Why your people do what they do
This is the chapter the rest of the book depends on.
What people do comes from what they feel. What they feel comes from what they know and have watched happen.
Read it backwards to work out what is wrong. Read it forwards to design something better. That is the whole model, and it has two arrows.
Start with a complaint
Every complaint a leader has about their people is a behaviour. Here are some you have probably said or heard.
My team are not ambitious enough. Nobody tells me bad news early. Nobody takes ownership. Nothing ever gets finished. They wait to be told. Nobody flags a risk until it is a problem.
Each one arrives as a statement about people. Each one is a behaviour, and behind a behaviour there is a feeling, and behind the feeling there is something somebody watched.
Take the second one, because it costs the most
Nobody tells me bad news early.
What would you have to feel to sit on a problem for three weeks? Probably bringing it up early is the problem. The person who raises it becomes its owner. That there is a chance it resolves itself, and then you never have to be the one.
Where would you learn that? From the meeting where somebody flagged a risk and spent the next forty minutes defending themselves. From the project that went badly and the review that was mostly about who knew what and when. From watching a colleague raise something honest and get a reputation for negativity that outlasted the project.
So the fix is not asking people to be more open. You can ask, and they will agree, and nothing will change, because you have not altered the thing they are responding to.
The fix is what happens to the next person who brings bad news early. In front of others. Whether they get thanked or handled.
The part that catches everybody
We have spoken to a huge array of people about how their businesses operate. Often, what people believe is not true.
Nobody was punished for missing an ambitious goal. But one person thought they were. They told two people. Those two adjusted their behaviour and told others why. Within a year, it becomes a fact everyone acts on, nobody says out loud, and no leader has ever had the chance to correct it because it was never said to them.
That is why this cannot be fixed by communication. There is nothing to correct, because nothing was ever claimed. And it is why the design matters more than the message: the only way to overwrite what people watched is to let them watch something else.
Reading it forwards
Now use it deliberately. Pick the behaviour you want.
We want people to stop things that are not working early and without drama.
What would they have to feel? That stopping is a good outcome. That the reasoning matters more than the result. That nobody's standing drops.
So what do they need to watch? A goal was stopped by a senior person, who said out loud, with the reasoning kept, and the person thanked. Once. Maybe twice. Then it is true here.
That is a design, and it takes about ten minutes of somebody's courage rather than a change programme.
Where this shows up in the rest of the book
Every one of the six things is specified twice: what it produces and what it teaches.
The weekly meeting produces a decision. What it teaches is whether honesty is safe here, and that is decided by the first question the person chairing it asks.
The goal template produces a resourced goal. What it teaches is whether ambition is supported or decorative, and that is decided by whether anything came off somebody's plate to make room.
The recognition list produces a moment of praise. What it teaches is what this company actually rewards, and it overrides everything above it.
A ritual you designed for what it produces will teach whatever it happens to teach. That is how well-run companies end up with behaviour nobody wanted and nobody chose.