A culture-change sentence

My colleagues and I have been busy with a series of culture initiatives, working with teams of people entrusted by their organizations to write the words that will hang on the wall and be pointed out as the essence of who they are. As they struggle to arrive at just the right phrasing, they tend to ask two defining questions: Is this aspirational? Or is it real? We like to steer them away from the dichotomy, toward: This is who we are when we're at our best.

Here's what that sentence does for you: It says that the culture you aspire to is not detached from your current reality. It's just not everywhere, all the time, in full bloom. If you travel around your company, you'll find your cultural ideals in play now and then, here and there, more or less. So we're asking you to step up in a big way, but not to step outside of what's real. We're aiming for consistency across time and place and uptake, to be "at your best" more often, in more places, with greater clarity.

It's the culture-change version of the (alleged) William Gibson quote: "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."