Everyone’s talking about…culture transformation

“Systems are like gravity,
we can’t necessarily see them but
they exert a powerful pull on our behaviour”

- Dr. Irving Borwick

Organisations seem abuzz with talk of transformation. There is a need to adapt, innovate, or in some way fundamentally change the way things are working.

If we know anything it’s that the path will be emergent - predictably unpredictable - requiring more than the average project plan and rollout. We need an answer to the question:

How do we approach this differently?

Despite best intentions we soon find ourselves filling in planning tools, setting milestones, and listing out the behaviours we want in an act of wishful thinking. We approach it like a problem to be fixed, a project to complete, and a journey to end. After all, how do we talk about these things other than in the language we know?

In this extended article I share insights and learning from the field, and what doing things differently looks like.

Here are some examples of the types of transformation your organisation might be seeking:

• We need to be more entrepreneurial, agile, and innovative

• We’re moving to a purpose-driven and sustainable model

• We want to move from product to service delivery

• We want to move from single product/market to multi product/market

• This last year has revealed we need genuine empowerment, inclusion, and a ‘speak up’ environment

• We want to move to self-service; to enhance our use of technology and systems; to be more efficient with our resources.

Trying to do things differently

In order to get things underway you’re likely to be engaged in - or about to start - activities in these areas:

• Design and measure for what matters: review strategy, org design, and operating model

• Build a community to lead change: develop leaders and managers

• Identify the behaviours you need: refresh values, beliefs, mindsets, and attitudes

Ideally you would design and begin these initiatives with the language, frames, and mindset of the future rather than repeating the ways of the past. But you can’t do that until you’ve travelled to the future or know someone who has. Mission impossible.

For example, the strategy requires greater ownership at all levels, but can you ‘cascade ownership’ through hierarchical channels? It sounds like an oxymoron. And you’re right, it is. 

How do you break out of that? I’ll help you answer that question, but first…

Back to basics: what is culture again?

Purpose answers the question why.
Strategy, structures and plans give us the what and how.
Culture tells us who we are. If an organisation is a living entity the culture is its character, behaviour, and identity.

These need to come together with a sense of congruence if we want to thrive. However proposing to change culture is quite the ambition when you consider how deep it goes, with identity often rooted in strong narratives and long held legacies.

People often express a fear of losing what makes them unique, of no longer being the organisation they once knew and loved. We hear statements such as “we don’t want to just be another <insert competitor brand>” and yet it’s hard to grasp at what the alternative will be.

And what is transformation?

Instead of trying to be something or someone we’re not, can we shift or redirect the way our core identity is expressed? Could it be possible that the strategic shifts help us to be more purposeful, and more effective in expressing ourselves in the contemporary world? Perhaps our essence is not in our behaviours but something else underneath which can find a new way of being in a new era of organisational life.

Transformation is at its core about becoming more me rather than a different me.

There are many aspects of my history, personality, and inner world that make up my identity and drivers. If we understand them we can motivate me to change my habits. However instead of trying to change who I am in the endeavour, as if who I am is wrong or not enough, this may be in service of being a more liberated, vital and alive version of myself. In this way a call for transformation need not be a criticism of the past, but an opportunity to thrive.

There are multiple and complex causes that come together to create an organisation’s culture and identity. We need to understand and honour what these are - unique to each entity - before we can propose to affect change.

A metaphor

• When you walk into someone’s home how do you know whether you should take your shoes off or keep them on? 

• When you enter their kitchen how do you know whether to help yourself to a drink, or wait for them to make it for you? 

• At what point was it negotiated in your household who takes the recycling out, and what do you do when it doesn’t happen?

Instead of describing what you do in the house, the challenge is to report on why, and how you know to behave the way you do.

Just like our home life, organisations are made up of:

1. The Architecture: org design, structures, strategies, systems, processes, assets (e.g. the flow and floor plan of your home)

2. Interior Design: artefacts and symbols, branding, resources, accessibility of information (e.g. whether there’s a usable shoe rack, mugs and kettle on show, easy to find kitchen lights)

Finally, how you respond to the above is impacted by:

3. Relationships: the clarity of your role and authority in relation to this particular place, as well as your social identity, reputation, status, and connection (e.g. the nature of your relationship to fellow occupants)

These are the boundaries from which behaviours arise: the ones we have consciously designed and negotiated and the ones that have emerged organically. There are some we have been managing thoughtfully, and others we have let go.

Now if guests start trampling mud through your house, or your family slip into a bad habit of not taking out the recycling, how do you re-negotiate the boundaries?

All three of these areas need attention. If you renovate your home and invite your best friend over they’re likely to ignore the design features that signpost a different way of using the kitchen, and will go hunting for their usual mug. The shift in roles and relationships need to be renegotiated and reinforced.

There will always be resistors who - regardless of their surroundings and role - have behaviours that insist and persist no matter what. A more creative solution to boundary management may be required in those cases.

Finding the future 

You are now thinking about how to re-negotiate the boundaries of your home. You have labelled the cupboards, put the mugs on display, and repeatedly told people to help themselves. However they still sit down and ask you for tea. It can be infuriating. And your Communications team are looking tired and over-worked.

I can’t help with your home but there are a few ways you can start to re-define the boundaries at work, and from there, bring the future closer:

• Find help from people - inside or outside - who are a step or two ahead in their language and approach. Do you feel energised when they reflect back their understanding of your purpose? Do they paint a picture of the future in that speaks to the change the organisation yearns for? Can they hypothesise about the levers of your culture, beyond a report back of what is more easily observed? Can they weave the links and implications across your purpose, legacy, strategy, and organisational design? If ‘yes to all of the above’ set them to work.

• Identify your time travellers. You will have people who are frustrated and have ideas the organisation was simply not ready for. Some may have a foot in the future but be misunderstand or misplaced, caught in experiences of conflict, complaints, or isolation. Channel their energy. If you can find a few time travellers from across the business then even better. They may understand the details of the architecture to redesign.

• Dialogue & early engagement. You may think providing clear and final Change Plans give people certainty and security, but it can create cynicism unless they genuinely represent what’s to come. Announce the non-negotiable boundaries: “the aim is a self-serve kitchen” and let everyone have a go at discerning the rest. Invite your customers into your workshops, and your teams into your decisions. If you want people to serve themselves then trust them to serve themselves from the get-go. If you need innovation, ask people to innovate how to get that. If you need agility, let go of your own rigidity, and so forth. The change starts Now.

• Nurture a narrative of identity. Organisations have existential crises too. Pay attention to the narrative arc of the organisation’s life. Honour what has been, what will be left behind, and what new aspects are emerging. Repeat and reinforce this story to create a sense of belonging and firm ground through uncertainty.

If this sounds unrealistic…

I remember going abseiling as a kid and the sheer terror of seeing the ground below. The instructor kept saying: “Lean your body over the edge Olivia, let the harness take your weight”. I could not conceive how that was possible. I knew other kids had done it before me and the instructors had been doing this for years. And yet...I trusted my own fear of what I didn’t know more than I trusted what other people did know. I made it over the edge, but I was full of doubt and mistrust until I experienced it for myself.

Transformation can feel like this. Us humans will vehemently and passionately resist at all stages because what’s being proposed is counter-intuitive. We prefer the safety of the known to the fear of the unknown.

And yet that is entirely what’s called for. If you want difference, you won’t get it through sameness.

For related articles see: what it takes to lead systemically and organisational boundaries.

For a conversation on these themes, get in touch.