How to Run a Moments Audit: Finding the Interactions That Shape Your Culture
| A Moments Audit is a structured review of the recurring interactions in your organization, onboarding, one-on-ones, feedback, departures, that identifies which ones carry disproportionate weight and deserve deliberate design. The method comes from Chris Dyer’s 2026 book Moments That Matter. This guide walks through the full process: inventory, classify by the seven moment types, score the story gap, design the top three, and build the propagation loop that keeps designed moments alive past month eighteen. |
People remember less than one percent of what they experience at work. That fraction decides who stays, how hard they try, and what they tell others about your organization. The uncomfortable implication for leaders: most of your culture is being written by a handful of interactions nobody is managing. A Moments Audit finds them. It takes a leadership team about two hours to run the first pass, and it usually changes what the team spends its energy on for the next year.
Table of Contents
- Step 1: Inventory your recurring interactions
- Step 2: Classify by the seven moment types
- Step 3: Score the story gap
- Step 4: Design the top three
- Step 5: Build the propagation loop
- The three signals that a moment matters
- A worked example
- Common mistakes
- Running the audit solo as a manager
- How the audit connects to See, Shape, Scale
- The eighteen-month trap
- Frequently asked questions
Step 1: Inventory your recurring interactions
List every interaction that happens repeatedly across the employee lifecycle: the offer call, the first day, the first week, one-on-ones, project kickoffs, performance conversations, promotions, mistakes and their aftermath, recognition, team meetings, transfers, and departures. Add the guest- or customer-facing equivalents if your teams have them. Aim for 20 to 30 items. Resist the urge to fix anything yet; the inventory only works if it stays judgment-free.
Step 2: Classify by the seven moment types
Mark each interaction with the moment type it belongs to. The seven types, from Moments That Matter:
- Inception: first days, first meetings, first impressions. The design question: how do you want people to feel about who they are becoming?
- Transition: the space between what was and what is next. The question: what does that space require?
- Decision: choices under pressure while someone is watching. The question: what would clarity look like?
- Recognition: acknowledgment that changes how someone sees themselves. The question: what specifically am I seeing in this person?
- Connection: when two people share something true and feel heard. The question: what does presence actually look like here?
- Truth: difficult information delivered with care. The question: how do I ensure this lands as care, not criticism?
- Culmination: endings, goodbyes, completions. The question: how do we honor what is ending before rushing to what is next?
Most teams discover their inventory clusters heavily in two or three types, and that the neglected types, usually Transition and Culmination, are where the worst stories originate.
Step 3: Score the story gap
For each interaction, ask two questions. First: what story gets told about this interaction today? Be honest; exit interviews and Glassdoor reviews are the answer key. Second: what story could get told if this interaction were designed well? The distance between those two answers is the story gap, and it is the audit’s ranking metric. Score each item 1 to 5 on gap size, then multiply by frequency. A weekly one-on-one with a gap of 3 outranks an annual event with a gap of 5.
Step 4: Design the top three
Take the three highest-scoring interactions and design them using the questions Chris Dyer lays out in the book: who is centered in this moment, what should they feel, remember, and tell, what preparation does it require, what setting enables it, and how will you know it worked. The evidence that design pays: at one of Chris Dyer’s companies, redesigning the Inception moment, welcome packages built from a new-hire questionnaire, personalized letters, a first day engineered for belonging rather than paperwork, cut turnover from 35 percent to 12 percent. Leave everything outside your top three appropriately efficient. Designing every moment leads to exhaustion and moment inflation; the skill is concentration.
Step 5: Build the propagation loop
A designed moment that stays private changes one person. A designed moment that becomes a story changes a culture. For each of your top three, decide how the story spreads: who retells it, where it gets shared, and what makes it repeatable. Then close the loop with three review questions after each occurrence: did I show up with full presence, what story is now being told, and who else needs to know what happened. The propagation step is where audits usually stall, and it is the difference between an initiative and a culture.
The three signals that a moment matters
Classification gets easier once you know what to look for. Three signals mark a moment as disproportionately weighted. Somatic signals: your body registers the stakes before your calendar does, the tight chest before a conversation, the reluctance to open a particular email. Resistance signals: the interactions everyone quietly avoids or rushes, departures handled by checklist, feedback postponed for weeks, are usually the ones carrying the most weight. Disproportionate-impact signals: any interaction that shows up repeatedly in exit interviews, reviews, or the stories people tell about your organization has already voted itself onto your list. If an interaction trips two of the three signals, it belongs in your top-three design candidates regardless of its frequency score.
