Culture by Design
A culture built with the people who live in it.
A culture is the hardest thing to see from inside it. Culture by Design finds out what people are experiencing now, lets them help design what changes, and keeps it alive through the year.
Start with a conversationThirty minutes on the organization as it is now, and where to start.
Explore the approach- On the wallValues, a mission, an adopted plan
- In the roomWhat every employee hears, and whether every voice is heard
- In the weekWhat gets noticed, repeated, and recognized
The week is where people learn what the wall means.
Built for the leader who senses it is time.
The relationship between people and their work changed. Expectations, politics, and technology moved, and the ways leadership used to reach employees stayed where they were. The leader usually notices first, in one of four moments.
Something good is worth keepingA team that works, and a leader who wants it to survive the next departure, the next hire, and the next hard year.
The workforce has changedNew people with new expectations of work, and a set of habits that was built for a different room.
Something shifted and nobody can name itMeetings run and the work gets done. Good people are harder to keep, and nobody can say exactly why.
The whole organization needs one pictureA moment when the leadership team and the front line need to hear the same thing at the same time.
For a sitting city or county manager anywhere on that range.
A new budget-and-goals year, a new term or mandate, a new strategic plan, or the reset after an election can anchor the work, and none of them is required. The leader’s sense that it is time is the starting point.
The world changed.
The patterns stayed.
Most organizations kept the ways of reaching employees that used to work. The employees changed.
Those patterns were sound. They were built for conditions that no longer exist: a workforce with different expectations of work, a political climate that reaches into the daily job, and technology that changed how the work gets done. Nobody chose the gap between what leadership intends and what employees experience. It opened while everyone was busy doing the work well.
Culture is what employees experience, not what is written down. Culture by Design closes the gap where it opens: in what the whole organization hears, says, and repeats, not on the wall.
- The patterns
- The ways leadership reached employees. Sound, and built for the conditions of another decade.
- The gap
- The workforce changed. What leadership intends and what employees experience slowly stop matching.
- Redesigned
- Assessed honestly, shaped with the people inside it, reinforced through the year.
A culture that outlasts the tenure of the person who built it
The Shift That Sticks
The program is built from the pieces the organization needs, from an assessment on its own to a full year of support.
Face the Truth
Assess the culture as it is. An engagement assessment the whole workforce can answer in confidence, and conversations with people across departments and tenures. Offered as a shared mirror, not a verdict.
Define What Matters
Design the system. With the assessment in hand, shape the exercises, the discussions, and the commitments the organization will make to itself, built for this workforce and not a generic one.
Make It Real
Bring the whole organization into the same conversation, in one room or department by department. A workshop where every voice is heard, employees write the norms themselves, and the leadership team turns what was said into goals with owners and dates.
Reinforce the Change
Keep it alive through the year. Check-ins, a short return visit inside a gathering already on the calendar, and a year-end look at what held, so the momentum survives the first hard month.
Any one of these can stand on its own. A full year of support. A single workshop. An assessment and a written report. The shape follows what the organization needs and what it has already decided matters.
Explore The Shift That SticksKept by the people
who wrote it.
Nothing here assumes the culture is broken.
Most of what an organization does well is worth keeping. The work is to find out what employees are actually experiencing, let them shape what changes, and make the commitments public, so the culture belongs to the whole organization and not to one leader’s tenure.
Done well, people remember the day the whole organization was heard at once, from the newest hire to the longest tenure, and every voice counted.
An outside view
of the inside work.
Imagine That Performance’s experience is in municipal leadership work: assessing what is true, bringing a whole workforce into the same conversation, and keeping what was decided alive through the year. The value of the outside seat is exactly that it is outside: it hears what the inside has stopped hearing.
Rob Duncan, who founded Imagine That Performance, takes the first conversation himself.
Meet Rob DuncanShaped to the organization, not sold as a package.
There is no standard version. The program is built around the organization and the outcomes it has already decided matter. A first conversation settles the shape. The investment is agreed before anything begins.
No fixed package. The shape comes first. The investment follows it.
What does the assessment involve?
A short engagement assessment every employee can answer in confidence, and conversations with people across departments and tenures. The results go back to the whole organization in plain language, as the starting point for the work and not as a grade.
Who takes part?
The manager and the leadership team, always. The whole workforce where the scope calls for it, and it usually does, in one room or department by department depending on size. The moments that hold are the ones where the front line and the leadership team heard the same thing at the same time.
What is left behind?
A written picture of the culture as it is, a set of norms the employees wrote themselves, goals with named owners and dates, and a rhythm for the year that keeps them in view.
What does it cost?
An investment shaped by the scope, agreed in the proposal after the first conversation. Nothing is quoted before the shape of the work is known.
Every leader deserves clarity about what matters.
Every engagement builds a capability the organization keeps, measured by what it can do after the work ends, not during it.
Build a culture the whole organization can keep.
Thirty minutes on the organization as it is now, and where to start.
Open the conversationThe first conversation is where the outside view begins.