little bit about what he might want to share. I gave him a little pep talk beforehand to make sure he was still bought in, and then we had our meeting.

During that meeting, my job was pretty easy. I just got to explain what we were going to do — just like I did to all of you. And then I sat back and let our leader lead. He led by example, he shared his story, and everybody else followed suit.

Immediately after that conversation that we had, I asked the group to reflect, and I just asked them the question: why do you think I put you all in such an uncomfortable situation together? And answering that question helped them realize that building that type of vulnerability in those types of meetings was the foundation for building trust. I didn't lose my job, thankfully. And it opened the door for future sessions, and we've had so much fun learning together.

So what has that progression looked like? Like I said, we picked a recurring meeting for a reason. We've been able to bring in new and different activities on a very regular cadence to help practice vulnerability and empathy.

So I have a couple other examples on the screen. I'm just going to share one of them, and some of my friends in the room will find this to sound very familiar. I had our leaders create a comic strip about themselves in which they were the superhero. And their superhero powers were all of the things that made them the amazing individual and leader that they are today. They also had to find their kryptonite — the thing that was holding them back from reaching their highest potential, the thing that they had to get vulnerable about. And they had to share all of this along with their personal action plans for what they would do to overcome their kryptonite. And they had to name people on their personal accountability team — like mentors and guides — that could actually hold them accountable to sticking to this action plan.

And that's where my second metric emerged, which are moments of vulnerability. I know that's going to probably sound a little woo-woo and fuzzy to you. I am from Boulder, Colorado, after all. But that's honestly the best thing that I could come up with to figure out how to measure this. And so I guess that's where I'll ask for some help from you all — if you have a better way to measure this, please come talk to me afterwards.

I know that some companies will use things like pulse surveys. Humana uses those too. And honestly — pardon my French, I promised if I would curse at least once in this talk — those are prone to b******t. A lot of companies will use these, but if you don't already have a psychologically safe environment, people aren't going to feel safe enough to answer those honestly either. So you're going to end up with skewed data.

So anyway, after a few sessions with our leadership team, our leaders began showing up for all different types of meetings differently. Just recently — actually just a few weeks ago — we had this huge town hall with all 250 of our people leaders across the entire organization. And we really saw this ripple effect start to take form. That really resistant executive — he actually shared that same exact story with the entire leader organization within his business unit.

So we're making sure to celebrate big wins like that. I actually even posted feedback for him on our company-wide shout-out board so people could see that yes, we're making progress. Yes, it's making a difference. And even though it's a big scary C-level leader, it's really important to celebrate their successes publicly too.

We're very much in the beginning of all of this. We're still exploring ways to leverage this training and practice and feedback loop, but this leadership team is making so much progress — probably more than they even realize. We do have our avenues in place to share learnings and wins, and we also have plenty of opportunities to reflect and retrospect, which is huge. And we're already finding new ways to learn while doing and proudly say, "I don't know."

Ronica Roth

Nice. Let me be a little more explicit explaining the structure we're going for in these agenda updates, right? We've said we want to create cycles of training, practice, and feedback. Training is probably a pretty strong word here. Often all we need is a quick reminder to bring a skill front and center. For example, we want to create a culture of openness and we're working on building a behavior of raising difficult topics. People know how to do it, but if they've lost that habit, a little reminder or some modeling from a leader will help us remember to try, right?

In fact, most people have had training in many of the skills we wish they would use — they're just not using them every day. So let's remind them that they already know how to do this by offering a quick refresher, like a short video on the topic — say, active listening, right? A skill that brings a nice culture.

Then we let people know that in this meeting today, we're going to be conscious about practicing together, and that we've designed this meeting to make it easy to practice. So maybe we do that by adding a step in the agenda — because we're practicing active listening, after each presenter, we're going to ask someone to paraphrase.

And then the agenda also needs to include that mechanism for feedback and coaching — whether it's from leaders or peers, right? Including highlighting successes: "so great paraphrasing, I feel very heard," right? And ideally we also make it easy on each other to practice and not get it right — to help us all laugh together when we make the inevitable mistakes. I remember one team that was trying to learn to be more succinct, and so anyone was invited to hold up an Elmo doll for "enough — let's move on."

So I'll share an experience I did in the digital organization of this mid-size company I worked with for past couple years. One culture shift we wanted was to ground all of our work in business value, which might sound like a big "duh" — of course we should work on things that will bring value to the business. But other departments just could not make the connection between our geeky descriptions of features and stories and the why, the business value behind it. And by not using clear business value language all the time, the teams were sometimes missing the mark on their features.

So first behavior change: speak succinctly to business value. And we chose the biweekly system demos as the place in which to practice. We made a new intro slide template and provided prep instructions to the product managers that they had to be very clear in providing the reason — the business value behind the work that developers were about to demo.

As we ran the meeting, the digital org leader listened carefully for whether the value explanations were clear, and when they weren't, she provided feedback in the form of either asking questions or filling in some of the gaps. At the end of the meeting, the leader appreciated out loud how great it was to hear the why behind all of that great work. And afterwards I sent some specific feedback notes to the PMs that they could use to get better.

