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The Seven Lenses and the Werewolf Café
Nobody really knew why the café kept losing staff.
Technically, it was successful. The Howl and Brew Café sat in the middle of a busy little town and did excellent cinnamon buns. People queued down the street for the Full Moon pumpkin latte every autumn, despite the fact it tasted suspiciously like nutmeg and regret.
Behind the scenes, though, it was chaos.
Staff kept quitting.
Customers complained online.
The dishwasher cried twice a week.
And Barry, the owner, had developed a twitch in his left eye.
Barry himself was a werewolf.
Not in a dramatic cursed-by-the-moon way. More in a "hairy on Thursdays and emotionally sensitive around full moons" sort of way.
He'd inherited the café from his aunt, who had believed strongly in three things:
strong coffee
natural moonlight
"people these days just need to toughen up"
Unfortunately, the staff did not thrive under this management philosophy.
One barista had left after a team meeting where Barry had shouted "IDEAS?" and then stared at everyone in silence for seven straight minutes.
Another had quit because the café playlist changed songs every twenty seconds and included at least four versions of jazz bagpipes.
One poor teenager called Colin had simply walked into the stockroom one day and never come back out emotionally.
Barry was confused.
"We're like a family here," he said one morning, while simultaneously asking three people questions at once and blending ice loudly behind them.
The problem, as it turned out, was not that Barry was evil.
The problem was that Barry had absolutely no idea what it cost other people to function in his café.
Everything changed when a customer left a strange little book behind.
The cover said:
The Seven Lenses: A New Way of Seeing Neuroinclusion
Barry almost ignored it because there were no werewolves on the cover and therefore it seemed irrelevant to his interests.
Business was bad, though, morale was worse, and the dishwasher had started hiding in the freezer room, so he gave it a go.
The first thing that hit him was this line:
"What does this experience demand?"
Barry sat back in his chair.
"Huh," he said.
Then his tail knocked over a latte.
The Red Lens: Emotions and Energy
The book explained that showing up costs people energy.
Barry had never considered this.
In Barry's mind, if somebody arrived at work upright and wearing shoes, they were "fine".
Then he started noticing things.
Mina, the baker, always sat in silence for ten minutes before opening.
Jared looked exhausted after busy lunch shifts, even though he barely stopped moving.
Colin physically recoiled every time Barry yelled "TEAM HUDDLE".
Barry realised he ran the café like a fire drill.
The next morning, he made changes.
He stopped doing surprise meetings.
He added proper breaks.
He stopped asking staff to "just quickly" do five extra things while already overwhelmed.
He created a tiny quiet room upstairs with blankets, soft lamps, and emergency biscuits.
Nobody cried that week.
Progress.
The Orange Lens: Execution and Focus
Barry then discovered executive function.
This explained why his whiteboard saying:
"DO ALL CLEANING, STOCK, CUSTOMER SERVICE AND VIBES"
had somehow failed as a management strategy.
The book explained that knowing what to do and actually being able to do it are not the same thing.
This shocked Barry.
"You mean people need… steps?" he whispered.
So they rewrote everything.
Opening tasks became checklists.
Coffee recipes became visual cards.
Instead of yelling "CAN SOMEONE SORT TABLE SIX?" into the void, tasks became specific and assigned.
The staff suddenly stopped wandering around looking like confused Sims characters.
Colin completed an entire stocktake without staring into the middle distance once.
The Yellow Lens: Sensory Experience
This one caused several difficult conversations.
Mainly because Barry discovered the café lighting was so aggressive it could probably interrogate prisoners.
The playlist was changed.
The blender got moved further away.
One flickering bulb was removed after staff admitted they had all secretly hated it for eight months.
Barry himself was devastated to learn that the "rustic wolf ambience" smell was mostly just burnt syrup.
Customers started lingering longer.
One woman described the café as "surprisingly calming".
Barry nearly cried into a muffin.
The Green Lens: Processing and Memory
This explained why staff forgot things the moment Barry said them aloud while simultaneously moving at 40mph around the espresso machine.
