The objective was a culture of performance in an organisation facing a world getting faster, more automated and more demanding. Ordinary enough as a brief. The three challenges named underneath it were sharper: arriving at a shared understanding of that new world; solving for the human preference for the tried and tested over the uncharted; and — the one that decided the design — building something replicable and scalable that could be updated in a modular way over years.
I was Chief Digital Officer at Xynteo. The programme document was written by a team of seven, myself among them. The technology stack that had to carry it was mine.
Waves of catalysts
The shape was a wave: a group of people taken through three phases. Align them on the why, producing a strategic beliefs document that translated the organisation's purpose into guides for actual choices. Align them on the how, producing individual culture-to-performance plans. Then reinforce, through guided call behaviours, a value-action framework, case-study conversations, and co-created purpose projects with board members and regional chief executives.
Starting at the top was deliberate — equip the leaders, then propagate. That part is conventional. The next part is not.
The distinction the whole thing rests on
Every subsequent wave had to build on the first rather than begin again. And the reason is stated plainly in the document: after wave one, you are no longer asking people to invent their future. You are asking them to catch up with the future senior leadership has already imagined.
Those are different jobs and they need different designs.
Invention needs a small group, a lot of time, genuine openness, and the willingness to accept an answer nobody expected. Transmission needs context, internalisation of what was decided, a clear explanation of the mechanism, and then a specific challenge: change a behaviour, join an implementation, do your part.
The failure I have watched repeatedly is running the invention workshop indefinitely. It feels inclusive and it is enormously expensive — and worse, it is dishonest, because the direction has in fact been set and everyone in the room can tell. People know when they are being consulted about a decision that has already been made, and the resentment that produces is larger than the goodwill the workshop was meant to generate.
Saying it out loud — this wave is transmission, the beliefs are settled, here is what remains genuinely open — is more respectful than pretending otherwise. What stays open in the later waves is real: which behaviours you change, which implementations you join, what you do in your own area.
Why the technology question came second
The stack brief was narrow and correct: build technology that can support the culture-change programme. Not a digital transformation. A stack for this programme.
The existing footprint was the usual industrial-company picture. Conference calls carried one-to-few communication. Email carried one-to-many. A collaboration platform was being rolled out, and a broadcast platform was relatively new.
Read against the wave design, the gap is obvious. Conference calls and email can run wave one perfectly well — it is a small group of senior people, and the richest possible channel is the right one for invention. Neither can run wave five. Transmission at scale needs a persistent place where the strategic beliefs live, where implementation plans can be seen and joined, and where the conversation continues between sessions rather than evaporating when the call ends.
So the recommendation followed the programme rather than leading it: spaces on the collaboration platform for each subsequent wave, with mentors acting as moderators, and toolkits so those moderators knew what to do.
That last detail is the one most organisations skip. Giving a mentor a platform and a title is not the same as giving them a method. A moderator without a toolkit does what everyone does in an empty forum — posts an encouraging message and waits.
What I would do differently
I would have made the strategic beliefs document a living artefact on the platform from day one, rather than an output of wave one.
It was the thing every later wave had to internalise, and it existed as a document produced by a group of senior people at a moment in time. Had it been published where the later waves worked, with the ability to see who had challenged which belief and what the answer was, transmission would have been much easier — because the most persuasive evidence that a belief is real is a record of it surviving argument.
The method is on this page because the method is mine to describe. What the organisation did with it belongs to them. The specifics are not mine to publish.