What We Build Going Forward

Culture is what people do when no one is watching. Skills become cultural when they stop being special, when they are simply how the team operates. The question this month: what would it take for what you have practiced to become the default rather than the exception?

This month’s move: The harvest scan. This month’s rep is reflective. Once a day, pick one of the six prior moves and notice, in real time, whether you used it or had a chance to. You are taking inventory of what actually stuck. That inventory becomes your culture commitments.

Recognition cue: You notice yourselves slipping back into old defaults, or you realize a norm everyone values has never been made explicit.

Write one line on your log each day you run it.

Run the harvest scan alone exactly as written. Re-score your Starting Point Survey, compare it to Session 0, and write your own personal practice commitment for what comes after the curriculum ends.

Most culture commitments fail because they are aspirational rather than behavioral.

ASPIRATIONAL (won't hold): “We will be more honest with each other.”
BEHAVIORAL (will hold): “When we disagree with a decision in the room, we will say so before the meeting ends, not in the hallway after.”

A real commitment has three parts:

1. The specific behavior (what you will actually do differently)
2. The signal (when / in what situation)
3. The accountability mechanism (how you will know if you are keeping it)

Questions to test any commitment:

• Could someone observe whether you kept this?
• Would your team be able to call you on it if you didn't?
• Is this specific enough to do, or general enough to always claim you're doing?

Month 1 — Under the Hood: Nervous system awareness. STOP practice. SCARF model.
Month 2 — The Voice in Your Head: Facts vs. stories. Ladder of inference. 30-Second Start. The 5 Whys.
Month 3 — The Art of Really Listening: Looping. NVC. LEAP.
Month 4 — Repair: Three restorative questions. Circle practice. Repair protocol.
Month 5 — Not All Conflicts Are the Same: V model. Adaptive vs. technical. Decision types.
Month 6 — Accountability That Connects: Accountability structure. Shame vs. reflection.

For each lens: Which changed something real for me? Which did I most resist? What does my resistance tell me?

Then: Which two or three are most useful for this team? Build culture commitments from those.

SCENARIO 1
Six months from now, a new person joins your team. You explain how your team handles conflict. What would you say? Write it down. That is your culture, or the one you are building. Does it match how you actually operate today?

SCENARIO 2
Identify the conflict pattern that has persisted through this curriculum. Apply the Month 5 diagnostic: technical or adaptive? Which lens addresses it most directly? What culture commitment would specifically target this pattern?

SCENARIO 3
Write one culture commitment using the behavioral format: when [signal], we will [specific behavior] instead of [current default], and we will know we are keeping it by [specific indicator].

Media for this Month
Required before the live session: the Edmondson IdeaCast. The rest is optional.

1. REQUIRED · LISTEN HBR IdeaCast: Amy Edmondson — Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace What psychological safety is (candid feedback, open acknowledgment of mistakes, the ability to take interpersonal risks), why it is the single factor most predictive of high-performing teams, and how leaders sustain it.
2. LISTEN We Can Do Hard Things: Why Are We Never Satisfied? with adrienne maree brown on satisfaction, sustainability, and building a culture people actually want to sustain, not from obligation but from genuine investment. Belonging vs. compliance, and how joy is a strategy rather than a reward.
3. ARTICLE Murmurations (adrienne maree brown’s column at YES! Magazine) column on relationship, pattern, and practice at small and large scale. Suggested: “Grow the Chorus,” on moving from a solitary voice to a collective chorus. brown created and curates the column.
4. ARTICLE Four Ways to Avoid Our Feelings, and What to Do Instead (Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley) Research-backed piece from Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, directly relevant to the question of what makes change stick versus what we avoid
5. ARTICLE How Curiosity Can Help Us Overcome Disconnection (Greater Good Science Center) Four steps to practicing deep curiosity about others' perspectives; the practice skill that makes culture commitments real rather than aspirational
6. OPTIONAL | BUY THE BOOK *Make It Stick* (Brown, Roediger, McDaniel)

Total time for required media this month: approximately 2 hours. Deliberately lighter, so the harvest gets the energy.

• Personal: Which of the seven lenses changed something real for you? Which did you most resist? What does your resistance tell you?
• Relational: Is there a conversation you want to have with a specific teammate before this process closes, something you have wanted to say and have not?
• Systemic: What is one thing about how your team is structured, how you make decisions, run meetings, or handle performance, that this process has revealed needs to change?
• Looking at your Starting Point Survey scores from Session 0 and now: what changed? What stayed the same? What does that tell you?

You started this curriculum because lint accumulates. Small things, never quite addressed. Patterns everyone sees and nobody names. Stories formed years ago and never tested. Seven months later the question isn’t whether you have a cleaner filter. It’s whether you have built a practice of cleaning it. Conflict won’t stop. Lint will accumulate. The difference now is whether you have the habit, the language, and the commitment to each other to deal with it before the machine starts running hot.

This is your Month 7 artifact: the Culture Commitments Charter. Sign it. Post it. Put it somewhere you will see it. In six months, take it out and read it together. The charter is only as good as what you do with it.

Discussion questions for pairs or the full group:

• Looking at your Starting Point Survey scores from Session 0 and now: what changed?
• What stayed the same?
• What does that tell you?
• Which of the lenses in this curriculum were most useful?
• Which was hardest?
• Are those the same one?
• What is the single most important thing this team needs to keep doing to sustain what you built?
• What are you still afraid of when it comes to conflict on this team?
• What would it take to be less afraid of it?

Before the next session, check in with yourself:

• Did I name one thing I am grateful for from a teammate in this process?
• Did the team write at least three specific, behavioral culture commitments?
• Do I know what my personal practice will be going forward, distinct from the group’s?

• Month 7 is not the time to introduce anything new.
• It is the time to honor what was built.
• The harvest round is the most important part.
• Give everyone equal time.
• Do not let some people dominate or others off the hook.
• Culture commitments must be specific and behavioral.
• “We will be more honest” is not a commitment.
• “We will use STOP before any meeting where a difficult topic is on the agenda” is.
• Keep asking: what will you actually do differently?
• When?
• How will you know?
• The closing gratitude round sometimes feels awkward.
• Let it be awkward.
• It is important.
• Watch for teams that skip to action planning before harvesting (protect the harvest) and people who minimize their own growth (“I still have a lot to work on” is true and also deflects from naming what changed).
• Consider scheduling a 90-minute check-in three months after Month 7 to revisit the culture commitments.
• That meeting is not part of the curriculum.
• It is the beginning of the next stage.