Work Conventions 🤝
Shared rules. Same language. Less friction.
A workspace without conventions is a shared inbox with project labels: every team uses it slightly differently, and within two months the platform is "where some people put some work." A workspace with conventions is a shared operating language — the same task-name format, the same custom-field meaning, the same answer to where does this conversation belong? You are the one who installs that change of state.
In this document
How conventions become the team's common language — and make change stick
The two workshops that run this stage
Conventions are a project, not a document
What to prepare before this stage
Avoid this if you don't want your transformation to fail or delay
What you get with the full protocol
1️⃣ How conventions become the team's common language — and make change stick
This stage is the most consequential stage in the entire Protocol. We say that with care — every stage is load-bearing in its own way. But this is the one that decides whether your platform is a tool a few people happen to use, or the place where the organisation's work actually lives. Without a shared set of conventions, your workspace is a hundred private notebooks that happen to share a domain.
Conventions are not authored in this stage. They've been accumulating since Kick-off. This stage is the alignment stage — where you take what's already true across teams, filter it, and write it down as the operating system for the next quarter.
The visual above is the answer to the most common question we get on this stage: "why does this stage sit here, and not at the start?" It's because the conventions you align here are already in the building — you've just never collected them in one place.
- The Kick-off 🏈 stage seeded the first-ever convention — the Why Asana statement that names the platform as the place selected workflows will live from Launch Day. Every other convention is downstream of it.
- Workflow Mapping, Implementation, and Simulation at the Mapping & Implementing Workflows 🛠️ stage surfaced the local conventions — the rules that worked for one team or one workflow, marked as ⬛ stickies on Miro and written into Project Overview tabs.
A local convention becomes a global convention by passing through five steps. Three of them already happened: captured locally, aggregated into one project, and carried in as a draft list. The two that happen during Stage 7: filtered by the Guardian, then ratified by the Change Leaders. That's the whole shape of this stage.
Note on naming (Sponsor, Guardian, Change Leaders, Convention Setter) — click to reveal
Sponsor, Guardian, and Change Leaders were appointed at the
Kick-off 🏈 stage and keep those titles for the rest of the Protocol.
The convention owner here is the Convention Setter — the organisation-wide role formally appointed at the Change Alliance 👥 stage. Until then it's usually the Guardian, sometimes a deputy in larger organisations; they own the Work Conventions project and @mention a convention when it's violated.
2️⃣ The two workshops that run this stage
Two meetings, in this order. The order is the methodology.
Workshop 1 — with the Guardian, alone. A 120-minute deep-work block. One person, the room of all collected conventions, and a single question per item: would this rule work if every team in the organisation followed it tomorrow? No Change Leaders, no group debate. The Guardian leaves with the global list filtered, contradictions resolved, and a short list of edits to make before the next meeting.
Workshop 2 — with the Change Leaders, together. A 2-hour presentation-and-ratification session. The Guardian walks the room through the filtered conventions, the team takes edits, names which two habits will hold for the first month, and commits to the reinforcement loop. By the end of the meeting, the convention project is the team's contract.
The discipline: filter first, ratify second. The most common failure on this stage is to flip the order — to "save time" by running both passes in one big meeting with everyone present. The loudest voices anchor the list, the quiet leaders agree to keep the meeting moving, and you leave with a watered-down filter the team won't actually follow. The two-meeting cadence is not a process formality. It's the methodology.
Bringing this to your Sponsor or CEO: "This is the stage that decides whether the platform becomes the team's operating system or remains a tool a few enthusiasts use. Skip it and you've installed software; run it and you've changed how the organisation works."
3️⃣ Conventions are a project, not a document
The deliverable of this stage is a project, not a page. That choice is the part most teams get wrong on their first attempt — and it's the part that makes everything else either work or not.
A convention written in a Notion page or a Google Doc is a reference. People read it once, never go back, and the rule decays. A convention written as a task in a dedicated Asana project is operational infrastructure: searchable, status-trackable, and — the move that makes the whole stage work — @mention-able in any comment when it's violated. The conversation re-anchors on the rule. The violator sees the source. The rule reinforces itself.
The template arrives in your workspace via CSV import, populated with the starter conventions we see hold across most engagements. Your Guardian's job is to merge the local conventions into this template, not to author from scratch.
