Author: Wayne Loke

You come home late. The day has been long, the last meeting went sideways, and something you sent at 4pm is still sitting in your head unanswered. Your other half starts telling you about her day. You are sitting right there in the same room, close enough to touch her. You nod at the right moments, you make the small agreeable noises, and your eyes are pointed in her direction.

Then she stops and asks you what she just said.

You cannot answer. Not one line of it. You heard every word and you kept none of them.

I have been on both sides of that, and the uncomfortable part is that nothing dishonest happened. You were not pretending. The sound arrived, your ears worked, your face did what faces do. What did not happen was the other thing, the expensive thing, the part where you put down what you were carrying and pick up what she is carrying instead. Hearing costs nothing. Listening costs attention, and attention is a fixed amount that has usually been spent before the conversation starts.

That gap does not stay empty. This is the part I did not understand for a long time. When someone does not spend the attention, they do not sit there with a blank space where your meaning should be. They fill it. They fill it with the reading that costs them the least, the one that fits what they already believe and what they were already planning to do. And then they carry on, quite genuinely, believing they have understood you.

So the frustration most of us call “not being heard” is not silence. The words arrived. Somebody nodded. Something even happened afterwards. It just was not the thing you were asking for, because what travelled was your sound, and what got acted on was their assumption.

The month the celebration became the problem

At Stats NZ we ran a programme we called DBS 2.0 inside Digital Business Services, and we measured how people felt about it every single month from 2018 onward. Not annually, not at the end, every month, with the score plotted on a chart so we could see whether the process had genuinely changed or whether we were reading noise. The first measure came back at -14. We were not popular, and the number said so.

It climbed in steps over the next three years. Not smoothly, and not because of any single intervention, but it climbed, and by February 2021 the top reading was 50. In August 2020 we were named a finalist in the CIO Awards for Best Team Culture. When I ran the Schneider Culture Model survey the shape of the place had moved into Collaboration and Cultivation, which is a long way from where a group of information technology people usually sit. The senior leaders around me celebrated, and they were right to. We had broken something that had been stuck for years.

What I said at the celebration was that culture is not a thing you achieve. It is the accumulated friction of everyday decisions, which is the argument I made in Designing Team Culture, and it is why it moves so slowly and slides back so easily, which is Why Is Changing Culture So Hard?. You do not finish it, tick it, and file the certificate. It has to be fed, and the feeding never stops, and a programme that runs 2 years is no longer a programme anyway, it is just how the place works now, or it is nothing.

That fell on deaf ears.

Except it did not, and this is where I have to be honest about my own part. Nobody in that room dismissed what I said. They heard it, several of them agreed with it out loud, and then Monday came and they went back to their day jobs, because they had day jobs, with their own deadlines and their own people and their own problems flowing down from above them. Calling it deaf ears is Wayne taking Wayne a bit too seriously. The message landed in a room full of people whose attention had already been committed elsewhere, and in that condition the cheapest available reading of “culture needs continuous work” is “culture is good now, well done us.”

Through the second half of 2021 the score settled back to roughly half of where it had been. Not a crash, not a scandal. It simply stopped being held up, and it went back down to about the level that the actual daily behaviour of the place could support without anybody carrying it.

Because that was what I had been doing, and I did not know how much of it was me until it stopped. I had been retelling the story. Over and over, in every forum that would have me, what the number meant, what it had cost people to move it, what would happen if we treated it as finished. That retelling is real work. It is tiring in a way that does not show up on anybody’s plan, and there is no line item for it, and the moment you stop, the story goes quiet, and quiet gets filled with the easy reading again.

The board that said one thing and meant another

At Inland Revenue we did the visible version. I have written about this before in Two Kinds of Visibility, and about what it actually took to keep those platforms standing in Arcane by Necessity, so I will not retell the whole thing here, but the short version is that we put everything on the wall. A kanban board. A 45-inch TV. Priority one incidents, how many were open, how many we had closed, when the next scheduled reboot was going in. Anyone walking past could see the state of the platforms without asking a soul.

The message we thought we were sending was this: these platforms are old, there is no further investment coming, and we are keeping the tax system standing by sweating assets that should have been replaced years ago.

The message that got received was: Business Platform Services has it under control.

Which is, if you look at it coldly, a completely reasonable reading of a board full of falling incident counts. It was even flattering. And it was heard by people who were not being lazy or unkind, who were deep in their own transformation programmes with their own targets, and who now had one fewer thing to worry about. So the transformation work carried on at pace, and the platform work carried on being absorbed, and nobody upstream ever had to do the arithmetic on what absorbing it cost.

