Climate and Environment

The climate only gets named once it’s already heavy

Methods, results and objectives get talked about constantly. The climate gets talked about once it has become unbearable, and by then the conversation starts uphill.

The climate has no thermometer. There’s no number on a dashboard to look at, and that makes it an easy thing to put off until it presents the bill.

Three steps, in this order

1. Move people out of their environment. In the office, in the same seats as always, people say the same things as always. You need a setting where opening your mouth isn’t already a position in itself.
2. Create the conditions for listening. Whoever speaks has to know in advance that what they say will be received, including when it’s awkward. Not every moment of sharing is pleasant, and the most useful ones usually aren’t.
3. Get the difficult things out. What goes unsaid turns into a settled discomfort. But sharing on its own isn’t enough, and left there it makes things worse: what comes out then has to be worked through, otherwise you’ve only opened something and left it open.

Once those three steps are done the work isn’t finished, and this is where a lot of attempts stop. What had been dividing the group up to that point has to become a shared starting point. If that doesn’t happen, it was a venting session.

Corporate theatre

Getting people to talk about how they actually are isn’t simple, and asking them head-on doesn’t work well. One of the instruments we use is corporate theatre: you build a character and you say it through them.

The advantage is precise. If I speak, I’m exposing myself. If a character I invented speaks, and that character happens to resemble me closely, the irony keeps the judgement at a distance and the thing can be said. You work on the words too: which ones to use, which to avoid, what effect they have on the person listening.

And there’s a fact that weighs more inside a team than people like to admit. Moods transmit. Laughter is contagious and so is a bad mood. Noticing what state you’re in, and knowing how to change it, is a capability that acts on everybody around you too.

Environment isn’t only the place

Environment is the physical space, and it doesn’t end there. It’s the tools people use, the internal communications, the way people are together, the culture you breathe.

The workplace isn’t the factory floor of a century ago, dark and dangerous, so today the question is a different one: whether people are restored in that place, or only used up.

There’s a practical detail worth more than a lot of statements of intent. What the company treasures has to stay visible. A photograph from an event, a product on a shelf, the memory of something difficult that went well. It’s needed on the days when the motivation isn’t there, and the days when it isn’t there are normal days.