The Power of Culture — Part 1 of 3, The Power of Belief

Early in my career, when we needed to change things within the company to pursue an opportunity or improve performance, we just did it. Little thought was given to how it impacted people or how it might change company perception. In retrospect, I consider myself, and the companies in which I worked, incredibly lucky that any of the changes took hold or saw success. Since my early days as a young engineer I have witnessed spectacular failures in delivering enterprise change. Some of those failures ended the companies attempting them.

I confess, I am a Boomer. I began my career in the final days of the paternal contract between caretaking companies and their lifetime employees. Additionally, we lived in a tacit agreement that the company would work in the best interests of employees and the communities in which we were placed. My first professional employer was considered the ‘it’ company for innovators. That said, even truly innovative companies moved at a deliberate pace, during my early career.

Since then, Gen X, the Millennials, and Gen Z have entered the workforce. Desktops have been replaced with laptops and mobile devices. Technology has moved from the edges to the center of our lives. Company loyalty, in either direction, has all but disappeared. Both sides are culturally expected to make employment decisions in their own best interests. Companies serve their mission. We, guns for hire, are expected to manage our own careers to our own objectives. The cadence for change and improvements has moved from deliberated, thoughtful and delivered in waves to hypersonic and constant. Technology development and use cases are moving so fast that it is hard for anyone to keep up. Those of us responsible for company development, improvement changes, and transformation live in a world of relentless flux.

Change is a high risk game. Those of use that do this sort of work seek to reduce that risk wherever possible. The first stop for anyone leading broad changes is the culture of the organization. Why? Culture seems so ethereal and, well, squishy. Whatever our work, wherever we live, culture is the water in which we swim. Because it surrounds us at all times it becomes hard to notice, unless someone is pointing it out. Yet, culture has a profound impact on the success of the changes we make, the solutions we offer, our behaviors in executing our duties. This article is the first in a three part series on culture.

Part 1: The Power of Belief

• Describes the foundations of culture and what culture drives. We also set up a case study for the series.

Part 2: The Power of Infrastructure

• Describes the foundations of infrastructure, and its more developed sibling, institutions. Then we address the interplay between culture and infrastructure.

Part 3: Curating Culture Case Study

• We bring the culture discussion home by applying these concepts to a case study.

Why is Culture so Important?

Why, in this body of work looking at operations, transformation, leadership, and managing these big changes, are we taking time to discuss culture let alone a three article series. Organizations going through change usually give deep thought to the organizing and structuring for the change, dealing with the most tangible aspect of the change with expertise, strategic, and tactical planning. However, culture often gets a short shrift. In a world of facts, substance and clear value, culture can seem like so much gossamer. Yet culture affects every aspect of change. If there is a difference between the needed change and the culture. The culture will break.

For those of us that have endeavored to create and support culture, whether for a country, a corporate enterprise, a team or for our family, it is an ethereal, never ending challenge. Culture is difficult to build, fragile, and can be destroyed in an instant. Thus we constantly fret over culture and enthusiastically protect it.

In the business world of deliver-deliver-deliver, why be concerned about culture? Isn’t the culture of business to get offerings out the door and make money? In part… yes! However, since Generative AI has not yet replaced us, humans are required to make that happen. Culture dictates how we humans interact with each other, our partners, our competitors, and our organization’s infrastructure and resources.

An organization’s culture establishes our ‘operating morals’, our operating traffic lights. Green… you can do that. Yellow… proceed with caution. Orange… problematic with little progress likely. Red… do not go there! The term ‘morals’ in this context does not mean good or bad, right or wrong. Rather it expresses conformity to norms and values.

Organizationally, culture dictates:

Our goals for the offerings we provide and the people that those offerings impact.

• Example: When Elon Musk took over Twitter and shifted it to X, he shifted the culture to value primarily, perhaps almost solely, free speech, thus allowing for much less curated hate speech. That culture shift completely changed the usage and clientele of X.

The means by which we will develop and deliver those offerings.

• Example: Urban Decay cosmetics refuses to test products on animals, labeling their products ‘cruelty free’. They have, through that value, limited their options for product testing and attracted socially conscious customers.

Our behaviors in engaging others — teammates, employees, partners, competitors.

• Example: Company harassment and DEI [diversity, equity, inclusion] policies provide specific guidance for what is and is not acceptable employee behavior and has opened up potential new sources of employment candidates.

