Trish's Blog

Leadership conversations about culture tend to gravitate toward the big moves. The restructures, the offsites, the new frameworks, the carefully worded values statements pinned to the wall. These things have their place. But if you want to understand why one team feels alive with ideas and another feels like it’s going through the motions, you rarely find the answer in the grand gestures. You find it in the small ones.

Culture is not built in the moments you plan. It is built in the moments you respond. The way you handle the meeting that goes quiet after someone shares an unpopular idea. Whether you notice the person who has been in the room for an hour without saying a word. What you do when a suggestion comes from an unexpected source that cuts against how things are usually done. These moments pass quickly, often without fanfare. But your team is watching every one of them, and drawing conclusions about what is actually welcome here, and what isn’t.

You Don’t Need Authority to Change This

One of the most persistent myths about culture change is that it requires positional power to make it happen. It doesn’t. Influence over how a team works begins long before any formal authority kicks in, and it operates through something far more immediate: the signals you send about what kind of contribution matters.

You send those signals constantly, whether you intend to or not. When you turn toward someone who has been quiet and ask what they think, you signal that presence alone isn’t enough, that hearing from everyone matters. When you follow up a meeting by returning to an idea that got glossed over, you signal that good thinking doesn’t have an expiry date and that being overlooked in the moment doesn’t mean being dismissed. When you ask a question rather than offer an answer, you signal that you are genuinely interested in what the room knows collectively, not just in confirming what you already believe.

None of these acts require a title. They require intention.

Why Diversity of Thought Needs More Than Good Intentions

This is where diversity of thought moves from principle to practice. Most leaders believe in the value of different perspectives. Far fewer have built the daily habits that actually allow those perspectives to surface and do something useful. The research is consistent: cognitively diverse teams solve complex problems faster, spot risk earlier, and generate more creative solutions. But that only holds true when the conditions exist for diverse thinking to be heard, not just present.

This is what Weird Wisdom® at Work is fundamentally about. It is not enough to hire people who think differently, or to state that all voices are welcome. The culture has to actively make room for thinking that doesn’t fit the familiar pattern. And that culture is not created by policy. It is created by the repeated, small signals that tell people whether their difference is genuinely valued or merely tolerated. Every act that surfaces an unconventional perspective, every question that challenges a settled assumption, every moment of noticing who hasn’t been heard, these are the building blocks of a team that can actually use the diversity it has.

The Three Acts Worth Practising

If you want to shift your team’s culture toward something more dynamic and less predictable, three small habits are worth building deliberately.

The first is noticing who hasn’t spoken. In most team conversations, a handful of voices dominate and a handful remain silent. This is rarely because the quiet people have nothing to contribute. It is usually because the conditions haven’t made it easy, or safe, or worth the effort. When you notice the silence and name it, not as a call-out but as a genuine invitation, you begin to change those conditions.

The second is asking thoughtful questions. Not questions designed to guide the room toward a conclusion you’ve already reached, but questions that open things up. Questions that treat the current approach as one possibility among several rather than the obvious path. Questions that invite people to think alongside you rather than present to you. This kind of questioning is a skill, and like any skill it improves with practice. It also models something important: that not knowing is not a weakness, and that curiosity is more useful than certainty.

The third is amplifying unconventional ideas. Every team has people who think differently, who raise the idea that feels slightly left-field, who ask the question that makes the room briefly uncomfortable. These are often the people whose contributions matter most to your team’s ability to evolve. When you take their ideas seriously, when you build on them rather than moving past them, when you bring them back into the conversation after the room has moved on, you send a signal that thinking differently is not a liability here. It is a contribution.

What Shifts Over Time

None of this produces dramatic change overnight. That is not how culture works. What it produces, over time, is a shift in what your team believes is possible within the space you share.

When people consistently experience that their contribution is welcomed, that their silence will be noticed and gently interrupted, and that unconventional thinking won’t be quietly dismissed, they begin to show up differently. The conversations get richer. The ideas get bolder. The team starts to feel less like a group executing a plan and more like a group genuinely thinking together.

That shift, from predictable to dynamic, from compliant to genuinely engaged, is what high-performing culture actually feels like from the inside. And it almost never starts with a directive. It starts with someone deciding to pay attention, ask a better question, or make space for a voice that wasn’t being heard.

That someone can be you. It already is, whether you are doing it intentionally or not. The only question is whether you want to be deliberate about it.