When Smart People Realise They've Been Using Hammers on Everything

The moment I remember most clearly happened on day two of a workshop in Silicon Valley. An engineering director - let's call him David - suddenly stopped mid-conversation and said, "Oh. Oh, we've been treating our culture change like a technical problem, haven't we?"

You could see it spreading around the room as others started connecting the dots. Here were brilliant people realising they'd been approaching their messiest, most human challenges with the same tools they used for software problems.

And then something interesting happened. Instead of getting defensive about past approaches, they became teachers. David started sketching out examples from his own team - "So when we tried to 'implement' better collaboration, we designed the perfect meeting structure. But what we should have been asking was: when does collaboration already happen naturally here? What patterns are already working?"

Another participant jumped in with her story about employee engagement surveys that told them what they already knew but never helped them understand why. "We kept measuring the problem instead of exploring what was underneath it."

The Shift From Fixing To Noticing

By day three, you could feel the shift. People who'd arrived thinking about how to engineer better culture were now curious about what patterns already existed in their teams. The questions changed from "How do we fix this?" to "What's really happening here that we haven't noticed?"

This was a division of a global infrastructure company facing the kind of pressure that makes culture change feel urgent, not optional: new competitors disrupting their market, technology shifting faster than they could adapt, customer expectations evolving in ways that demanded different responses. Instead of hiring more external consultants to solve these challenges, they made a different bet: invest in complexity training for their people and see what emerges.

Building Internal Capability Through Complexity Training

Over nine months, we worked with 100 people across their global sites, training them in complexity-based approaches and tools. But here's what made it stick: we used their actual workplace challenges as the exercises. Instead of abstract case studies, people worked on the real problems they'd return to on Monday morning. The training was heavily dialogue-driven - more conversation than lecture, with examples and tools emerging from the specific situations they brought to the room.

The Reality Of Organisational Change Adoption

Let's be honest: not everyone "got it." But those who did, really did. They became evangelists for approaching their challenges differently. And here's when we knew it was working: some of these participants started teaching the materials themselves to other groups in their organisations. Our role shifted from delivering content to supporting these emerging internal teachers.

The support didn't stop after the workshops. Over the following year, we provided ongoing coaching and mentoring - face-to-face sessions on client sites, online sessions for those who couldn't meet in person, and deeper sessions for people who wanted to go further with their learning.

Emergent Outcomes Across Global Teams

As these newly-trained change agents returned to their teams, something unexpected happened. Different sites and divisions started adapting the approaches in ways that fit their local context. People in Paris started looking at employee wellbeing differently. Teams in San Jose began building new platforms to examine employee data from fresh angles.

And Bangalore? I honestly don't know what they did. (And that's exactly the point.)

What the company got wasn't a standardised culture change program. They got something more valuable: an organisation that became more resilient to market shocks, more responsive to customer needs, and more fulfilling to work for.

Measuring Success Through Voluntary Adoption

The real validation came when change agents started applying these approaches beyond their own teams. Some began using the same principles with external clients - taking what they'd learned about working with complexity and uncertainty internally and discovering it transformed difficult customer conversations into trust-building exercises. When your people start voluntarily using your training approaches in their most important external relationships, you know something fundamental has shifted.

The real outcome? When the next market disruption hit, they had people throughout the organisation who could read the patterns, work with uncertainty, and help their teams adapt - instead of waiting for the perfect solution to be designed and deployed from above.

Know someone stuck in similar patterns? Send them this to show there's another way forward.

Think your organisation might benefit from this kind of approach? Let's explore it together.