The book explained that information disappears when people are overloaded.
Again, Barry felt personally attacked.
They added:
written handovers
visual menus
slower explanations
one conversation at a time
Barry also stopped giving instructions while halfway inside the industrial fridge.
This helped enormously.
The Blue Lens: Social Connection
Barry had always assumed "good team culture" meant mandatory karaoke nights.
Apparently not everybody wanted to sing "Bat Out of Hell" with a werewolf called Derek who did the Thursday deliveries.
The book explained that social connection should have multiple routes.
So they stopped forcing socialising.
Some staff chatted.
Some sat quietly together.
Some communicated mainly through thumbs up and memes.
Oddly, people became closer once they stopped being pushed into "fun".
The Indigo Lens: Communication and Language
This lens revealed that Barry communicated like a man throwing cutlery into a tornado.
His previous management instructions included:
"make it pop"
"just wolf it a bit"
"you know the vibe"
"do the coffee emotionally"
Nobody knew what any of this meant.
The café introduced plain language.
Specific instructions.
Clear expectations.
No mysterious metaphors involving wolves.
Orders started coming out right first time.
Although one customer did complain the café had "lost some chaos".
Barry framed the review.
The Violet Lens: Body and Movement
This was the final piece.
The café had previously expected people to stand still for hours despite the fact half the staff regulated themselves through movement.
One employee focused better while pacing.
Another concentrated more while doodling.
Colin remembered things better while carrying boxes around.
Instead of policing movement, they worked with it.
Fidgeting became normal.
People sat when needed.
Staff moved around naturally instead of pretending to be professional statues.
The atmosphere changed completely.
The café felt calmer.
Kinder.
Easier.
Not perfect.
Just easier.
Six months later, the Howl and Brew Café had become unexpectedly famous.
Not because of the werewolf.
Although admittedly that helped the marketing.
People came because it felt good to be there.
The staff stayed.
Customers relaxed.
Nobody hid in the freezer anymore.
One journalist asked Barry what had transformed the business.
Barry thought carefully.
Then said:
"I stopped asking why people were struggling and started asking what the café was demanding from them."
There was a pause.
Then Colin whispered:
"…that's actually really good."
Barry nodded wisely.
Then accidentally howled because someone dropped a tray.
Some things, after all, are bigger than neuroinclusion.
The real Seven Lenses
Every change in these stories comes from one of the seven lenses in the book. Each lens is a way of looking at a workplace and asking what it demands of the people in it, so you can spot the hidden effort and design some of it out.
Lens | What it looks at | A question for your workplace |
Red: Emotions and Energy | The emotional and energy cost of showing up, and how people recover | Where does work here use up energy before the real work starts? |
Orange: Execution and Focus | Getting started, planning, prioritising and following through | Which tasks arrive without a clear first step? |
Yellow: Sensory Experience | Light, sound, smell, temperature, texture and space | What in our environment has everyone learned to put up with? |
Green: Processing and Memory | Taking in, holding and recalling information | Where do important instructions exist only in a passing comment? |
Blue: Social Connection | Belonging, relationships and the different ways people take part | How many ways are there to feel part of this team? |
Indigo: Communication and Language | How instructions, expectations and feedback are worded and shared | Which of our phrases would a new starter have to guess at? |
Violet: Body and Movement | Posture, movement, physical comfort and pain | Where are people expected to stay still for longer than is comfortable? |
Using this with your team
Pick one lens and read that part of the story aloud at the start of a team meeting. Then ask the group: where is our version of this?
Write the answers down, choose one change to try for a month, and agree a date to look at how it went. The ideas should come from everyone in the team, since the people doing the work usually know where the friction is.
Before You Go
Read the real book
The Seven Lenses: A New Way of Seeing Neuroinclusion is available on Amazon in paperback, hardback and Kindle. See it here.
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We run workshops, training and coaching for teams, managers, HR and senior leaders, using the Seven Lenses to find the hidden effort in everyday work and design it out.
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