Why You Can’t Build a Culture…And How You Can Grow One
A lot has been written about why companies should focus on culture but much less has been written about how you get your culture, and how to make sure it’s a healthy one. Operationalizing your purpose and values is the hardest, yet most important thing to do. It’s easy to have a bold purpose statement that sits in a PowerPoint presentation. It’s much harder to take it out and live it in your everyday operations. Most organizations struggle actively cultivating a healthy culture in the midst of daily urgencies.
This is the first installment of a series that will describe how to grow an intentional culture and live it. This series describes how we teach and consult organizations to cultivate intentional cultures that is becomes part of their daily experience. Here is the summary of the three-part series:
1. Why You Can’t Build a Culture… And How You Can Grow One
2. Designing for Culture Change
3. Continual Culture Co-Creation
At iF we often see a mismatch between the nature of culture and common approaches that are taken to influence it.
One common approach to influencing culture and change follows a paradigm of Assessing, Analyzing, and Action Planning.
It’s a change framework that is borrowed from the old strategic planning model that assumes an organization is mechanistic and can be built or taken apart, like a wrist watch or car engine, and that you can analyze, root cause, diagnose every situation and create a workplan to fix or solve the challenge. This way of approaching change in organizations has been used for a long time — it’s so pervasive that you can hear it in the language we use to talk about culture-change…
“To DRIVE change we need to…”
“We need to ANALYZE the data (i.e.- engagement scores)…”
“We need to ROOT CAUSE what is happening…”
“We need to identify and PULL THE RIGHT LEVERS to affect change.”
“We need to BUILD our culture…”
While I think these can be helpful metaphors, they also reinforce an unspoken assumption that culture change is a controllable process. This way of thinking is borrowed from what is known as a complicated or cause-effect based approach to change and management (see my last article). While this way of approaching a challenge is very effective with complicated or causal systems, it’s not as effective when we are trying to affect change with a complex-adaptive system.
What’s more, this way of thinking and seeing the situation (mental model) can lead us to conclusions that may be incomplete or inaccurate. For example, we often hear that certain team members or groups are “resisting” change. While there is always room to explore what is happening for people in any given situation, what we find more often is that people are not resisting change. What are we observing all the time in change efforts, if it is not resistance to change? If you take a step back and you may notice that people often act consciously and intelligently (overall) to other things than the change itself. They may resist loss of status and power — which is quite intelligent. They may resist injustice, which is also intelligent. The change may also cause need for learning that is not properly addressed. And these are the things that we have to deal with in change: power structures, status, injustice, consequence, top-down command-and-control, and learning.
So it may be that people aren’t resisting change, but rather responding intelligently to inconsistency, incongruence, incoherence, and injustice.
The more resistance or lack of progress you experience the more likely it is that your approach is wrong.
We believe that many well-intentioned leaders are taking a complicated or cause-based approach to the complex-adaptive challenge of culture-change, and it is holding them back from creating the outcomes and possibilities they desire.
Instead, we assert that culture-building or culture change is more like spilling a drop of milk into a cup of coffee.
You can’t control the pattern that emerges…
You can’t compartmentalize the effect…
You can’t undo the impact…
And once you’ve done it, the coffee is irreversibly changed, even if only slightly, becoming a new version of itself.
All you can do is continuously observe and adjust your response.
We believe you can influence culture, but instead of taking an Assess, Analyze & Action Plan approach we assert that a more effective approach is to set up structures to continuously Design, Test, and Adjust, which gives people a way to co-create and learn their way into what is effective, for whom, and under which conditions.
What would such an approach look like? How would you apply it to culture-change?
First, let’s quickly unpack the difference between both approaches. In the Assess, Analyze, Action Plan approach one would likely take the following steps:
Assess
· Gather data
Analyze
· Disaggregate, diagnose and/or root cause the findings
· Attempt to isolate issues or opportunities
Action Plan
· Develop interventions, action plans, roadmaps and metrics
· Execute a plan and track progress
However, taking a Design, Test, Adjust approach would have you engage in a different set of moves:
Design
· Create a model of the system to help you understand relationships
· Interact with the system to learn then visualize what patterns emerge
Test
· Trystorm safe-to-fail experiments to learn what works, for whom, under what conditions
Adjust
· Create a learning & accountability process to test, learn and adapt
In the following articles I’m excited to share how we teach others to engage in culture-change using the moves outlined above. The following is not meant to be a description of what we know, but rather a share of what we are learning. We wholly welcome thoughts, ideas, and inspirations for improvement!
