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Growing Your Crystal

ing this sort of cautious optimism, you’re ready for this chapter, the last
in our section about growing your cultural crystal. Here, you’ll fi nd
tools to help with the diffi culties you’ll face as your crystal develops.

Making It a Habit
Let’s start where we always start—with you. The biggest challenge
you face in creating and growing your cultural crystal will most likely
not come from diffi cult coworkers, impossibly infl exible manage-
ment, or a disengaged and disinterested employee base. It will far
more likely come from you.
This stems from the nature of our approach. This is not a one-time,
high-impact, visible change that you implement, deploy, or infl ict on
your organization. Rather, it is a set of subtle, incremental changes in
your own work that together launch the organic process of improve-
ment in your environment. It is not the construction of a shade struc-
ture, but the planting of an oak seed. It is not liposuction, but a small
change in eating and exercise patterns. (There is no judgment intended
regarding the appropriateness of shade structures, liposuction, or any
other human-made process—just a reminder that these are not the
patterns we are attempting to follow.)
The good news—in the sense of what you have to do today, tomor-
row, and next week—is that this is a much easier way to infl uence the
culture around you. There’s no constituent support, deployment plan,
or executive buy-in needed; no formal launch to plan. You can simply
start, as soon as this minute and as small as you like. The other side
of the coin, however, is that for the organic process to take hold, you
have to be consistent and make the change in a permanent way. You
have to demonstrate your new behaviors today, tomorrow, next week,
next month, next quarter, and next year.
In other words, your practice of overtness about task and clarity
within relationship must become habitual. To do what this book sug-
gests, you must develop some new habits. If you’re having problems
implementing your new cultural patterns, start by considering the
strength of those habits.

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