What it cost was people. They got tired, and then they got burnt out, and then they worked out that the future being described in all the transformation material did not have a version of them in it. Their job, as they understood it, was to keep the old world breathing until it could be switched off, and then presumably they would be switched off with it. Some of them left. In the end I left too.

Nobody misheard us. They heard us clearly and converted us into reassurance, because reassurance was the reading that let everyone else keep going.

The version you can watch happen in 10 seconds

I have been using these AI tools daily for a while now, and the thing that keeps stopping me is how familiar the failure feels.

You type a request. In your head sits all the context: what you are actually trying to do, who it is for, what you have already tried, the constraint you did not mention because it is so obvious to you that you have stopped seeing it. None of that goes into the box. What goes into the box is the request.

The model does not sit there confused. It fills the gap from generalisation, produces something confident and well-formed and aimed at the average version of what people usually mean by those words, and hands it back. It heard you. It did not listen, because there was nothing there for it to listen to.

Then you look at the output, feel that small flare of irritation, and rewrite the prompt with the context you should have given in the first place.

That is the same failure I have been describing for 30 years in organisations, running at a speed where you can actually observe it. Seconds instead of quarters. And it is cheap to fix, because the machine cannot take offence and there is no relationship to repair. With people the same mistake takes a year to surface and somebody has usually burnt out by then.

The list I wrote, and what is left of it

A couple of years ago, while I was at Te Pūkenga, I wrote a LinkedIn post with 10 tips for getting your message heard by busy leaders. Keep it short. Lead with the benefit. Bring data. Tie it to their goals. Pick your moment. Follow up in writing. Tell a story. Ask for feedback. Be persistent. Listen yourself.

I wrote it because it looked to me like nobody was listening to the real issues in front of us, and writing the list was easier than saying that out loud.

Reading it now, it is decent coaching material. If a junior person asked me how to get a hearing in a large organisation, I would still walk them through most of it, and it would help them, and none of it is wrong.

It also would not have changed a single thing I have described above. Every one of those tips is a technique applied to the sending. The failures were all on the receiving side, in rooms full of people whose attention was already committed, where the gap got filled with whatever cost them least. You can compress your message, evidence it, time it, and follow it up in writing, and a person with no attention left will still convert it into the reading that suits them.

One of the 10 survives, and not in the form I wrote it. Stay persistent, yet patient. What I meant back then was keep trying until they cave. What I mean now is that being listened to is a thing another person gives you, at a cost to themselves, and it cannot be extracted with technique. So you keep retelling the story where there is presence in the room, and where there is not, you stop spending yourself on it and carry on with the work. That is not giving up. It is knowing what you are paying for.

And it goes the other way first. If I want that from someone, I have to have paid it forward: sat there, put my own day down, listened to somebody’s problem all the way to the end without reaching for a solution, and acknowledged that they have a voice and I heard it. Just that. Most of the time nobody wants the solution anyway.

So the tip I would give now is not on the list at all. It is a sentence you say before you start.

Can I have your attention for a moment? I need you to listen to this. You do not have to fix anything.

I still get it wrong at home. But I ask now, and that has been enough.

When we moved house, the hardest part was not the lifting. It was the packing, and inside the packing, the deciding. You pick up something you have kept for years, you hold it, and you have to work out whether it comes with you or goes into the pile for the op shop, and there is no right answer available to you at that moment, only a guess you will find out about later. On moving day the fear arrives in two flavours at once: that you have brought too much, and that you have thrown away too much. Both feel true simultaneously.

Then you arrive, and it starts again. In the old house my study was on the first floor and the living area was downstairs. In this house it is the other way round, the study on the ground floor and the living upstairs, so for days I walked the wrong way out of habit. I opened the wrong drawer looking for the scissors. I could not remember which box the good knives had gone into, and I could not remember which cupboard I had decided the good knives should live in, because that decision had not actually been made yet, it was being made again every time I cooked. Then there is the street, the neighbours, the new routine, the drive to the shops that takes a different amount of time from the old one.

None of that was a disaster. All of it was uncomfortable. And that discomfort, multiplied by a few hundred or a few thousand people, is what you are asking for when you stand up in front of an organisation and say we are going to change the culture.

That is the part I did not say properly the first time I wrote about this in 2019.

