A Game Called Culture

Fasahat Feroze
Aug 28, 2017 · 2 min read

“I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game — it IS the game.” Lou Gerstner, IBM CEO, 1993–2002.

Culture is a serious game; it is the most important game an organization plays to achieve its business goals. The importance of the culture is more pronounced in today’s day and age when organizations, especially the large ones, are struggling to transform — change their game dynamics.

What personality is to an individual, culture is to an organization. Culture is the collective behavioral tendencies of an organization, defined by organizational values and rules and influenced by individual’s behavioral profile — the more powerful the individual the stronger the influence.

The game of culture begins when an organization defines its win state — the business goals it intends to achieve — through vision, mission and strategy, as to how value for the customers will be created and captured.

The win-state strategy dynamics determine how the culture game will be played by the organization. Some organization chose differentiation dynamics while others chose cost. Differentiation dynamics require different kind of game play, target behaviors and player types than are required by the Cost dynamics.

Next step is to hire the most appropriate players who naturally display the target behaviors for the desired game play. Choosing the wrong player type makes it that more difficult to indulge them in the target behavior through the incentive and feedback mechanics. Activity loops in form of portfolios, program, projects and operational work keep the players busy in the game play towards the win state.

Hiring the best fit player type is perhaps the most aspect of the culture game followed by keeping the right mix of player types during different phases of the organizational lifecycle. For example, hiring a Killer in the beginning of the game will most likely kill the game itself.

What are the implications?

Culture holds the key to organizational transformational challenges. Mature industries, such as Banking and Telecommunications, are overloaded with Killers. Over the years, in these industries, Killers have optimized the game play according to their liking. Activity loops and incentive and feedback mechanics are designed to maximize the returns for the Killers.

Killers have personal liking towards Achievers but they can’t stand the presence of Explorers or Socializers and here lies the problem. If large organizations are to achieve the win-state, the game administrator (Board of Directors in most organizations) needs to kick some Killers, especially those with the power to redefine the incentive and feedback mechanics, out of the game and replace them with Explorers and Socializer at important positions.

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