As It Arrived
Find out what your organisation did to the practices it imported.
What is made possible
An organisation’s whole import history ends up on one wall: kept as it arrived, rewritten into something local, or gone. Then the room marks which of it people still do when nobody is checking. It isn’t somewhere anyone usually looks.
Five structural elements
Structuring invitation.
“Think of the practices this organisation brought in from somewhere else. Stand-ups, OKRs, the engagement survey, the operating model with a Scandinavian name. We’re going to find out what this place did to them, and which ones are still breathing.”
Space and materials.
A wall with three zones marked in tape. Sticky notes, pens, red dot stickers. Room for everyone to stand at the wall together.
Participation distribution.
Writing, sorting and dotting are everybody’s, and nobody’s stickies outrank anybody else’s. The facilitator asks two questions and then keeps out of the way. Eight people up.
Group configuration.
Alone, then pairs, then foursomes, then everyone.
Steps and time allocation
- 2 min
Intro. Give the invitation. Point at the three zones without explaining them. Say it out loud before anyone writes: most of what goes on this wall was brought in by somebody, and some of them are standing here.
- 4 min
Write alone. Practices that arrived here from somewhere else. Things this place actually adopted, not things you’ve heard of. Retros, the nine-box grid, the survey, the framework a consultant left behind.
- 5 min
Pairs. Combine, cut duplicates, keep the best eight. Before a sticky goes up it has to finish the sentence “arrived from…”, and carry a year; a guess is fine. No source, no wall.
- 16 min
The sort. Foursomes. Is it done today the way it arrived? Left zone, yes. Middle zone, changed into something local. Right zone, gone, nobody does anything at all. Between left and middle, ask whether whoever sold it would recognise what you do now. Between middle and gone, if any corner still does a version, it’s middle. Contested ones get two minutes and then they land. Underline whichever used the full two.
- 7 min
Second pass. Nothing moves. New question: do people do it when nobody is checking? Sightings, not intentions; if the only evidence is the calendar invite or the dashboard, that’s checking. If yes, red dot.
- 12 min
Stand back. Everyone. “What do you notice about where the dots are?” Then say nothing. Everyone writes one noticing before anybody answers out loud, then round the room, no commentary.
- 9 min
It came from here. Foursomes. Take a dotted sticky from the middle zone. What does your version know that the book it came from, the deck or the other company didn’t? Name it, and name who worked it out, because somebody did. It was never in the original.
An hour, allowing for movement and stragglers.
Practice insights
- Tips
Keep the sort question concrete. “Was the rollout successful?” invites people to defend practices they championed rather than report what happened to them, and the same discipline holds on the dots, where “people love it” is an intention and the question asked for sightings. A left-zone sticky with no dot is a practice running on supervision alone; leave it standing, the room will find it. And if the gone zone comes back nearly empty, don’t celebrate, look at the years: organisations delete their failures, and a wall where nothing is older than three years is a graveyard with the headstones taken out.
- Riffs and variations
If the room knows the argument, point at the left zone. A best practice is somebody else’s rewrite, photographed before it moved.
- Practical applications
When the next import is being proposed, before the pilot starts. When a practice is about to be scrapped for not being done properly, and the wall may re-read that as metabolised rather than failed.
- Optional string
Carry a dotted rewrite into Shift and Share (opens in a new tab), so the people who rebuilt it can show the room how it actually runs. Or take a contested sticky into Simple Ethnography (opens in a new tab) and go and watch the thing before anyone rules on it.
Where it came from
Nothing in the official repertoire does this job, which is part of why it exists.