Trish's Blog

Two things tend to be true when an organisation is ready to take diversity of thought seriously, rather than ceremonially.

One: someone with authority has felt the cost of its absence personally. A decision that went wrong in a way more honest dissent would have caught. That sting is usually the start.

Two: there is a willingness to change how the powerful people in the room behave, not just how the rest of the company is asked to behave. Programmes aimed downward while the top stays the same do not hold.

Knowing it is working takes more than the feeling of a livelier meeting.

It looks like decisions getting stress-tested before launch instead of after.
Your hardest-to-replace people staying, and saying more.
Ideas arriving from the outer reaches of the org and surviving the journey to the centre.
The strange suggestion that turned out to be right, and the fact that it was allowed to exist at all.

That is the bar I hold my own work to. Not whether people enjoyed the session. Whether the way decisions get made looks different ninety days later.