What working together looks like
Four steps, from a first look to evidence of change. It starts with how your leaders see the organisation, finds out what is actually true on the ground, works on what matters most, and then checks what moved.
Most organisations already know what’s wrong. The knowledge is just in the wrong place.
Every organisation drifts into ways of working nobody chose, and the people closest to the work usually know where. This work creates the conditions for that honesty to reach leaders, then helps them make conscious decisions about what to stop, change and keep.
- Fewer nasty surprisesProblems surface while they are still cheap to fix, instead of after an incident, an audit or an inquiry.
- Capacity backStopping the reports, initiatives and meetings nobody needs frees time and money without a restructure.
- Change that landsProgrammes stall on quiet resistance and unacknowledged loss. Hearing both early is how they speed up.
- One leadership team, one organisationWhen leaders find they have been describing different organisations and close the gap, decisions stick.
- Judgement kept in the age of AIAutomation and suppliers don’t quietly take skills, knowledge or oversight with them.
- Before a major change or AI rollout
- When a programme has stalled
- After an incident, audit finding or difficult inspection
- When a new chief executive or leadership team starts
Start with how your leaders see it
Each member of the leadership team takes the Drift Check separately: 26 statements, about ten minutes. Then we look at the results together.
The most useful result is rarely the scores. It is the idea where one leader sees drift and another sees none. That gap shapes where the review listens hardest.
Find out what is actually true
A Listening Review is a series of short, open conversations across the organisation. It hears the people who do the work, not just the people who plan it, and it lets the themes come from them.
- Listen widelyStart with a handful of names and let the list grow by recommendation, until the same themes keep returning.
- Ask one closing questionEvery conversation ends the same way: “What three things would you fix?”
- Keep the wordsWhat people say is recorded as closely as possible to how they said it, and played back unfiltered.
- Let themes emergePatterns are tested back with people as they appear, rather than decided in advance.
- Find the people who already seeEvery organisation has people who already know where it needs to go. They are the fastest route to change.
- Name the lensThe reviewer says plainly where their own background and biases might colour what they hear.
- Offer choicesFindings come with options at different scales, so leaders choose the pace, rather than receiving one answer.
- Hand it backChange is owned inside the organisation, by the people who will carry it, not by an outside programme.
The question is not what the strategy says. It is what the people doing the work would recognise.
Work on what the review found
Each of the twelve ideas on the map has a practical exercise. We choose the two or three that fit what the review uncovered, and run them with the people involved.
| If the review finds… | We might run… |
|---|---|
| “That’s just how it’s done here” is the answer to most questions | Decision archaeology: tracing practices back to the decisions that made them |
| Outcomes nobody would have chosen, and no one quite responsible | Drift review: a blameless look at the reasonable steps that led here |
| Reports and dashboards that drive no decisions | Metric amnesty: retiring measures without blame |
| Teams that can no longer work without a tool or system | Capability fire drill: doing the work without it, then talking about what was missing |
| The real conversation happens after the meeting | Corridor cards: bringing the unsaid into the room, anonymously |
| Recent change has left people tired or quietly resistant | Loss inventory: naming what the change took, not only what it gave |
| Far more being started than stopped | Practice funeral: formally retiring something the organisation has outgrown |
See what moved
Around six months later, the same leaders retake the Drift Check. We compare it with the first, and with what people said in the review.
The second check is not a scorecard. It shows whether the organisation is noticing and choosing more than it was. Often the clearest sign of progress is that leaders’ answers have moved closer together.
A report your organisation can act on
At the end, everything comes together in one report, written for the leadership team and shareable with everyone who took part.
- Findings in your people’s own wordsThemes from the Listening Review, with quotes attributed only by team and level.
- Your own mapThe twelve ideas, showing where your organisation has drifted and how often each came up.
- The gapWhere leaders’ view of the organisation differs from what people on the ground said.
- Decisions with ownersWhat was stopped, changed, kept or tried, and where each one stands.
- What movedLeaders’ first and second Drift Checks side by side.
- What you keep doingThe few habits that carry on after the engagement ends.
Carrow Water
A complete report for a fictional public water authority: five executives, ten teams, 50 conversations, three exercises and two Drift Checks. The organisation, people, figures and quotes are all invented, so you can see exactly what a finished report looks like.
How the work is done
No villains
Drift is made of reasonable decisions. The work looks at systems, not at who to blame.
Seeing comes first
The benefits follow from an organisation seeing itself clearly, not the other way round.
Never a target
No score from this work should become a KPI. The moment it does, it becomes one more scoreboard nobody chose.
Owned inside
The aim is for the organisation to need outside help less, not more.
Start with a conversation
Take the Drift Check with your leadership team, or get in touch to talk about what a review might look like for your organisation.