What I had then

A few years ago, while I was at Stats NZ, I wrote a short piece asking why changing culture is so hard. I had the symptoms right. Not invented here, so nothing from an external origin is ever quite good enough. The organisation’s immunity system, which switches on the moment something threatens people’s influence and control, and which does not live in the leadership layer, it lives with the people who man the cogs. Culture wrapped around leadership, strategy, structure, process and people like a rubber band, so that when you pull on one part of it, the whole thing snaps back to where it started.

I still think that is right. But it describes the machine, not the people inside it. What I could not name then were the two things underneath, the two that decide whether anything moves at all.

Belief and fear.

Belief

The status quo is not laziness. It is a comfort zone that people have earned, day in and day out, over years of doing the same thing with no threat to their safety and no threat to their routine. Ask them to work differently and you are asking them to move house. The boxes, the wrong drawer, the scissors.

So the standard answer is that you need a visionary leader, someone who paints the picture of the future and pulls people towards it. Apple gets cited, and Steve Jobs, and the argument is not wrong, but look at the position he was standing in. He was the founder. He was also the employer. If the vision failed, he failed himself, and everybody could see he had put himself on the line to the same degree he was asking of them.

Now take a senior leader of similar seniority in a large organisation. Not the founder. Not the employer. An employee, like everyone else, with a manager above them, a contract, and a term. They can paint the same picture, with the same conviction, in the same words, and from what I have watched, belief tops out somewhere around half. Maybe 50 to 60 percent of the people underneath will take it on. The rest will not.

They will not because they have no skin in the game, and because they have seen this film before. The senior leader can leave. The senior leader can be overruled by someone more senior, a chief executive, a chair, a board, or the founder himself or herself. The vision can survive one restructure and be quietly dropped in the next. And what people are being asked to sign up to, in the meantime, is a way of working that makes their own job harder today, for a benefit that lands somewhere else, later, if it lands at all. They are reading the odds correctly.

Fear

Fear does the work belief cannot. Fear of losing your job. Fear of losing your subsistence, the mortgage, the school fees, the amount that arrives in your account every fortnight. Fear of losing your seniority, your influence, your position, the standing that took you 15 years to build and can be removed in a 20 minute meeting.

Ask why some organisations change quickly and the answer is usually sitting right there. When people genuinely believe the organisation may not be an ongoing concern, they move. Their livelihood is at stake, so they adapt, they adjust, they learn the new system, they stop arguing about whose team owns what. Belief and fear point the same way for once. And a second belief switches on alongside it, that if they do not contribute to the change, they will be as guilty as everyone else for not putting in.

I am not going to pretend that everyone behaves rationally. Some people look at exactly the same situation and say, this ship is going down, why am I still standing on it, and they go. They are weighing a different risk, and from where they sit it is a fair call. Self-interest is part of belief too. A person who believes the effort is wishful will not spend their remaining energy on it, and they will certainly not be moved by a poster in the lift lobby.

So fear moves people. It also moves people out the door. Fear on its own, with no belief attached to it, buys you compliance and a resignation queue.

Why you cannot do it one lever at a time

Belief without fear gives you polite agreement. People nod in the workshop, they take the sticker, they go back to their desk and do what they did last week, because nothing bad happens if they do. Fear without belief gives you compliance, which looks like change for about two quarters, until people work out the minimum they can do without being noticed. You need both, pointing the same direction, at the same time.

Which is the real reason culture cannot be changed sequentially. People are programmed to do things one at a time, so we take strategy this quarter, process next quarter, technology after that, and people when the budget allows. It is orderly, it fits on a Gantt chart, and it fails, because every lever you have not pulled yet is a question you cannot answer, and every question you cannot answer is a reason not to believe.

Someone asks what happens to his or her role in the new structure, and if the structure work has not started, you have nothing to give them. Someone asks why the leadership still behaves the way it always did, and if you have changed the process but not the behaviour above them, they will believe the behaviour, because that is the part that decides their next performance review. People read what stays the same far more carefully than they read what changes.

That is the rubber band. Culture wraps around leadership, strategy, structure, process and people. Pull one of them on its own, and you feel the tension for a while, and then it snaps back, and everyone who did not move feels quietly justified for not having moved. Pull all of them together and the whole thing travels.

What is invisible from the outside is how much preparation that takes. When an organisation appears to change quickly, you are watching the last 10 percent. The other 90 percent happened before anything was announced: the sequencing, the deciding of who can answer which question, the working out of what people will ask on day one and what the honest answer to each of those is. That preparation never shows, which is exactly why the next organisation copies the visible part and wonders why it snaps back.

