Ronica Roth has elephants all over her house now, and after this conversation I have them running through my head. Ronica co-wrote Practice Makes Culture with Christine Hudson, and has spent 25 years helping leaders change culture, often sneaking it in under the label of agile adoption because culture wasn’t what anyone wanted to buy. We talked about the elephants organizations refuse to see: the system nobody sees whole, the emotions we pretend we left at home, and the stories everyone knows and no one speaks. I thought about the elephant sanctuary I visited in South India, and the mahouts who never take the animal’s size for granted - much as we cannot take our emotional elephants for granted. Ronica argues that culture shifts through small practiced behaviors, like having an accountabili-buddy or a leader who agrees to stay quiet in his own meeting, and not through the all-hands announcement. Then we got to AI and the stress it brings, where she calls herself curious and terrified. Humans sit at the center of every change, and telling people about a change is not the same as making room for them to engage with it. I keep thinking about her point that learning prompts is easier than caring for the elephants, and I wonder why so many organizations will choose the easier one.
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