Your point about conditioning is sharp, Justin, but I'd push further: in my experience, the organizations where transformations actually stick aren't the ones with the clearest authority or most stable interpretation. They're the ones with enough baseline trust that people can tolerate the ambiguity during the change. When teams trust each other and the system, they don't need perfect clarity to move forward. They can hold multiple interpretations, sit with vagaries, and collectively sift signal from noise as things evolve. The conditioning that matters most isn't structural clarity. It's relational. You can't communicate your way into that, and you can't force it. But without it, even the best-prepared system fragments the moment reality gets messy.
Appreciate this, Mark. I agree trust is essential, especially for holding ambiguity.
What I have seen is that when authority and interpretation are not stabilized, trust gets consumed faster than it can be replenished. Conditioning, for me, is about protecting trust from being spent as a substitute for structure.
Your point about conditioning is sharp, Justin, but I'd push further: in my experience, the organizations where transformations actually stick aren't the ones with the clearest authority or most stable interpretation. They're the ones with enough baseline trust that people can tolerate the ambiguity during the change. When teams trust each other and the system, they don't need perfect clarity to move forward. They can hold multiple interpretations, sit with vagaries, and collectively sift signal from noise as things evolve. The conditioning that matters most isn't structural clarity. It's relational. You can't communicate your way into that, and you can't force it. But without it, even the best-prepared system fragments the moment reality gets messy.
Appreciate this, Mark. I agree trust is essential, especially for holding ambiguity.
What I have seen is that when authority and interpretation are not stabilized, trust gets consumed faster than it can be replenished. Conditioning, for me, is about protecting trust from being spent as a substitute for structure.
Thanks for adding this lens.