So we practiced that for two demos, got better at it, and we introduced the next behavior — which was to encourage everyone, so other teams and stakeholders who were in that demo, to keep asking, "what's the value?" anytime it wasn't clear. And our PMs were often very surprised that two weeks later people had forgotten why we were doing things. But that's how it works. That's what happens, right? So we helped the product managers build this habit of continually reminding everyone what the business value was. And once we got good at that, we were able to take it a step further and practice demoing the results of our A/B testing, providing very clear explanations of the impact on customer behavior and of that behavior on business metrics. So building a bit by bit.

All right, so those are some everyday meetings. Some of our meetings are longer, right? They're bigger moments. And these bigger, longer meetings provide even more time to model and practice behaviors that can really change our culture. And with even more people there, typically there's more positive peer pressure.

So when I say bigger meetings, I'm just talking even just something as short as two hours, right? So you have these at quarter and year-end. You have leadership offsites, you have quarterly business reviews, annual planning. I mean, we have these when we need to make a big decision, right? Product direction, vendor meetings, architecture changes. You have these. So let's take a look at two more stories — how we started to change work culture with a single behavior or a couple of behaviors in a single meeting.

Bria Schecker

I'm going to tell you another story from Humana. This one's actually still very current, just like the last one as well.

We are currently working on a really high-stakes initiative that we have to deploy, and it impacts all of our segments — which still to this day work in silos more or less.

What this would look like traditionally, as I've mentioned before, is identifying that one single person, that directly responsible individual — the DRI — to track all of those activities, to make sure that everything is staying on plan, to have all of the answers to all of the questions. Spoiler alert: that never works.

And what usually happens is we have late-breaking dependencies, we have late-breaking requirements, everything feels really emergent, and we end up pointing fingers. We end up blaming, we end up with delays, we end up with a lot of waste and rework. Sound familiar? Yeah.

So what are we doing about it? We're doing things differently this time. We are shifting to a culture of shared responsibility instead of individual accountability. We are making sure that we're visualizing and sharing plans before they're finalized. We're bringing more people into that messy middle, which feels really uncomfortable for a lot of folks.

And the way that we're doing this is we're inviting more diverse perspectives into our pre-existing quarterly planning sessions. So what this looked like before is we would just have a really small group of product and program managers sitting together in a meeting for a long time, fleshing out really detailed project plans, and then everyone would have to go take those project plans to their other silos, fight for prioritization, and then bring back everything that didn't get prioritized — and it was really chaotic.

So instead, that same group is coming together ahead of the meetings. They are developing a shared vision and a set of features, rather than really detailed project plans, and they're letting it feel a little messy. They're also asking those who are closer to the work to come in to those planning sessions to help flesh out the plan and highlight all of those dependencies. They're making sure that stakeholders and individual contributors are able to collaboratively work to prioritize and plan in a way that feels way more holistic and frankly way more realistic as well.

What this has led to is some shared accountability and much more successful delivery in a really short amount of time. So a bigger moment like this — it allows us to not only practice our shift in that meeting itself, but it also helps us shape all of those smaller moments that lead up to that bigger moment. Things like backlog refinement, as well as even the events afterwards, like post-planning, retros, and demos. We have to learn to be more inclusive. We have to include more diverse perspectives. We have to let them into kind of how the sausage is made, in order for it to feel like a true team effort and eradicate the individual accountability mindset.

So as you can imagine, that first session definitely was a little bit messy. But even through that mess — which we wanted to embrace — we saw some really amazing wins. We had more diverse perspectives in the room. We had a clearer vision, and we also had incredibly meaningful conversations. And when we were retroing, participants could not stop raving about the quality of those conversations as well as the quality and their confidence in those plans that we made. And they couldn't wait to plan the next one.

So what did the next ones look like? Well, because of a moment like this, the beauty of it is, it's not just a bigger moment, but it's still one that recurs on a cadence. So we were able to keep practicing that desired behavior of bringing folks into the messy middle phase of ideation and collaboration. But what we did change and evolve was who we invited.

So as folks got more and more comfortable being open to being more inclusive in that messy middle phase, we started inviting more people. So that first session, we just had our architects come, and they realized, "oh my gosh, this is so valuable, we're learning so many things so much earlier on in this process." So then the second time they said, "well, let's have someone come from every single team — or at the very least every single segment." And the learnings grew exponentially. And so this most recent one that happened just a few weeks ago, actually, we had a couple full development teams join the planning. And every single big moment that we've had has just uncovered more and more gotchas earlier and earlier on. People have gotten so excited, and the collaboration in these events just continues to grow. It's very cool to see.

Christine Hudson

All right, let's talk about another big moment. And this one we've labeled — we called it "Delivering with Confidence." So a senior executive that I adore working with joined a Fortune 500 company, and he joined it to take over a company-wide initiative to increase customer satisfaction. So we were measuring NPS, and it had plateaued significantly.