A worked example
A 120-person software company runs the audit and inventories 24 recurring interactions. Classification shows heavy clustering in Connection and Recognition, with almost nothing designed in Transition or Culmination. Story-gap scoring surfaces three winners: departures (gap 5, the current story is a same-day Slack deactivation and silence), the first week (gap 4, new hires describe it as paperwork and waiting), and the monthly all-hands shout-outs (gap 3 but high frequency, the recognition is generic enough to mean nothing). The team designs all three: departures get a send-off ritual and an open-door alumni policy, week one gets rebuilt around belonging with a buddy, a personalized welcome, and a real first project, and shout-outs get a new rule, name the specific behavior and its future implication or skip it. Six months later the stories have changed, and the audit’s twice-yearly review keeps them changed.
Common mistakes
- Auditing everything and designing nothing. The inventory is a means. If the session ends without three named design projects and owners, it was a discussion, and discussions decay.
- Designing for the leader instead of the person centered. The design question is what the other person should feel, remember, and tell. Moments built to make leadership look thoughtful read as performance.
- Confusing frequency with weight. The daily standup is frequent; the departure is weighty. The scoring step exists to stop the loudest calendar item from absorbing all the design energy.
- Skipping the propagation step. A beautifully designed moment that produces zero retold stories changed one afternoon. Decide how each moment spreads before calling it done.
The eighteen-month trap
Jan Carlzon transformed SAS by focusing the airline on its moments of truth, and the transformation nearly collapsed eighteen months later when quarterly pressure made moment design feel like a luxury. He had to launch a second wave aimed at sustainability rather than spark. Plan for your own second wave from the start: put the audit on the calendar as a recurring review, twice a year, and treat the designed moments as operating standards rather than a campaign. Organizations that skip this step get a great quarter; organizations that build it get a reputation.
Teams that want help running the audit at scale bring Chris Dyer in to deliver the Moments That Matter keynote and facilitate the first audit as a working session; details are at chrisdyer.com/speaking. The rest of this guide, and the full question set, work fine on their own.
Running the audit solo as a manager
The full audit assumes a leadership team, and a single manager can run a scaled version in 30 minutes. Inventory only the interactions you personally own: your one-on-ones, your team meetings, how you deliver feedback, how you welcome new team members, how you handle someone’s last day. Classify each by type, score the story gap honestly, and design one, just one, this month. The solo version compounds: a manager who redesigns their one-on-one shapes a dozen careers, and the retold stories travel farther than most org-wide programs. The seven questions from the design step work identically at this scale, and the twice-yearly review matters even more, because nobody else is holding the calendar for you.
How the audit connects to See, Shape, Scale
The audit is the See step made operational: a structured way to identify which moments carry disproportionate weight before they happen, instead of recognizing them in hindsight. The design work in step four is Shape, showing up with preparation, presence, and intention. The propagation loop in step five is Scale, helping moments become stories that spread. Chris Dyer sequences the book the same way because teams reliably fail in that order: they act without seeing (designing moments that were never the heavy ones), or see and shape without scaling (great moments that die in private). The audit forces the sequence, which is most of its value.
Frequently asked questions
What is a Moments Audit?
A Moments Audit is a structured review of an organization’s recurring interactions that identifies which ones disproportionately shape culture, retention, and reputation. The method comes from Chris Dyer’s 2026 book Moments That Matter and uses his seven moment types and See, Shape, Scale framework.
How long does a Moments Audit take?
About two hours for a leadership team’s first pass: 30 minutes for the inventory, 30 for classification, 30 for story-gap scoring, and 30 to pick and assign the top three design projects. The design work itself unfolds over the following weeks.
Who should be in the room for the audit?
The leaders who own the interactions being audited, typically the executive team plus HR or People leadership. Frontline perspective sharpens the story-gap scoring, so include at least one voice close to daily operations.
How often should we repeat the Moments Audit?
Twice a year for the full leadership version, with the top-three design projects reviewed quarterly. Organizations change faster than their rituals: a merger, a growth spurt, or a new leadership layer reshuffles which moments carry weight, and the audit only protects you if it recurs. Put the next session on the calendar before ending the first one.
Can the audit work for customer-facing moments too?
Yes, and hospitality, retail, and service organizations often run a second inventory for guest or customer interactions using the same seven types and the same story-gap scoring. The employee version usually comes first for a practical reason: the people delivering customer moments can only give what their own moments have given them.
Where can I get the full framework?
The complete method, including the design toolkit and the seven moment types in depth, is in Moments That Matter by Chris Dyer (2026). A free companion workbook, with no email required, is available at chrisdyer.com/moments.
Go deeper
The full framework is in Moments That Matter, available wherever books are sold. Download the free companion workbook at chrisdyer.com/moments, and explore Chris Dyer’s keynotes at chrisdyer.com.
