Four ways to fail at creating a future-fit culture
Four ways to fail at creating a future-fit culture
A six-minute video on traditional approaches to avoid if you want to succeed...
“We are very largely devoted to doing the wrong thing right. That's very unfortunate, because the righter you do the wrong thing, the wronger you become” — Russ Ackoff 1
There are four main approaches that organisations have traditionally used in their change efforts:
Bring in a mainstream management consulting to take on the task.
Try to inspire people to change using vision, mission, and values statements.
Roll out standardised training across the organisation in an attempt to get buy-in.
Hire an executive coach for the top team, based on the assumption that if the top team is aligned, everything else will fall into place.
Unfortunately, none of the above approaches works for creating a future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
Why these approaches all fail is addressed in the six-minute video below:
The usual change methods don’t work for creating future-fit, innovative, agile organisations (5 mins 59s):
Transcript
There are four main approaches that organisations have traditionally used in their change efforts.
The first is to bring in a big, established, brand name consulting firm from outside to take on the task.
The second aims to encourage people to change from the inside out by inspiring them with vision, mission and values statements.
The third approach is to roll-out standardised training across the organisation, aiming to get everyone on board with the change; and the fourth is to hire an executive coach for the top team — based on the assumption that if the top team is aligned, everyone else will fall into line and everything else will fall into place.
So, let’s take a look at why each of these approaches fails to help you build an innovative agile organisation.
The business model of big consulting firms is totally dependent on deploying large teams of mostly junior consultants. This approach stems from their traditional work of providing research-based advice to help senior executive clients make better-informed decisions.
But when they hire those same firms to help them to change, senior executives often experience a disappointing lack of meaningful results.
This is even more of a problem when you want to build an innovative, agile organisation. I cover this in more detail in my free guide to overcoming the five fatal habits that have consistently killed organisational efforts to improve innovation over the past 30 years. 2
In essence, the problem is that because big consulting firms depend on deploying their people to do the work, your people end up displaced, discouraged and disengaged.
And the unavoidable truth is that you can only build an innovative, agile organisation when it’s your people who do the heavy lifting themselves.
The problem with the second approach — focusing on mission, vision and values — is not that these things don’t matter, it’s just that the only ones that do matter are the ones people actually embody, because these are the ones that then play out in their actions and interactions. 3
And you don’t need to reflect very hard on your own experience to see that we pick these things up from our day to day experience of the organisation, and most of all from the attitudes and behaviours of key influencers, not from published statements, motivational posters or the plexiglass plaque in the front lobby. 4
The third approach is to put everyone through standardised training with the aim of aligning people around the desired change. This approach is known as ‘sheep-dipping’ because it involves briefly immersing people in the proposed solution, after which they pop up on the other side, shake themselves off, and go back to what they were doing before.
It’s a shame so many organisations still go in for sheep-dip training, because isn’t just ineffective, it actually makes things worse.
That’s because when someone has been in an organisation for any length of time, they form a biased, limited and one-sided 2D personal perspective on what needs fixing.
And since sheep-dip training never adequately addresses everyone’s personal pet peeves, these continue to fester. In addition, people then resent having been dragged away from their real work to participate in what they regard as a pointless exercise.
The net effect is to further stifle the very innovation and agility that the training was meant to encourage.
Over the past decade or so, an increasing number of organisations have adopted the fourth approach — hiring an executive coach to improve top team alignment.
Executive coaching definitely has its place, and I do a fair amount of it myself, but improving executive team alignment doesn’t build innovative agile organisations — because it leaves out other key influencers who are not on the top team.
The simplistic, widely-held view is that the more senior someone is, the more influence they have. But this isn’t how organisations actually operate in the real world.
Yes, it’s true that ‘the buck stops at the top’, but talk with senior executives who’ve struggled with transformational change and many will admit — even if only in private — that they don’t have the power to change things that their position on the organisation chart might suggest.
That’s because most people in the body of an organisation are in reality much more affected by peer pressure that ultimately stems from key influencers who don’t sit on, or often anywhere near the top table.
The fundamental flaw that’s common to all these approaches is that they all fail to focus narrowly enough and deeply enough on making sure that the actual key influencers in the organisation escape the trap of their narrow 2D perspectives.
The systemic effect that these people have on everyone and everything else then blocks the cultivation of the 2D3D mindsets that form the foundation of an innovative agile organisation. 5
Given the problems with these traditional approaches, organisations can find themselves seduced by more recent, alluring and sexy-sounding concepts like innovation labs, digital platforms and ‘open innovation’ partnerships. But innovation isn’t something you can just ‘bolt-on’ to an existing organisation.
And any attempts to do so are inevitably doomed to failure so long as key influencers remain trapped in their narrow 2D perspectives.
Every organisation has its own unique set of key influencers whose attitudes and behaviours systemically affect everyone and everything else. This means that the most pragmatic way to cultivate a systemic, organisation-wide shift to innovative 2D3D mindsets is by focusing precisely and deeply, on shifting key influencer mindsets.
The systemic effect of the key influencers is such that once they adopt innovative mindsets, everything changes.
But if they don’t, then it doesn’t matter what other steps you take, forces lurking in the dark, murky depths of the organisation will ensure that all the old problems of the past come back to haunt you.
And, what’s more, they’ll almost certainly bring new friends.
So how do you focus on key influencer mindsets?
That’s described in the post “Seeing your way to a future-fit culture”.
Dr Russell Ackoff (1919 – 2009) was Professor of Management Science at Wharton and a pioneer in operations research and systems thinking in organisations. This pithy aphorism is from his speech here (at 09:30 - direct link).
See this previous post on the Toxic Myth of “Culture as Shared Values”.
How people pick up the real mission, vision, and values is addressed in this previous post on The Secret Everyone Already Knows.
The topic of 2D3D mindsets was the theme of the third video featured in this post.