4️⃣ What to prepare before this stage
- The Tooling Landscape board from the Audit 🔍 stage. The cross-tool boundary lives here. Without it, you'll write Asana-only conventions and the team will keep working around them in Slack.
- The local conventions surfaced at the Mapping & Implementing Workflows 🛠️ stage — pulled from Miro ⬛ stickies and Project Overview tabs. Harvested into one place before Workshop 1.
- The Work Conventions template, imported. Via CSV, in the language the team uses. The Guardian merges into it, not from a blank page.
- A named Convention Setter — usually the Guardian, sometimes a deputy. Picked before Workshop 1, because the workshop ends with them owning the role and the room needs to know who that is.
- A 120-minute deep-work block on the Guardian's calendar. Not split, not interruptible. If it gets sliced to 30 minutes the filter pass turns into a triage exercise.
5️⃣ Avoid this if you don't want your transformation to fail or delay
‼️ Don't ship conventions as a memo. A convention in a Notion page is decoration; a convention as an @mention-able task in Asana is enforcement. If you cannot @mention the rule in a comment, you do not have a convention. You have a wish.
‼️ Don't merge local conventions live with the room. Workshop 1 is deep work, by design. Filter first, ratify second. Doing both in one big meeting turns alignment into debate, the strongest voices anchor the list, and you leave with a filter the team won't follow.
‼️ Don't forget the cross-tool layer. Conventions about your work platform alone are half the work. Stage 7 is when you write down "Slack stays for chat; project decisions live in Asana comments; Drive stores the artefacts" — and then you defend that boundary. Skip this and the team will keep parallel-running every conversation in two places.
‼️ Don't skip the "first-ever" convention. The Why Asana statement from Kick-off — that the platform replaces other channels for selected workflows from Launch Day — is the founding rule. If you didn't lock it at the Kick-off 🏈 stage, this stage is when that absence shows up. Bringing this to your Sponsor: "We need the platform-replaces-channels commitment in writing before Workshop 2. Without it, every convention we ratify has a loophole."
‼️ Don't appoint a Convention Setter who has no authority. The role is the @mention-er — the named person who corrects violations out loud, in the platform, every day for the first 60 days. No political capital, no adoption. Pick someone the team already listens to, not someone with the most enthusiasm.
‼️ Don't make thirty conventions on day one. Two habits, max, in the first month. Two habits get followed; ten habits get none-followed. The team's attention is finite — spend it on the two conventions that, if held, change the most.
✅ What you get with the full protocol
The full Reliability Protocol is delivered as one weekly action by email. You don't read 15 stages in one sitting — you receive one stage at a time, with one implementable artifact, and one clear next step you (or your Guardian) can act on that week. The artifacts you get for this stage:
- The Work Conventions Asana project (CSV-importable) — the 60-task template seeded with the conventions we see hold across most engagements. EN + PL. Imports straight into your workspace and is ready to be merged with your local conventions.
- The Conventions Alignment runbook (Guardian deep-work) — the 120-minute solo session structure: pre-reqs, the local-to-global filter rubric, the conflict-resolution moves, the output checklist.
- The Sum-up Agenda for Change Leaders — the 2-hour agenda, the base categories with example conventions, the @mention enforcement protocol, the monthly Reinforce/Readjust cadence, and the presentation frames pre-built.
- The 3-email sequence (before / Guardian-prep / after) — three plug-and-play emails (EN + PL placeholders) for the Change Leaders kick-off, the Guardian-prep handover with the conventions-list link, and the post-Workshop 2 reinforcement note.
- The Tooling Landscape reconciliation worksheet — the cross-tool boundary template (Asana ↔ Slack ↔ Email ↔ Drive ↔ Calendar) pulled from the Audit 🔍 stage, used to write the inter-tool conventions cleanly.
💬 Take this with you and your Guardian can run the conventions stage themselves. Hit a wall — especially on the filter pass or a contradiction the Guardian can't resolve alone — and want a partner — book the session below.
💡 This is Stage 7 of the Reliability Protocol — Remote Sensei's 15-stage system for permanent organisational transformation, and the global standard for Asana implementation: making Asana and AI stick in mid-size and enterprise teams so work ships on time without anyone chasing it.