The Practices · The other half of the Retrofit
Twenty-four ways a company learns to update itself.
Your products get updates. Your organisation runs on a version from a previous decade. These are the practices we guide companies to switch on.
We are not an AI-driven consulting firm. The practices are the proprietary half of the offering; the instruments are the modern half. Together they are the Retrofit.
TWENTY-FOUR SWITCHES. YOUR STEWARD HELPS YOU CHOOSE WHICH THREE OR FOUR TO FLIP FIRST.
FIND MY PRACTICES
Start with the tension, not the catalogue.
Describe what is getting in the way. Five practices light up: places to start, not a prescription.
Open a practice for its provocation, its mechanism and its teeth. Flip its switch to shortlist it for your first year.
Seeing the company
Practices that make the business legible to the people in it.
- 01Reading the NumbersEveryone learns the six numbers that run the place, from the top down and from the kitchen table up.TRANSPARENCY
- 02Open by DefaultEvery meeting open, attendance voluntary. The empty room becomes the verdict.VOLUNTARY PARTICIPATION
- 03Two Open SeatsTwo chairs in the steering committee, or the board, for the first two people who sign up.ACCESS TO POWER
- 04Kill a RuleA quarterly amnesty. A rule nobody will defend in three minutes dies.SUBTRACTION
Leading by consent
Practices that make leadership accountable, reversible and temporary.
- 05Validate Your BossTwice a year, the led score the leader. The score has consequences.LEADERSHIP LEGITIMACY
- 06Move Up and DownEvery promotion comes with a return ticket. No stigma, no exit.REVERSIBLE HIERARCHY
- 07Pass the BatonCohort leadership is a six-month turn, not a life sentence.RENEWABLE LEADERSHIP
- 08Factory CommitteesAn elected voice with information rights, and a deadline for the answer.COUNTERPOWER
Moving through roles
Practices that help people find, try and grow into useful work.
- 09Lost in SpaceA year with no job description and two rules.TALENT DISCOVERY
- 10Rotate Your ButtChange jobs without changing companies. The swap board is always on.INTERNAL MOBILITY
- 11RoleUpYour job, five years out: read in daylight, slowly, by you first.FUTURE FIT
- 12AllQFourteen ways to be smart, instead of one number.PLURAL INTELLIGENCE
Owning your time
Practices that loosen the company’s claim on place, hours and life stage.
- 13Whenever, WhereverContract for the result. Where and when you produce it is nobody’s business.RESULTS-BASED WORK
- 14Retire-a-LittleBuy your Wednesday now, while you can still climb the mountain.TIME OWNERSHIP
- 15Work’n StopA career with seasons: a long pause without a permanent exit.CAREER RHYTHM
Sharing the economics
Practices that distribute decisions about profit, pay and risk.
- 16Upside EconomicsThe pool formula is published before the year starts, and the people vote the split.SHARED POSITIVE RESULTS
- 17Build Your Own PayPropose your own pay, in daylight, with the numbers on the table.COMPENSATION AGENCY
- 18Risk SalaryTrade a little certainty for a share of the upside. Your dial, your choice.VOLUNTARY UPSIDE
Inventing and opening up
Practices that turn curiosity into experiments and make the company’s edges permeable.
- 19Have You Lost It?The only forum where a sensible idea is out of order.INNOVATION
- 20NTIA small nucleus, freed from the day job, paid to invent, and to kill most of it.PROTECTED INVENTION
- 21Rush Hour MBAAnyone teaches anything, between five and seven, while the traffic clears.PEER LEARNING
- 22We Don’t Work Here, But We DoBelonging is not a payroll category.POROUS WORKFORCE
- 23The Satellite ProgramWhen the work no longer belongs inside, build a company, not a redundancy list.ENTREPRENEURIAL SEPARATION
- 24The Alumni BenchThe people who left still know where the bodies are buried. Ask them.INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY
What a practice is made of
Five parts, or it isn’t on the menu.
Semco’s original contribution was a set of mechanisms, not a set of permissions. Every practice on the menu has the same five parts, and a candidate joins the menu only if it has all of them.
01
A provocation
The assumption the practice exists to challenge. If an idea can be approved in an ordinary meeting, it does not belong in the forum.
02
A protocol
A repeatable sequence, four moves typically, that makes the practice usable by people who did not invent it.
03
Teeth
A right, threshold, budget or consequence written down before the practice starts, so it cannot become a suggestion box.
04
A 90-day pilot
One cohort, a named sponsor, a small budget and an honest stop-or-scale date.
05
Evidence
The handful of measures that would make us keep, change or stop it, read monthly, in the open.
How a company chooses
Chosen, piloted, owned.
1Start with a reading, not a recommendation.
An MRI (a company X-ray built from public signals and a short private intake) and, where useful, a TruthScan that hears from current and former employees, clients and suppliers. Both are free to prospects.
2Pick the first three or four with a Steward.
The founder or CEO and the Steward choose from the menu against what the readings showed. Nothing is prescribed. A practice a company is not ready for is a practice we will say so about.
3Pilot, ninety days at a time.
Each practice switches on in one cohort of ten, with a sponsor, a budget and a date. The company decides at day ninety whether to kill it, keep it or scale it.
4Own it.
By month twelve the chosen practices run without us. The instruments stay, and in years two and three you program the next practices yourselves, straight from the menu.
What we deliberately don’t do
The absences are part of the design.
No consultants on site.
Delivery is remote: a Steward on video weekly, senior advisors who have run companies rotated in by subject, a small board of outside thinkers a few times a year.
No sequence imposed.
The waves in which practices tend to reinforce each other are knowledge we bring to the choice, not a schedule we bring to the client.
No practice without teeth.
If a company wants the name without the consequence, we would rather it chose a different practice.
No audit of your books.
Year one is a fixed fee. After that we share in the extra results, with the amounts determined by the client and no legal recourse on our side. We would rather be trusted than audited.
Every practice has teeth.
A right, a threshold, a budget, a consequence, a binding choice or a protected route: something written down before it starts that stops the practice collapsing into theatre. The full anatomy of all twenty-four (what each asks, what it returns, the watch-outs) lives one door in.