Example of looping

- One of the biggest misconceptions about looping is that we have to do these grand experiments, right? Do something that's going to effect everyone or change things in a very material way. But what we've learned through doing this work and watching this work happen inside organizations is that actually sometimes the smallest things have the biggest effect. So one of my favorite tensions is the tension around we're not really having equal talk time in meetings, right? People are louder voices are taking control, they're dominating the meetings and the decision-making process. And we want to start to encourage more inclusivity, right? So how do we do that? And we can do training and education and all that but that's not really going to change things in real life. So what we like to see is an experiment says, hey that's the tension. The practice is let's check-in and out of every meeting. So at the beginning of a meeting, everyone will have a chance to speak to check-in, to react to a question. And at the end of a meeting, everyone will have a chance to speak in turn and answer the question, what did you notice? What can we do better? What's next for us? What are you looking forward to? The question almost doesn't matter, right? The check-in question could be, how are you feeling today? What has your attention? It could be, what's the biggest risk you've ever taken, right? It could be something really serious or really light. The point is not the question at all. The point of the practice is you talk, and then you talk, and then I talk, and then she talks and we're all playing this game of equal talk time because it creates a priming effect. If we start and end the meeting that way, what happens in the middle may change. And so having teams take that practice of we're just going to check-in and out of every meeting and we're going to do it for four weeks, eight weeks and see what happens. What's profound is when that's the experiment, by the end of it, they're like, man we're communicating totally differently. Because this little thing that we tried is now kind of leading into the way we show up in different context. It's effecting us in ways that we're not even consciously aware of. And those are my favorite kinds of loops. The loops that start small, are easy to try, are almost painless but then later on we see, oh, wow this is actually effecting a culture in a material way.