Seeing your way to a future-fit culture
Seeing your way to a future-fit culture
A seven-minute video on what works when creating a culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness
“Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory you use. It is the theory that decides what can be observed.” — Albert Einstein 1
Last time we explored the four ways organisations usually go about attempting to create a future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness — all of which lead them to fail: 2
Bringing in a mainstream management consulting to take on the task.
Trying to inspire people to change using vision, mission, and values statements.
Rolling out standardised training across the organisation to try to get buy-in.
Hiring an executive coach for the top team, based on the assumption that if the top team is aligned, everything else will fall into place.
So if the above doesn’t work, what does work..?
That’s the subject of the seven minute video below (with transcript).
It describes how to see culture not as a fuzzy amorphous phenomenon but in a much more useful way that enables you to take focused, pragmatic action.
It highlights the mindset that needs to be cultivated at the heart of a culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
And it identifies how to achieve maximum leverage for culture change by focusing on key influencer mindsets
Transcript:
Many senior executives who recognise the need to create a culture of innovation get put off by the prospect of embarking on what they worry will be a tortuous, drawn-out and eye-wateringly expensive process that, statistically speaking, will probably fail.
But, there is a much easier, higher leverage and lower risk way, based on seeing culture not as some sort of soft, fuzzy, amorphous phenomenon, but something much more tangible that can be tackled head-on.
The key is to recognise that an organisation’s culture is simply the specific system of mindsets that dictates “the way we do things around here”.
Culture change is therefore the process of changing this system of mindsets. That’s why the focused, pragmatic way to build innovation and agility is through a systemic, organisation-wide shift to innovative 2D3D mindsets. 3
The best way to change any system is to target its key leverage points — those places where a relatively small amount of effort causes the maximum amount of change.
And, for changing an organisation’s culture, the maximum leverage comes from targeting the mindsets of the key influencers.
Key influencers are not necessarily always in the most senior positions.
What makes them key is that what they do and how they do it has a big, systemic, knock-on effect on many others.
The fact that the key influencers aren’t always in the most senior positions often gets overlooked, which is why so many efforts to build innovative agile organisations get bogged down or come off the rails. 4
Here’s a generic example of an organisation struggling with innovation and agility.
The problems appear to be with the people most visibly involved in delivering results – here shown in red.
Here’s the same picture again, but this time it’s the actual key influencers who’re highlighted in red.
Their mindsets dictate their attitudes and behaviours, actions and interactions - in other words, what they do and how they do it. This has a systemic knock-on effect on these people here in orange, resulting in low performance.
Notice how, despite this negative influence, there are still a number of people, here shown in green, who remain unaffected.
So, how do you find the actual key influencers so you can understand, target and shift their mindsets?
A good place to start is by exploring the perspectives of a number of people in and around important innovation-related issues.
By triangulating between these various perspectives, particularly the different ways things look to those most affected — the oranges — and those seemingly unaffected — the greens — you can start decoding the underlying logic to the system of mindsets that creates the current culture.
And, at the centre of this logic, you'll find the key influencer mindsets systemically dictating everyone's perceptions of the way we do things round here.
The best way to approach to shifting the key influencer mindsets depends on various factors, including which ones seem most pivotal, who seems most entrenched in their current 2D perspectives and who seems most interested, inclined or inspired to shift from red to green — by adopting an innovative 2D3D mindset instead.
When key influencers make the shift from red to green, it releases the logjam around them.
Then as the effect ripples through the other oranges, these also turn green, progressively unleashing innovation and agility.
Case example
Here's a specific client example to illustrate the approach in action. It's from about twenty years ago and I've chosen it here because it had a major impact on my work with clients ever since.
The recently-hired CEO of a biotech company called me in after things ground to a halt following his announcement that the organisation would from now on be “market-driven”.
Since the business had always been technology-driven, this immediately disengaged people on that side of the business, who heard the CEOs message as “marketing are now calling the shots”.
What the people in Marketing heard was “we have full control of the strategy, at long last”.
When I got involved, Technology and Marketing had been hunkered down in their respective bunkered silos for several months, lobbing rocks, hand-grenades and the occasional cruise missile at each other.
When there are conflicts between fiefdoms, factions and silos like this, breaking the deadlock involves getting key influencers on both sides of the divide to recognise that although the problem appears to be the fault of the other party, the real root-cause problem is a conflict of different 2D perspectives — none of which is the whole picture.
Once they see how each of these 2D perspectives makes perfect sense taken in isolation, but together create the deadlock, they automatically shift to an innovative 2D3D mindset, and engage much more productively with each other to move the organisation forward.
In this case, the breakthrough occurred when key technology and marketing influencers saw that their separate 2D takes on “being market driven” had prevented everyone from seeing the bigger picture that, in reality, they needed to drive the market.
The reason this work had such a major impact on my work with clients ever since, is that it proved that culture change doesn’t have to be a risky, tortuous, long, drawn-out and painfully expensive process.
It was amazing to see how shifting a few key influencer mindsets transformed attitudes and behaviours in the Technology and Marketing functions literally overnight, enabling them go on to build a successful multi-million dollar business together.
When I revisited them a few months later, the Senior Vice President of Marketing told me: “Until you arrived, it felt like we were driving round and round a roundabout — and when we asked the CEO which road he wanted us to take he would just shout back “drive faster...!”.
The problem with trying to create an innovation culture using traditional methods is that these all fail to focus precisely enough and deeply enough on shifting key influencer mindsets. 5
Then, instead of the few key influencer reds becoming greens, many more of the current greens end up turning orange.
The net effect is to pour even more concrete around the existing obstacles, blocks, and barriers to building an innovative agile organisation.
Einstein objecting to the placing of “observables” at the heart of quantum mechanics, during Heisenberg's 1926 lecture at Berlin; related by Heisenberg, quoted in Unification of Fundamental Forces (1990) by Abdus Salam.
The previous post Four ways to fail at creating a future-fit culture is in the archive here.
For more on 2D3D mindsets check out the six-minute video in this previous post. (The third video therein).
This is why simply focusing on the top team doesn’t work.
See Four ways to fail at creating a future-fit culture (Ibid).