When a third of the room changed the same word — BASF

Why BASF asked us in

Culture change rarely fails on ambition. It fails in the gap between a stated value and what actually happens in the next meeting. BASF set out to make its culture ambitions real at that level — the small moves in everyday conversations that decide whether a culture shifts or stays on the wall.

The session was designed to give those ambitions a working bridge through the 5 Guiding Principles of Applied Improv: speed over perfection, learning from other perspectives, recognising others, and the willingness to act before everything is certain. The brief was to make those behaviours tangible — something people feel and practise, rather than another framework to absorb.

The themes that shaped the work:

• Behaviour, not posters. Culture ambitions only land when they show up as specific behaviours people can actually do on a Monday.
• Speed that comes from how people talk. Much of what slows an organisation down happens at the level of a single exchange — ideas met with objection before they're explored.
• Connection across teams. Getting people to reach across departmental lines, rather than stay in their own.

What we delivered

A two-hour experiential session grounded in the 5 Guiding Principles of IMPROV, followed by a 30-day reinforcement sprint for those who opted in — a short prompt each Monday, a reflection each Friday, for four weeks. The session was hands-on throughout: people practise the behaviours, notice what happens in themselves, and commit to one specific change to carry back to their work. The sprint exists to turn that intention into habit.

What the participants told us

The numbers are warm and honest. People rated their likelihood of reaching across teams at 6.07/7 — the strongest signal in the data — and their confidence to apply what they'd experienced at 5.4/7. Ninety-three per cent would recommend the session, and two-thirds opted into the sprint.

That gap is worth noticing: people left more ready to reach out to a colleague in another team than to apply the methodology alone at their own desk. The session lowered the cost of connection faster than it answered every "how do I do this by myself" — which is exactly the gap a 30-day sprint is built to close.

Which principles resonated most. Asked which of the five spoke to them most, the room pointed clearly at one.

Principle named as most resonant	Times named
Yes, And	6
Make Each Other Look Good	3
Do Not Judge Yourself	2
Do Not Judge Others	1
Embrace Failure	1

Yes, And was the most-named principle by some distance, and the reasons were practical rather than abstract — people recognised a behaviour they wanted to change, not a concept they admired.

The most striking pattern was in what people committed to. A third of respondents named the same specific behaviour: replacing "but" with "and" or "at the same time" in how they respond to a colleague's idea. Most cohorts produce ten scattered, vague intentions. This one converged on a single, observable linguistic shift — which gives the whole group a shared reference point for the weeks ahead, and gives culture change a precise place to begin.

What people noticed about themselves is where change starts. The clearest pattern, named in eight of fifteen responses, was the discovery that collaboration can feel light rather than heavy. One person put it simply: "I laughed a lot, and this made me understand that collaboration doesn't have to be stressful." Others caught their own "yes, but" reflex in the act, or felt — rather than were told — the cost of doing a bit of everything at once.

In their own words

Deleting the "but" in a response and saying "at the same time". — Anonymous respondent, on what they'll do differently

Say yes first to an idea when someone comes to me. — Anonymous respondent

I laughed a lot, and this made me understand that collaboration doesn't have to be stressful. — Anonymous respondent, on what they noticed

Send recognition to my team or the people around me once per week. — Anonymous respondent

Trying more open questions, to understand better before I act. — Anonymous respondent

What they committed to doing differently

Each respondent named one specific, observable behaviour to change. The themes clustered tightly:

• Replace "yes, but" with "yes, and" or "at the same time" (a third of the group).
• Listen and ask a question before responding or judging.
• Recognise others, and make space for their ideas.
• Give myself more grace, and judge my own work less harshly as I go.

Each is observable — the person can notice whether they did it. That is what makes them a foundation the 30-day sprint can build on.

Bring this to your organisation

Any large organisation working on culture faces a recognisable version of BASF's question: how to turn a stated ambition into what people actually do in the next meeting. Our approach transfers directly — an experiential session built on the 5 Guiding Principles, a follow-up sprint that turns intention into habit, and a focus on the small, specific behaviours (how people respond to an idea, whether they reach across a team line) where culture is really decided.

Source: anonymous post-session survey, 21 May 2026. 15 of 24 participants responded — read as the fifteen voices we heard rather than the full cohort.