Demonstrate the Standard, Then Collect It

Description

When a new leadership expectation has to land across multiple orgs, Peter does not write a spec. He runs a live exemplar in public with the strongest performer first, says openly that the ordering was deliberate, keeps the form of the deliverable open so the ask stays about the thinking rather than the artifact, lets the delta be self-evident to the people who will have to close it, and then collects the same from everyone else on a named rotation. He prefers showing imperfect work now over polished work later.

Typical Approach

Pick the strongest performer and have them go first, then name it as intentional - it is not an accident that this person is going first here. Praise the thinking rather than the output: you are taking an opinion about what you want to see from your team and what you can measure to improve those outcomes. Leave the form deliberately open - I do not care whether there is a dashboard or just a system that reports a set of metrics - so nobody can satisfy the ask by copying the artifact. Say plainly that this is the kind of thing I am going to be looking for from every org. Propagate the exemplar sideways as a training artifact, including to peers outside engineering. Tell the person privately that the others will not measure up, so the bar is calibrated rather than implied. Put the remaining orgs on a dated rotation. Separately, ask for work in progress to be shown even if not perfect, because the visible rough state is what makes the structural problem legible to the whole room at once instead of in serial one-on-ones. MINED REFINEMENTS (from 6 meta-learning observations, 2025-12-19 to 2026-08-11). Asking for visibly IMPERFECT work is one of his cheapest and highest-leverage moves - showing a half-migrated report made a structural problem legible to a whole room at once instead of across six serial conversations. He teaches a framework in two stages, a calm 1:1 explanation and then a live enforcement when someone tries to bypass it, and the enforcement matters more than the explanation because it converts an abstract framework into an observable boundary. He will privately tell the exemplar that the others will fall short, which calibrates the bar rather than merely implying it. IMPORTANT CORRECTION (2026-08-11): when a message fails to land, re-delivery works by DEMONSTRATION rather than by greater force. The second attempt at an AI-access rule worked because the room watched the code run, not because he was clearer - and his own prior self-diagnosis, that the failure had been in his delivery directness, turned out to be the wrong read of his own miss. Do not accept his self-diagnosis of a communication failure at face value.

Trigger Conditions