Ways to fail at culture change
Are you doing the same things but expecting different results..?
“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
If organisations are to thrive in today’s increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, the old school tradition of prediction-based planning must be replaced by creating an entrepreneurial future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
That’s not a particularly heretical statement or novel realisation. Organisations have been trying and failing to translate it from aspiration into reality for 30 - 40 years.
The reason most such efforts come off the rails is they’re based on approaches that not only don’t work, but make matters worse.
In failing to replace the status quo, they reinforce it instead.
The four most “popular” ways I’ve repeatedly seen organisations fail in their change efforts over the past 35 years are:
Hiring a mainstream consulting firm to “make it happen”
Publishing purpose, vision, mission, or values statements
Sheep-dip training people throughout the organisation
Engaging an executive coach for the top team
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So, let’s take a look at why each of these approaches fails to help you build a future-fit organisation.
Hired Help that Hinders
Many senior executives have been tempted to hire traditional management consulting firms to help their efforts to create future-fit, entrepreneurial cultures.
But this approach inevitably fails — for an inherently inescapable reason.
The mainstream consulting business model relies on mobilising large numbers of junior consultants. This approach — known in the industry as the finders, minders, grinders model — stems from their traditional work of providing research-based advice to help senior executive clients make better-informed decisions. 2
And, since creating a new culture is fundamentally about building new organisational muscles, when large teams of outsiders get shipped in to “make it happen”, the required entrepreneurial muscles never develop inside the client organisation.
The unavoidable truth is that you can only create a future-fit entrepreneurial culture when the people in the organisations do the heavy lifting themselves.
I unpack the deeply systemic failure of the hired help that hinders approach in my 22-page guide to the Five Fatal Habits that have consistently killed organisational efforts to improve innovation over the past 30 - 40 years. 3
Publishing purpose, vision, mission, or values statements
The problem with purposes, visions, missions, and values is not that they don’t matter, it’s just that the only purposes, visions, missions, and values that do matter are the ones people actually embrace, embody, and enact in their day-to-day actions and interactions. 4
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 on the corporate intranet, motivational posters in the corridors, or the plexiglass plaque in the front lobby. 5
Look inside yourself — do it right now — and feel your way to answering the question: “In organisations where I’ve worked, how did I come to understand ‘the way we do things round here’?
Those seven words — ‘the way we do things round here’ — encapsulate the embodied human experience of the organisational culture acquired within a few months.
That’s what people describe when you ask them about their organisation’s culture, maybe prompting them with something like: “What’s the advice you’d give a close friend about how to survive and thrive in the organisation”?
So, looking at your own embodied experience, what clues, cues, signs, and signals did you actually draw upon to figure out ‘the way we do things round here’?
If you’re like the thousands of people my colleagues and I have explored these themes with over the past 35 years, it won’t have been the organisation’s published purpose, vision, mission, and values statements.
“The way we do things round here” is inferred from clues, cues, signs, and signals people pick up through the seven channels of culture. 6
Sheep-dip training everyone
Standardised training aimed at teaching people how they need to change is also known as sheep-dip training.
That’s because it briefly immerses people in the supposed solution, after which they pop up on the other side, shake themselves off, and go back to doing what they were doing before.
Sheep-dipping not only doesn’t work, but actively makes things worse in two ways:
Firstly, when someone has been in an organisation for any length of time, they inevitably form a personal, biased, limited, one-sided, and incomplete “2D” perspective on what they think needs fixing. 7
And since any form of generic ‘one-size-fits-everyone’ training can never adequately address everyone’s unique, individual pet peeves, these get left to fester.
Secondly, people resent being dragged away from their real work, which they still have to get done, probably by working unpaid overtime, to participate in what they experience to be a completely pointless exercise — because it doesn’t tackle their pet peeves...
Engaging an executive coach for the top team
Don’t get me wrong — executive coaching definitely has its place.
And as you can imagine, in 35 years of helping organisations throughout Europe, Asia, and the US create future-fit cultures, I’ve done a lot of it myself.
The problem here though is that improving executive team coherence, alignment, and functioning leaves out other key influencers who are not on the top team.
And in all the organisations I and my colleagues have worked with over the past 35 years, there’s never been a single one where all the key influencers were on the top team — nor, for that matter, where all the people on the top team were key influencers. 8
The widely-held but dangerously simplistic view is that the more senior someone is, the more influence they have.
But this isn’t how organisations actually work in the real world.
Yes, it’s true that “the buck stops at the top”.
However, talk with senior executives who’ve struggled with transformational change and many will admit — if only in private — that they don’t have as much power to change things as their position on the organisation chart might seem to imply.
That’s because in reality, most people in the body of an organisation are far more affected by peer pressure and other cues, clues, signs, and signals that systemically stem from key influencers who don’t sit at, or often anywhere near, the top table.
Why these methods all fail
Ultimately, the fundamental flaw that’s common to these approaches is they all fail to focus precisely enough and deeply enough on ensuring that the actual key influencers in the organisation escape the trap of their narrow 2D perspectives. 9
The systemic effect the mindsets of these few pivotal people, manifest through their attitudes and behaviours, has on everyone and everything else then blocks the cultivation of the entrepreneurial 2D3D mindsets that form the foundation of future-fit cultures. 10
Given the longstanding problems with these traditional approaches, some organisations have been tempted by more recent, alluring, sexy-sounding concepts like innovation labs, cloud-based digital apps, and open innovation partnerships.
But the innovative, agile, adaptive mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours at the heart of a future-fit entrepreneurial culture can’t simply be bolted-on to an existing organisation.
And any attempts to do so are inevitably doomed to fail so long as key influencers remain trapped in their narrow 2D perspectives. 11
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. 12
The systemic impact of key influencer mindsets is huge. So much so that once they adopt innovative mindsets, everything changes.
But if they don’t undergo the required shift, 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…
Questions for reflection
Which of the four ways to fail at culture change described above have you experienced?
Have you encountered other approaches that have either failed, or succeeded, at achieving the intended culture change? 13
Are you working to cultivate a 2D3D mindset so you can “be the change” that your organisation needs if it’s to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world? 14
Dr Russell Ackoff (1919 – 2009) was Professor of Management Science at Wharton and a pioneer in operations research and systems thinking in organisations. This quote is one of his many oft-repeated pithy aphorisms, taken from this speech from the 1990’s (the quote is at 09:30).
See this previous post on how hiring a mainstream consulting firm undermines culture change.
See this previous post on the Toxic Myth of Culture as Shared Values.
How people form their views on the real vision, mission, and values is addressed in this previous post on The Secret Everyone Already Knows.
Find out more about these channels and how they inform people’s awareness of “the way we do things round here” in this previous article The seven channels of culture.
For more on 2D perspectives see this previous article on Unlocking the innovative mindset.
For more on this topic, see this previous article: Focus on key influencers
Ibid (2D perspectives). Also see this previous article on the Seeing-Being Traps that make it hard to escape our own 2D perspectives.
For more on culture and in particular future-fit culture, see this previous article.
Ibid (Seeing-Being Traps).
For more on this topic, see this previous article: Leverage for systemic change
If you have, I’d love to hear about your experience.
For more on this topic, see this previous article: Cultivating combined wisdom