One technique I’ve used to soften the process is to ask everyone in the room to make two lists: the top five things that they would do again and the top five things that they wouldn’t do again. People find it easier to be candid if they balance the negative with the positive, and a good facilitator can make it easier for that balance to be struck.

Creating the conditions for a cultural transformation takes all the tools at your disposal. You can’t, for example, command an internally focused culture to magically metamorphose into one that canonizes its customers. You have to nudge, suggest, cajole, and ultimately convince people that the new environment you’re proposing really is the best one for the business and, perhaps more important, for themselves. That takes time - and a good sense of timing.

Some leaders look back on their first hundred days and say, “If I could do it again, I wouldn’t hesitate so long to make those key people changes or that strategic move.” Others were glad they exercised restraint. In most cases the timing are dependent on the situation.

As to method, Mary Murphy and her colleagues have developed a deft and usable approach they call a “cues audit.” In settings like corporate divisions, academic departments, non-profit organizations, boards, classrooms, small businesses, and churches, do three things.

First, educate. Explain how features of settings— the proportion of different identities in the setting; the pictures on the wall; the references people use in their speech; the style differences in people’s clothing; the language people use to designate different identities— can cause churn in some people while going unnoticed by others.

Experience can tell us important things about how to make good ideas work— for example, that how something is done can be as important as what is done. A cues audit can yield information that is invaluable to the life of a setting. Look at how dramatically it changed 3M. But experience with such efforts tells us something else too: to avoid a heavy hand in implementing it. It shouldn’t become a tyranny. I suspect you know what I’m saying. We shouldn’t use relatively small violations of emerging mores to morally condemn or socially ostracize a person— to “cancel” them. Terms or behaviour that degrade the humanity of other groups— mortal sins— have to be off-limits. But experience suggests it’s wiser to treat venial sins with more latitude. Reacting too strongly to them can undermine the very goal we’re after— a setting with a climate of greater trust and lower churn. Remember the manager who keeps talking to his staff about his European cathedral tour when many of them can't afford an out-of-town vacation.

The aim is to establish a practice that keeps people in touch with each other’s experience of the setting. An advantage of locating such an effort in specific settings is that that’s where trust-building changes are often most feasible and their outcomes most measurable. It enables a culture in which change is empirically driven (see the next chapter for a superb example) and takes place at a pace that is more evolutionary than revolutionary— both features of which foster stability and trust.