Run the Room

Did it clear the bar?

↓

Ever sat through a board meeting where seven things got passed and four months later, not one had actually changed?

Saying yes is easier than changing the behaviour underneath it. By the time someone notices, the institution has spent eighteen months and several careers' worth of political capital on…

Well. Nobody could quite tell you.

The gap is usually the bar.

The single sentence describing what the institution defaults to on a Tuesday at 4pm

(nd whether a board member, a finance officer, and a frontline manager could repeat it back the same way.

The professional Community Health Worker standard moved across more than a fifty because the bar was tight enough that a community health worker in Kenya, a finance minister in DRC, and a multilateral staffer in Geneva could repeat it back the same way: Salaried. Skilled. Supervised. Supplied.

The same discipline works for an internal AI policy, an ESG standard, or a procurement criterion. Yes, you still need the 47-page policy document. You also need the bar.

Try this:
Last week, I shared that the work of moving anything that matters happens at three levels:

Get in the room. Make your value impossible to miss, so the right people pull you in before you have to push.

Run it. Make it easier for people to move than to stall, so the meeting ends with a decision, not another meeting.

Change what happens after you leave. Design the conditions that make the new practice easier than the status quo, so adoption keeps moving without you in the room.

This week: pick the one thing your field, board, company — or family (!) — said yes to last quarter that never moved.

Write the bar. One sentence. The observable change that would have to occur for this to count as moved.

Once you've named where you're going, the next move gets easier to find.

→ Find your next move

🌿 No bar, no agreement

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