There’s a moment I’ve seen play out in boardrooms, strategy sessions, and HR offsites more times than I can count.
A senior leader, smart, experienced, genuinely committed to their people, stands at the front of the room and announces a culture shift. New org structure, new values, or a new operating framework. A change management rollout that took six months and a six-figure consulting fee to design. They’re passionate, the deck is polished, and the team nods along.
And then six months later? Nothing has changed.
The same dysfunction. The same disengagement. The same execution gap that was there before the initiative launched.
Team members are confused, unsure, and scrambling, and the leader is exhausted, frustrated, and quietly wondering what they’re missing because by every measure, they did everything right.
I’ve sat across from that leader. I’ve been that leader. And for the longest time, I couldn’t name exactly what was going wrong.
Then I had a conversation with Norman Wolfe of The Living Organization, that changed the way I see all of it.
The Problem Isn’t Your Strategy. It’s Your Paradigm.
Here’s the hard truth that I have shared for many years now. For decades, leaders expected their people to operate as robots and they managed their organizations like a machine.
Full focused on improving the steps, methodologies, and processes, so they can optimize the inputs, measure the outputs, and fix anything that may be broken. And when people don’t perform the way the system expects, they run a training program, launch an engagement survey, or roll out a new change management initiative on top of the last new initiative.
It becomes a vicious cycle.
It’s not that these things are wrong, it’s that they’re incomplete. And it’s exactly why your strategies, change management initiatives, aren’t sticking and your people aren’t bringing their full energy to the work.
Norman Wolfe, creator of the Living Organization Framework, puts it plainly: if you think of your organization as a machine, you will only ever optimize one dimension of performance — activity. What you do. How efficiently you do it. Inputs to outputs.
But people don’t create results through activity alone. They create results through three forces: activity, relationship, and context.
Activity is the work. Relationship is the quality of the human connections through which that work happens. And context, this is the one most leaders never touch, is the underlying operating system.
Context is the narrative. The invisible set of beliefs, assumptions, and stories that determine how your people interpret every decision you make, every initiative you launch, and every message you send.
And you are responsible for defining that narrative.
When you only manage activity, you’re pulling the smallest lever. When you learn to lead across all three, the energy available inside your organization multiplies. That’s not a metaphor. That’s the execution gap closing in real time.
The Four Skills That Make This Real
When I look at the four skills Norman mentioned as part of his framework, it hit me hard, as those are the same four skills I spend a great deal of time coaching my clients on.
Skill 1: Heart Centering
This is the foundational skill, and it’s the one most corporate leader will resist first because it sounds to “woo” for a business conversation.
When I first started doing this work, it was extremely uncomfortable. Afterall, I grew up in corporate operating as a robot. But that is what eventually caused my demise.
I soon learned that operating from a place of genuine curiosity, compassion, clam, and grounding, was what ignited my team members and clients to show up with unrelenting energy, focus, and determination.
Think about it. When you’re leading from apathy, anger, fear or pressure, your body and your thinking respond accordingly. So does your behavior, words, and attitude.
When you shift to a state of centeredness, something opens — intuition, insight, the ability to hear what someone is telling you beneath the words they’re using, because you are present, curious, and caring.
Psychological safety, the kind where people will tell you what’s wrong, admit when they’re stuck, and bring their whole capability to the work, only exists when the leader is operating from a place of genuine compassion. When the person across from you knows you’re meeting them where they are, not evaluating them as a component to be improved.
That’s heart centering. And it’s a skill you can develop.
Skill 2: Storytelling and Ritual
This one explains why almost every culture change initiative fails. Leaders try to change behavior directly through mandates, training programs, and performance metrics. But behavior reflects the narrative the leaders communicate in words, behavior and actions.
If you want teams to show up in a certain way, you must change the story first. You must define, communicate, and live the new culture you rolled out.
Then, you need to put into place the scaffolding that will hold up the new culture and its story. And that’s where rituals, as Norman defines it, comes in.
