The World Has Changed
Has your organisation changed enough to thrive in today's increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world..?
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” — Abraham Lincoln 1
Have you noticed how organisational challenges are much more complex than they used to be?
How in the past you could devise a strategy, develop plans, roll them out for execution, and then tweak them over subsequent months or years to iron out the wrinkles?
But as the world has become, and continues to become, ever more uncertain and unpredictable, the organisation finds itself having to readily, rapidly, and repeatedly adapt to new threats and exploit new opportunities to create new value in new ways — or risk being disrupted, displaced, or even destroyed.
Organisations today need to cultivate a very different way of doing things. One that takes incessant uncertainty in its stride naturally and automatically by enabling and engaging everyone to bring innovation, agility, and adaptiveness to life.
The Challenge
How to achieve systemic cultural transformation in a realistic time frame, avoiding the huge costs and significant risk of failure traditionally associated with such efforts — all whilst simultaneously continuing to deliver current expected results?
It’s a tough ask.
One-off innovations are easy enough to achieve, simply by buying them in. But building an innovative, agile, adaptive organisation requires your people to consistently combine their different perspectives to continuously co-create new value.
Unless you create an organisational culture that enables, encourages, and embraces diverse perspectives, these different ways of seeing and being will interact in dysfunctional ways to stifle, smother and strangle new value creation.
Traditional ‘one-size-fits-all’, ‘cookie-cutter’, so-called ‘best practice’ approaches won’t create a future-fit culture — because they all fail to focus precisely enough and deeply enough on shifting the mindsets of the key influencers that systemically affect everyone and everything else. 2
Without this focus and leverage, creating a culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness becomes a massive gamble — like trying to rebuild a ship at sea in a force ten gale...
The Pragmatic Solution
Einstein recognised that a new theory provides a new way of seeing, one that can cut through clutter and create clarity.
That was how he saw beyond the conventional orthodoxy of Newtonian physics, revealing previously hidden mysteries of how the world works, captured in one of the simplest, most profound, and famous equations in the history of science: E=mc2.
What if a similar approach could unlock the mysteries of organisational culture..?
The first step on this journey is to drop the delusion that an organisation's culture is its so-called “Shared Values”.
That was a failed attempt to impose the notion of cultural fit as a normative behaviour control methodology — intended to homogenise uniquely creative human beings into compliant corporate drones. 3
For your organisation to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, you must move beyond the idea of cultural fit and focus instead on cultural fitness. 4
By learning to see organisational culture as the prevailing system of mindsets forming and informing people's awareness of “the way we do things round here” you get to understand exactly how the current culture formed, and how it can be reformed in a focused, pragmatic, low risk, high leverage way. 5
There are specific clues, cues, signs, and signals that individuals pick up to form their mindsets within organisational settings. 6
By decoding the unique way these influences play out in your organisation, you can identify where to focus for maximum leverage to reform the culture in a focused pragmatic way.
Just as innovation is about unique ways of creating new value, creating a future-fit organisational culture is a uniquely different journey for each organisation.
It's a journey dictated by the organisation's specific capabilities, competences, and constraints.
It's also a journey the organisation must take for itself, by itself. A future-fit culture cannot be imposed from above or imported from outside.
It involves building new mindset muscles inside the organisation, which means people in the organisation must do the heavy lifting...
Interventions that fail to take full advantage of the organisation’s unique strengths will invariably end up reinforcing its weaknesses and undermining its capacity for innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
Each organisation must find its own way to unlock and achieve widespread adoption of innovative 2D3D mindsets at the heart of a future-fit organisational culture.
Abraham Lincoln, Second State of the Union Address (1 December 1862)
See this previous article Focus on key influencers.
For more on the toxic myth of 'culture as shared values' see this previous article.
See this previous article Cultural fit or cultural fitness?
See this previous article Culture - values or mindsets?
For more on the clues, cues, signs, and signals forming and informing people’s awareness of ‘the way we do things round here’, see this previous article.