A Practice That Outlasted Its Original Team

The Situation

A federal regulatory agency was developing a complex, high-stakes rulemaking — a multi-year undertaking with significant public impact once finalized. The team responsible was technically capable, but collaboration was straining under the weight of the work. Policymakers and attorneys from the Office of General Counsel were pulling in different directions. Edits cycled without resolution. No one had created space to step back and work through why.

Partway through development, a new attorney joined from the director's office wanting an additional piece added to the rulemaking — the kind of late addition that, on a fragile team, can derail a timeline entirely.

The Lab

Nina was brought in to run a structured, three-hour Lessons Learned Lab™ with the team — the first one she ever facilitated. She chose a large training room deliberately, for the wall space, whiteboards, flip charts, and a projector the session would need.

The team built a shared timeline first — anyone could add a major activity or event, on the principle that if it mattered to someone in the room, it was worth reflecting on. From there, the group worked through a structured exercise the team came to call "Change the Paper" — surfacing specifically what they wanted to do differently going forward, not just what had gone wrong.

The room included the supervisory manager, several policymakers, an admin lead, and attorneys from the Office of General Counsel — voices that didn't always see the work the same way, and weren't expected to. The agency director later described this as healthy "creative conflict."

The session closed with a reflection circle: each person named one takeaway from the day and wrote it on an index card.

What Changed

The team left with a revised timeline — and held to it. The late addition from the new attorney, which could easily have knocked the schedule off course, didn't, because the team was already in the habit of reflecting and adjusting together rather than reacting individually. Collaboration between policymakers and attorneys measurably improved. Agreement, even where real differences in perspective remained, came faster.

The rulemaking was completed on schedule, signed off by the agency director, and published in the Federal Register.

What Happened Next

The team didn't stop after publication. They brought Nina back to run a Lab specifically to capture input from the contractors building implementation guides. From there, Labs became a recurring practice — every six months, or as needed — for years.

Over time, nearly everyone in the original room moved on. The supervisory manager left the agency. Other original team members left. Eventually, an entirely new team and a new supervisor were in place, with only a couple of attorneys carrying through from the original group. The work itself shifted too — from drafting the rule to actually regulating under it, with each session now focused on what was working and what needed to change as the agency applied the rulemaking in practice.

For roughly five to six years, the team kept calling Nina back — not because she chased the relationship, but because the practice had become part of how they worked.

Why It Lasted

Most organizations treat experience as something that happened. This team treated it as something that works — building reflection into the rhythm of the job instead of running it once and moving on.

That is the framework underneath everything at CROSSING CHANGE: the PRAE Cadence™ — Pause, Reflect, Act, Evolve. It is what this team did every six months without ever naming it that way, and it is why the practice survived long after the people who started it had moved on.