What I could and could not do at Stats NZ

Inside my own group, it worked. Over 2 years the engagement score in my area went from -14 percent to an NPS of +50. Not because I gave better speeches. In my own patch I could pull all of it at once, who led what, how the work was structured, how the process ran, who sat in which seat, and I could answer nearly every question a person put to me on the spot, myself, without going away to check. Belief was available because the answers were available. And fear had a floor under it, because people could see I would take the hit before they did.

Outside my patch I had none of those levers. I could influence, I could argue, I could write. The wider organisation had its own rubber band, and it snapped back, and I sat there writing a short article asking why changing culture is so hard, which is how the first version of this piece came to exist.

That is the honest limit of the story. I have changed the culture of a group I was accountable for. I have not changed the culture of an entire organisation from the position of an employee, and I have not met many people who have, unless the organisation was frightened enough to let them.

When the senses agree

Here is the test I use now. It is not scientific, it is just what I have watched happen. Culture has changed when what people see, what they hear, what they feel, what they taste and what they smell all agree with each other.

They see leaders doing the new thing when there is no audience in the room. They hear the same story from their manager, from the chief executive, and from the person two teams over. They feel it in what happens to them personally, their workload, their pay, their standing, whether the person who spoke up last month is still here. They taste it in the small daily things, the meeting that got shorter, the approval that took a day instead of a fortnight. And they smell it, because people can smell a change programme that is not real from a long way off, the same way you can smell a house that has been repainted to cover something.

If four of those agree and one does not, people believe the one that does not. Every time. That single disagreement is where belief leaks out, and once belief has gone, all you have left is fear, and fear on its own will get you through a transition and hollow out the place on the way.

I know where the scissors live now. It took a lot longer than I expected it to.

Picture five team leaders in a room near the end of the year, working out an unwritten agreement: each of us will sacrifice one of our own people into the bottom performance rating, we will take turns so that nobody’s team bleeds twice in a row, and the deal extends upward too, because each year one of the five leaders themselves has to wear the bottom rating, regardless of how well their team performed. My senior leader at the time proposed it himself, openly, as the sensible way to run the year-end process. We called it the merry-go-round.

If that sounds absurd, hold the thought, because the absurdity is the point. The merry-go-round was the rational response to the system we were given, and once you see why, you start recognising the same machinery in every forced ranking exercise you’ve ever sat through, including the ones dressed up as redundancy selection.

Here’s the system. End-of-year appraisal, rank and stack. Every team sorts its people into buckets, call them A, B and C: exceptional, meets expectations, below expectations. And a fixed percentage of every team must land in C. Say 10%, and that percentage is compulsory. The spreadsheet does not ask whether your team actually has poor performers. It asks you to produce them.

Now suppose your team is genuinely high performing. Suppose you’ve spent 2 years building it, the delivery record shows it, and the team has been beating every target set for it. The quota doesn’t care. Someone in that room is going to carry a below-expectations rating home to their family, and your job as their leader is to choose who, knowing the choice has nothing to do with what they did this year.

The standard defence, and I heard it every year, is that the C ratings get compared across teams later, so the process is fair in aggregate. That comparison has a name: recalibration, and I watched how it actually ran. All the leaders come together in a room and rank everybody’s proposed ratings against each other, with HR coordinating the process. After that, the senior leaders hold their own round and rank their direct reports, the leaders themselves, the same way we had just ranked our teams. I’d guess there were further rounds above that, with rules I never got to see. And here is where the whole thing quietly falls apart, because the people settling the ratings are 2 or 3 levels removed from the actual work. They have never seen your team member deliver anything. The session runs on questions like “who is so-and-so?” and “what has so-and-so done this year?”, and a person’s rating, bonus and reputation get settled on the strength of whatever answer happens to be in the room.

Which means the real variable in your rating is your leader’s debating skill. If your team leader is articulate, if they can run logos, pathos and ethos across a conference table and argue a proposed C back up to a B, power to you. If your leader can’t debate, or won’t fight for you, then I’m sorry mate, that’s it. The rating follows the advocacy, the advocacy follows the personality of your leader, and none of it has much connection to your work. There was no shared benchmark for what performance meant across teams, so every leader rated arbitrarily, and recalibration didn’t remove the arbitrariness, it just decided whose arbitrariness won.