Rituals aren’t ceremonies or team-building exercises. They’re intentional, repeated patterns of behavior that make a new narrative real in the daily life of your organization.
When you ring a bell and bring the whole team together to publicly acknowledge someone who showed up in the exact way your new culture demands, that’s a ritual. When it happens repeatedly, with intention and energy behind it, people start adopting that behavior naturally. Not because they were told to. Because the story around them changed, and the ritual made that story visible and felt.
Put it another way; you define your new culture, craft the meaning behind the culture, and put into place repeatable rituals of the behaviors that will achieve that new culture and meaning.
Skill 3: The Improv Mindset
I absolutely love this one. Having taken improv classes for a few years, it hit home.
Since we don’t want rigid, robotic leaders who can’t respond when something real and unexpected is unfolding right in front of them, possessing an improv mindset allows you and your team to be open to change and uncertainty without shutting down.
The improv technique of saying ‘yes’ to what’s coming your way, without any objection or complaint, you are open to respond from a place of your intuition and your preparation (of experience and expertise), so you create something that typically you would have blocked from ever showing up.
Robin Williams didn’t need a script because he trusted his preparation and stayed present to what was happening in the room. Your best leaders can operate the same way but only if they’ve been coached and developed to do it.
Skill 4: Balancing Opposites
Business is full of paradoxes. Structure and flexibility. Logic and intuition. Accountability and compassion. Process and presence. Most leaders feel forced to choose one side of these tensions, and in choosing, they lose half their capacity.
Balancing opposites, what some call polarity thinking, is the skill of leveraging both sides simultaneously and knowing when to lean into each. It’s the skill that keeps all the other skills integrated and functional when you’re faced with so many constraints and boundaries.
Norman is clear about something important here: we’re not throwing out the machine paradigm. The things that work about process optimization, efficiency, and structured execution, those still matter. We’re adding to them and expanding what’s possible.
The leader who can hold both the machine and the living system, as Norman calls it, in their thinking at the same time is the leader who closes the execution gap.
Three Shifts You Can Make Right Now
You don’t need to overhaul your entire leadership approach overnight. But here are four places you can start:
Start living the narrative you’ve defined. Take an assessment of the actual behavior of your team against the culture narrative or change you rolled out. If they don’t align, that’s where your work is.
Be intentional about your rituals. Do you know your organization’s current rituals and the ones needed to align to your change initiative?
Look at the rituals already operating in your organization, those patterns of behavior that happen without anyone thinking about them. Ask which ones reinforce the narrative you want and which ones quietly undermine it. Then design new, intentional rituals that support where you’re trying to go.
Practice getting centered before the hard conversations. This is a game changer.
Before your next difficult meeting or high-stakes conversation, take two minutes. Think of a moment when you felt genuinely at peace or deeply connected to someone you care about. Let your body settle into that. Then walk into the conversation. I can guarantee you it will be completely different, then if you walked in from the chaos of the day and your own mindset.
Over the next 30 days, focus on one of those 3 shifts until they feel comfortable, if not natural. Then move on to another.
Your team and results will thank you.
If this landed for you the way it landed for me, I want you to know there’s a lot more where this came from. So, you can:
- Check out Norman’s first book, The Living Organization. It’s available free at thelivingorganization.com/book1. Read it. Share it with your leadership team. It will change the conversation inside your organization.
- Listen to both Part 1 and 2 of my conversation with Norman on The Living Organization, on Shedding the Corporate Bitch, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
You invest a lot of time and energy trying to make your organization work better. Stop killing yourself and consider a new way about leading and executing.
Sure, it takes work, but the impact and results achieved are far greater for everyone.
If you’re a senior leader or HR executive who’s tired of watching good strategies and teams die in execution, let’s talk. I work with leaders and organizations who are ready to close that gap for good. Book a complimentary call at coachmebernadette.com/discoverycall
