🗒 Summary
Amale joined us to share a framework she's developed over 17 years of working with organisations through disruption, restructures, M&As, and AI adoption. The central idea: when threat levels are high and autonomy feels low, people freeze. They keep their heads down and hope the danger passes. The job of a leader isn't to demand courage from people in that state - it's to build the conditions where courage becomes possible. The Experimental Culture Toolkit is how you do that.
📡 The Big Idea: The Big Freeze
👉 Fight, flight, or freeze - and most organisations are frozen We all know fight or flight. The third response - freezing, playing dead, hoping danger passes - is what's happening in organisations right now. High threat levels combined with low autonomy push people into a state where they won't raise their hand, won't show initiative, and won't flag problems. They just wait.
👉 The triggers are everywhere Redundancies, restructures, AI adoption, M&A activity, changing priorities. Even if it's not happening in your organisation, people are hearing about it from friends, family, and the news. The fear about job security is visceral - people are thinking about mortgages, families, futures. Leaders underestimate how real that survival instinct is.
👉 The freeze is a system problem, not a people problem The level of threat someone feels isn't fixed. It's shaped by the environment around them. Which means leaders and People teams have real leverage here - not by demanding more resilience, but by reducing the threat and increasing the sense of autonomy people have over their own destiny.
👉 Design change with people, not at them Nobody changes how they work just because they're told to. They change because they want to. The only way to make that happen at scale is to involve people in designing the change itself. That's the red thread running through everything Amale does.
⚡ The Experimental Culture Toolkit: 5 Ingredients
1. Connection People won't feel safe taking risks with strangers. After restructures, M&As, leadership changes, or hybrid working, teams are often a collection of individuals who don't actually know each other. Connection doesn't happen by magic - it has to be designed intentionally. Start with one-on-ones before group sessions, especially where there's history or tension. Build rituals gradually. Increase the frequency and depth of time together incrementally - don't put everyone in a room and expect it to resolve itself.
2. Clarity Constantly shifting priorities are one of the biggest killers of autonomy. If people don't know where they're headed or what's expected of them, they can't show initiative. And if they can't show initiative, they stay frozen. The fix isn't just communicating the direction clearly - it's co-creating it. People who've had a say in the priorities feel more ownership over them. They work differently when they understand the why, not just the what.
3. Curiosity Leadership inherited its language from the military - command and control, confidence, certainty. But in an environment where nobody really knows what AI adoption looks like, or what good restructuring looks like, that certainty is a performance. The most underrated leadership skill right now is asking good questions and genuinely not knowing the answer yet. Leaders who kill curiosity by demanding solutions before problems are understood end up solving the wrong things.
4. Courage You cannot ask your team to take risks in an uncertain environment if you're not visibly doing it yourself. If you want experimentation, you have to model it. If you want people to stick their neck out, you have to be the first person to stick yours out. Courage is contagious - but so is its absence.
5. Celebration Most organisations celebrate wins and quietly ignore everything else. If you want an experimental culture, you have to celebrate learning from things that didn't work - not failure for its own sake, but the honest conversation about what you tried, what you expected, what got in the way, and what you'll do differently. Without that, experimentation feels like a trap.
✅ What You Should Do: A Practical Step Plan
1. Map where your team sits on the threat/autonomy spectrum Before you do anything else, understand the current state. High threat plus low autonomy equals big freeze. Which of the two levers - reducing threat or increasing autonomy - is more actionable in your context right now? Start there.
2. Don't wait for the annual offsite to build connection Identify one recurring ritual where people can talk about something low-stakes together. Start there. Then gradually increase the frequency and depth. If there's existing tension or history between people or teams, do one-on-ones first - never put people in a group situation before you understand the dynamics.
3. Co-create priorities, don't just communicate them The next time you set team or org-level priorities, involve the people who'll deliver them in shaping them. They'll flag problems you can't see from the top, they'll feel more ownership over the outcome, and you'll end up with a more realistic plan.
4. Start in your corner You can't change everything and everyone at once. Pick the part of the organisation you have most influence over and prove the model there. A team that's visibly working better is a far more powerful argument than any framework you can present to a resistant exec team.
5. Sell what they want, deliver what they need If leadership only speaks the language of results and efficiency, don't pitch connection - pitch workflow improvement, reduced friction, faster problem-solving. The intervention is the same. The framing is different. Meet them where they are.
6. Practice curiosity before pitching solutions If you have a founder or exec who's resistant, don't go in with an argument. Go in with questions. Understand what they've tried before, what didn't work, what they're actually afraid of. Then frame your proposal using their own language and concerns. People accept ideas that feel like their own.
7. Celebrate the learning, not just the landing Introduce a regular moment - a team retro, a monthly check-in - where people talk about something that didn't go to plan. Not to punish, not to analyse. Just to normalise the conversation. Over time, that's what makes people brave enough to try things.
8. Use the diagnostic before you guess If you're not sure which of the five ingredients is most broken, don't guess. Amale's book includes a diagnostic in the introduction specifically designed to pinpoint where to focus. Start there rather than trying to fix all five at once. (Link at the bottom of the page)
💬 Q&A Highlights
How do you get C-suite buy-in for connection work when they only care about results? Stop pitching it as connection work. Pitch it as workflow improvement, efficiency, or problem-solving. The work you'll actually do is the same - but the language needs to match what they value. Sell what they want, deliver what they need. And if you've pitched before and it hasn't landed, go back and ask questions before pitching again - understand what's blocking them, and reframe using their own words.
One approach that's worked in practice, shared by John at Open Org: be direct with the SLT and walk them through the logic chain. You want great results? You need great teams. Great teams need high trust, clear vision, and autonomy. Here's what our data shows we have and don't have. Here's what I'm proposing to fix the gaps. And if that feels too big a commitment, let me pilot it with one team for 6 weeks - with your pre-approval to roll it out org-wide if it works. If it doesn't, at least people saw leadership name a problem and try to tackle it. That visibility alone has an effect. The ask becomes smaller, the upside stays the same, and the worst case is still a win.
What do you do when a PE-backed leadership team is in pure delivery panic mode after multiple restructures? This is one of the hardest situations to work in. Five restructures in two years creates enormous residual anxiety in the organisation. The advice: find the efficiency and output framing, not the people framing. And start small - one team, one ritual, one moment of genuine connection - and prove it before trying to scale it.
How do you influence a founder who isn't bought into this way of working? Practice curiosity with them first. Ask them about their experience, what they've tried, why they're resistant. Then use those insights to frame your pitch in terms that came from them. People who feel like they've had a hand in shaping an idea are far more likely to accept it. Don't walk in with an answer - walk in with questions.
How do you handle M&A culture integration? Don't put people together and expect magic. Understand the dynamics - the history, the resentment, the "us and them" tension - before you design any intervention. Start with individual conversations, then very low-stakes group moments, then gradually increase the intensity. Moving too fast causes more damage than moving slowly.
How do you know which of the five ingredients to focus on first? There's a diagnostic in the introduction of Amale's book, Experimental, that maps your current state across all five areas and tells you where to start. Don't try to fix everything at once - use the diagnostic to find the biggest gap and work from there.