Once you understand that, the merry-go-round stops looking crazy and starts looking like game theory. If the quota is fixed before anyone looks at the work, the only question the system leaves open is who absorbs the damage. And once that’s the question, rationing the damage fairly, taking turns, spreading the pain across teams and across years, is exactly what reasonable people do. The five leaders in that room were queuing politely for a punishment the system insisted on handing out. They even queued themselves into it, since one leader per year took the C rating personally. You can call that integrity of a sort. The system asked for sacrifices; they organised a fair roster of sacrifices.

There’s a quieter cost underneath the game theory, and it’s the one the case studies keep naming. Forced distribution isolates people from their own performance. The rating a person receives stops being information about their work and becomes information about the quota, the roster and the room, yet it lands on them as if it were a verdict on the work. I’ve sat across the table from a team member who met every expectation we agreed at the start of the year and told them the organisation had rated them below expectations, and we both knew why, and neither of us could say it out loud. You do that to someone once and something doesn’t come back: the engagement goes first, and the trust goes with it. Multiply it across the team and you get the second effect: people stop helping each other. When the buckets are fixed, your teammate’s good year raises the odds that the C lands on you, so collaboration quietly turns into competition, inside the same team, among people whose work depends on each other. The system doesn’t announce this. It just prices it in.

None of this was invented locally. The apparatus was imported, mostly from the United States. Jack Welch ran it at GE as the vitality curve: celebrate the top 20%, keep the middle 70%, remove the bottom 10%, every year, forever. For a couple of decades the big corporates copied it as best practice, Microsoft among them. Microsoft finally abandoned stack ranking in 2013, after years of it being cited, internally and in business school case studies, as a system that made employees compete against their own teammates and that people experienced as demoralising and unfair. The verdict was in long before most organisations stopped. It kept travelling anyway, because forced distribution looks rigorous on a slide, and because it spares senior leaders the much harder job of actually knowing the work well enough to evaluate it.

And now the part that still makes me laugh, in the way you laugh at things that cost people real money. Suppose the organisation finally reads the case studies and decides to drop the system. Whoever’s turn it was on the merry-go-round in that final year is now carrying a below-expectations rating on their permanent record, for a rotation that no longer exists. Conned is the polite word for it. I know, because it happened to me. I objected, I brought the delivery evidence, and I had argued against the rotation itself in the calibration room more than once. My leader insisted it was my turn that year. Maybe my time was up for arguing. The wheel handed me the C, the system got retired, and the record stayed. I left not long after.

Redundancy runs on the same maths

Performance appraisal is the annual version of this machine. Redundancy is the crisis version, and it runs on the same maths: the number comes first, the evaluation comes after, if it comes at all. When an organisation decides it needs to remove some percentage of a division, the selection is another rank and stack, done quickly, by leaders who often have no better method for deciding who should stay than they had for deciding who was a C.

So the selection follows patterns that anyone who has watched a few rounds can recite. If you’re in the leader’s bad books, you’re a target. If you’re a mediocre performer, you’re a target. If you’re a poor performer, obviously. And if you’re a top performer, you may be a target as well, because nobody loves the most hardworking person in the team, and in New Zealand the tall poppy syndrome makes standing out its own kind of exposure. Good luck to the tall poppies.

The narrative wrapped around the process will talk about skills matrices, future capability requirements and fair selection criteria. Half of it is bullsh*t. The other half, depending on the organisation, is who you know and who you hang out with. That’s a blunt thing to write, and I’ve sat on both sides of these processes over the years, as the leader filling in the buckets and as a name on somebody else’s list, so I’ll stand behind it.

So what do you do with this, other than get cynical? Back in 2008 I read a book called Bulletproof Your Job and wrote about it on this site. I won’t repeat the whole playbook here, but the people I’ve watched survive these systems, myself included on the good years, did a few things consistently. They understood that the rating system is a game running on top of the work, with its own rules about quotas, turns and advocacy, and they never assumed the work would speak for itself. They paid attention to whether their leader could and would argue for them, because in a recalibration room your leader’s voice is your performance. They kept their own record of what they delivered, with numbers, because “what has so-and-so done?” gets answered with whatever evidence happens to be at hand. And when someone proposed an unwritten agreement where you volunteer for the bottom bucket because it’s your turn, they remembered that the wheel can stop at any time, and that it stops on whoever is in the worst seat.

That’s what I observed. Consider what applies to your situation.

I’ve taken my ride on the merry-go-round. Once was enough.