Establish a Community Group

Leadership evidence and aggregate data describe the organisation; they do not describe Tuesday morning. A community group supplies the ground truth that surveys flatten — how work actually flows, where friction actually sits — and tests interpretations before they harden into decisions. It is also the change infrastructure: people who co-created the evidence become credible ambassadors of its consequences. Skipping this method produces strategies that are analytically correct and organisationally rejected.

• During Discover, so the group witnesses the evidence being gathered rather than receiving conclusions
• In organisations with works councils or strong consultation cultures — align early
• Wherever a previous workplace change failed on acceptance rather than analysis

• 12–25 employees depending on organisational size and geography
• Cross-functional and cross-level: job families, tenure bands, contract types
• Geographic representation where multiple sites are in scope
• Deliberate inclusion of sceptics, part-time workers and operational roles — not only engaged volunteers
• Change lead as facilitator; project lead as connector to the method plan

• Governance charter defining the group's role: advisory voice, not decision body
• Organisational chart and site map for representativeness
• Works council / employee representation agreements where applicable

1. Define the group's explicit role and its limits: it interprets, challenges and communicates; it does not decide. State this at recruitment, in writing.
2. Recruit for representativeness, not enthusiasm: map job families, locations, tenure, and target the gaps.
3. Induct the group into the methodology so members understand where their input lands and where it does not.
4. Establish a working rhythm tied to method moments: reviewing Diagnose findings, stress-testing personas, previewing concepts.
5. Create a structured feedback channel back into the project team, with a visible response loop — input that disappears kills the group.
6. Prepare the ambassador transition: as Deliver approaches, members shift from evidence contributors to change communicators.
7. Document divergences between community-group interpretation and aggregate data as targeted-insight questions.

• Self-selection bias: volunteers skew engaged, senior and office-present
• The group drifting into a negotiation body — redirect to the works council where formal consultation belongs
• Members reporting group consensus that contradicts their private comments
• Departments 'protecting' staff from participation — usually the departments with most friction
• Feedback that is heard but never visibly answered

• Chartered community group with representativeness map
• Structured feedback mechanism and response log
• Interpretation notes attached to Diagnose findings
• Ambassador network ready for Deliver

The group's interpretation notes qualify Dynamics and Occupancy findings and generate Targeted Insights questions. It stress-tests Persona Development and reviews options in Workshop III. In Deliver it becomes the activation network; in Recalibrate it is the standing feedback channel that keeps the strategy connected to lived experience.

Reading whether the group is representative in voice — not just in composition — is facilitation judgement. So is distinguishing a genuine organisational signal from a vocal individual's campaign.

• Recruiting only volunteers and calling it representation
• Positioning the group as decision-making, then overriding it — the credibility loss is permanent
• Using the group as a communications channel only, wasting its evidentiary value
• Meeting cadence detached from the method plan, producing sessions with nothing to review
• Disbanding the group after go-live, exactly when Recalibrate needs it

A 3,000-person insurer recruited a 20-member community group including two open critics of desk sharing. During Diagnose, the group flagged that low Thursday occupancy reflected a client-visit pattern, not disengagement — redirecting a forming conclusion. At activation, the two former critics became the most persuasive ambassadors, precisely because their scepticism had visibly shaped the outcome.