Dear Reader,

When I begin working with a new organisation, there are things I am watching for before I have had a single formal conversation.

• Not the strategy documents.
• Not the org chart.
• Not the culture survey results or the engagement scores.

I am watching how people move. Who waits for whom. What happens in the moment before a senior leader enters the room. Whether people finish their sentences when they are speaking to someone above them in the hierarchy, or whether they watch the senior person's face and adjust.

I am listening to the silences as much as the speech. What topics move through the conversation fluidly and which ones produce a subtle shift in register, a slight formality, a careful choosing of words, a redirection.

I am noticing the quality of attention in the room. Whether people are genuinely present with each other or whether there is a layer of performance running alongside the content, the performance of engagement, of alignment, of confidence that may or may not match the internal experience.

This is the ethnographic sensibility that my training in medical anthropology gave me, the capacity to read the lived texture of an organisational environment rather than its stated description. It is the difference between asking an organisation what its culture is and sitting with it long enough to understand what its culture does.

What I typically find, when I look carefully, falls into a small number of patterns that repeat across contexts and sectors with striking consistency.

The first is what I call the performance layer

This is the gap between the official narrative of the organisation and the informal one. Most organisations have both: the story they tell about themselves publicly and in formal settings, and the story that circulates privately. The size of that gap and the nature of what it contains tells me more about the organisation's actual culture than any formal assessment.

The second is the load distribution

Specifically, where in the organisation the difficult things are being held. Unresolved leadership conflict almost always distributes downward. The teams carrying the most invisible load are frequently not the teams with the most difficult external challenges. They are the teams closest to a leadership dynamic that has not been addressed.

The third is the relationship to uncertainty at the top

A leadership team that can hold uncertainty, that can stay genuinely present with not knowing while the situation unfolds, creates a fundamentally different organisational experience than one that resolves uncertainty prematurely. The downstream effects of these two leadership cultures are categorical, not incremental.

The fourth, and the one that tells me the most about what is possible in this organisation, is the quality of honest and transparent speech.

Not how much people say, but what they say and to whom and under what conditions. Organisations where honesty is genuinely safe produce a particular quality of conversation that is immediately distinguishable. And organisations where it is not produce a particular quality of managed speech that is equally legible once you know how to read it.

These four patterns are where I begin. They are the diagnostic foundation from which everything that follows is built. Not because I arrive with answers. But because I have learned to ask the questions that surface what the organisation already knows but has not yet found a way to say.

Where your organization is looking for an in-house Coach and Advisor, or a Consultant, this is what I do and more. Did you know that even when I am working with individual leaders, and we are in the same geographical location at any one point in time, I now ask them to invite me to their offices, so I can observe them in action.

There is a lot that can be revealed between what you are saying and what you are doing. Your actions and behaviors are very revealing. Learn more on ways we can work together, by following the blue button below with All my services.

With loving kindness,