This seasoned executive, totally used to coming into new programs, could not tell what we were going to deliver or when. So there was definitely some quality issues. There was firefighting. There was definitely an occasional rollback. Some deliveries got out without training our front-end workers. So you can imagine how that felt to our customers. Not awesome.

Really, we just wanted to routinely deliver some good quality things to our customers. And we wanted our company to be prepared to help with that, right? We wanted our front-end workers trained. So I know that sounds basic, but I know you guys have probably struggled with that issue too.

So after one-on-one interviews with the involved leadership team, we decided on one big behavior change. So we were going to make our upcoming work visible to each other in 30-60-90 day plans. So this change would be asked of everyone in the program. So all the teams, all the extended leadership team members — how and what did we plan to deliver together next quarter?

We decided to use an existing quarterly business review meeting. I know, crazy, huh? You guys are looking at me like, "no, that doesn't happen." Yeah, it totally does. So we decided to use an existing meeting that we already had that idea of, "of course we're going to take a look at the past and see how the last quarter went, how might we need to steer our work based on that quarter?" Cool — now let's make it visible for the next quarter.

And these were service teams, customer service teams, tech teams, and leadership teams, right? So this actually — the work varied quite a lot. There were several cycles of training, practice, and feedback in the meeting. I'm going to tell you about one, which I think was likely the most important piece — around welcoming difficult information.

So to start out, we just talked about it. We named it in the beginning of the meeting: "We are going to see things that are difficult. We are going to see duplicate work, and it is going to suck, and it's going to feel terrible, and we're going to have to cancel one of those projects — but because of that, we're going to get better. We're going to see unnecessary work that's going to feel really bad." So we created working agreements as that whole room on how to call those out real kindly.

We practiced with each of these readouts. So we had people make their work visible, and then we read them out to each other. We practiced getting curious and trying to improve our system. So think a really, really light version of red teaming, right? Like, we're trying to be so kind in improving our strategy here, but we're going to make real improvements to our system and our work.

The feedback at first had to be provided by me modeling as a facilitator, and the senior executives in the room being really kind and curious and really supporting — like, "gosh guys, that sounds a lot like the work over there. Do you guys want to talk and see how it's different?" I'm like, we don't want to — you know, so it was really kind and gentle.

So we met for one and a half days. And you guys, that first day was so long — we ran over by a couple of hours, because as we were doing these readouts to each other, we learned so much about our system. We saw so many opportunities for huge improvement in not only the work itself, but how we did the work. So, you know, layer one and layer three. And it was sometimes awful to handle some of the big huge risks we ran into in the room together, but a lot better than firefighting them later. It was actually really awesome to give us that option, give ourselves that option — even if it was exhausting.

So at the end of the meeting we did a return-on-so-much-time-invested evaluation, and we decided that honestly we learned so much about our system, we learned so much about our work, and had made so many crazy changes to our system, that we'd better demo what we got done in the next two weeks just for alignment, and meet again in a month. This is 50 executives and the people doing the work in one room deciding to go ahead and spend another month working this way.

So one of the things we did at the very end of this first meeting — because remember, we're trying to reinforce these new behaviors — is we definitely gave verbal appreciations. But we also handed out little wooden elephants. So if you have something that somebody can take back that's physical, it's really nice — for people who welcomed the elephants in the room, those things we'd been dancing around, right? And so, especially for people who did it kindly, with consideration for the humans.

Ronica Roth

All right, we're almost done. Go for it. Fast, fast. All right. Okay. You know what, I will tell you guys more about the next meetings that we had if you are interested and want to stick around afterwards. But I want to make sure that we get to see a couple slides that will hopefully help you with your progress tomorrow.

In your meeting, let's bring it to you and your practice, right? So that culture you imagine — beginning that wonderful way of working. What's the gap between that and the culture you have today? If that gap is wide, then starting small and building slowly might feel like it doesn't create much of a difference at first. But we've found that as you expand to practice with more behaviors, with more people in more meetings, the impact grows and the culture really does change.

So there's no one right path to iterate to the culture you want. You can choose behaviors based on pain points, or where the energy is, or path of least resistance, honestly. That said, the bottom of this slide are a lot of the foundational behaviors that we most often start with when we're inviting change. These are skills that can be practiced with small agenda adjustments in meetings you already have.

We're over. So we invite you to try it, and I know it's the end. Take that first step. Name the culture you want, maybe even write it down right now. Choose a supporting behavior in a meeting, write that down. Schedule some time for yourself to design how you're going to make it a place to practice, and tell one of your colleagues you're going to do it — 'cause that'll make you do it.

Christine Hudson

Since we're in Vegas, we're placing a bet on you having a puzzle. If you are having a puzzle that you're working on, we really want to talk to you about it. It lights us up inside. So please feel free to reach out to us. We'll hang out here for a little bit, and you can always get in touch with us afterwards too. Thank you all so much. Thank you.