Page 120 - Make Work Great

Growing Your Crystal

between someone who is in the process of being added and someone
who is already a member.

Refl ect briefly upon this important distinction. If culture is nothing
but the aggregate default behavior of everyone around you, chang-
ing culture means changing behavior. The change must propagate
throughout the system. You don’t need to force this proliferation, but
it’s absolutely necessary that you recognize the extent to which the
new patterns have spread. The difference between someone in the
process of being added and someone who has already been added is
the difference between a planted seed and a sapling.
Because you’re broadcasting a new set of patterns and watching
to see who is willing to incorporate them, there’s a loose analogy to
sales here. Consider the funnel-shaped model in Figure 5.3, which
represents the different populations of people in your environment
and their relationship to your new cultural crystal. Similar fi gures are
often drawn to represent prospective buyers: in both cases, the pro-
cess begins at the top with the widest population and narrows down,
step by step, to the critical few. In sales, prospects become leads, leads
become opportunities, and opportunities become transactions.
Of course, you won’t be a salesperson; your “product”—your bun-
dle of new cultural precedents—will either sell itself or not. Your job
is simply to pay attention to who is “buying” and where those people
are in the process of adoption. In that sense, you are more of a market
analyst. First you recognize candidates from everyone around you,
then some candidates become additions in progress, and ultimately
some of those additions in progress become new members. Even if it
takes a whole year, the addition of just a few new members to your
crystal can make a tremendous impact in the broader culture of your
environment. If you want to prove this to yourself, try redrawing the
network of Figure 5.2 with the addition of a second partner in cul-
ture for you and an additional partner in culture for one of your two
new partners. Start with a big sheet of paper, because you will need
to expand the fi gure substantially to capture all of the new layers of
infl uence.

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