Finding the Right Cultural Fit

Firefighters wade into dangerous situations to save lives, limit property damage and then go home safe and unharmed. They work on shifts, in teams of trusted colleagues and, when called upon, arrive at an unfolding event as fast as humanly possible, assess the situation, and move into action as a group to resolve an urgently growing danger. They operate to the orders of the scene commander depending on colleagues to competently do their part. The firefighter culture is hierarchical, with clear, continuously monitored performance standards and expectations. If they make a mistake, people can and will die. When not out on a call, they are training, doing maintenance, or otherwise taking care of themselves to be ever ready for the next call. A firefighter’s value comes from competently playing their role as part of an emergency response unit that saves lives and property.

Academics, on the other hand, are thinkers, paid discerners of the yet to be discovered. Regardless of their specialty, academics conceptualize, research, develop hypotheses and build on theories. They tend toward narrow expertise, for which they publish, debate with their peers, and provide expert assessments to we layfolk. Much of their work is done in solitude unless peer reviewing, debating, or teaching classes. Performance is measured in published articles, colleagues’ respect for their work, and in demand for their perspective. Pushback on dictates is expected. Urgency takes a backseat to well researched and reasoned concepts. The work in a culture of collegial engagement with freedom to pursue novel ideas. An academic’s value is in the novelty and unassailability of their ideas and in bringing insight with debate.

Note that the cultures for these two professions are necessarily and radically different, yet completely support the arenas for which they were developed. One values urgency, competency in the moment, compliance to superiors, physical capability, and operating as a team. The other values thoughtfulness, novelty, immaculate solo research, written articles, and concept development, mental acuity, and ability to defend ideas. Skepticism is expected as part of the value they provide. The values for each culture supports and encourages the best performance toward the organization’s mission. The culture for each of these organizations are relative to the circumstance, type of practitioners, and have been refined to provide the best possible outcome.

As we develop organizations or shift in a new direction, culture remains a critical consideration. Culture resides in a larger ecosystem that includes the organization’s mission, its situational dynamics, the resources available, and operational constraints. Culture is malleable and needs to be curated to ensure its greatest effect. Is your culture supporting your current situation and long term goals? If not, it may be time to tweak it.

Answering Life’s ‘Whys’ — Two Approaches

Human beings are meaning makers and storytellers. It is literally in our DNA. Meaning is at the forefront of our immediate senses. We are hardwired in our psyches to interpret senses-input as a survival mechanism. “Does that grass waving over there mean a lion is coming to kill me?” Because we are social, communal creatures, storytelling is a way of extending that meaning making mechanism in our social group. No topic gets more of that meaning making and storytelling treatment than the simple question — “Why?”

The question, “Why?” has been and continues to be tackled to varying effect throughout history both objectively and subjectively. Each approach has delivered massive bodies of work that have deeply impacted virtually all mankind. Each has delivered us tools and capabilities which we use daily. From the subjective treatment of ‘why’ has sprung the discipline of philosophy, quests in spirituality, and world religions. The objective treatment of ‘why’ generated scientific disciplines such as physics, chemistry, and biology, while psychology and sociology attempt to bring objectivity to the messy, often subjective, human condition. These two treatments of ‘why’ have operated in parallel for as long as people have been people, with the objective investigations delivering scientific principles and the subjective investigations delivering social norms.

The scientific method produces the framework for our understanding of how things work enabling us to produce sophisticated technology and engineered solutions that have both generally improved living circumstances around the world and allowed for mass annihilation of living things. The philosophic pursuit of ‘why’ has allowed us to purposefully develop a social construct in which all things happen. In short, for those of us that muck about with culture, the scientific principles inform what we CAN do while our cultural norms inform what we WILL and WON’T do. Our culture develops from the beliefs side of the house. For this article we will focus on the left side of the ‘Why?’ model.

Something Doesn’t have to be True to Believe in it

In the 2003 movie, ‘Secondhand Lions,” Hub told his grand nephew,

“If you want to believe in something, believe in it. Just because something ain’t true doesn’t mean you can’t believe in it. Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love… true love never dies. …. It doesn’t matter if they’re true or not, you see, a man should believe in those things because those are the things worth believing in.”

Beliefs are not powerful because they are factually true. Beliefs are powerful because they point us in a direction, give us a point of view, provide us something to reach for and aspire to. Regardless of where you come from, what your experiences are, or what spiritual practices you have or don’t have, belief is a powerful driver.

That said, over the course of your life, or your organization’s life, there will be times that one or more of your values becomes bankrupt. They no longer serve. You will need to trade out horses and climb on board a horse that can get you where you are going personally and organizationally.

Cultural Layering

Culture is not a monolith. No organizational or community culture is hermetically sealed. Rather, culture is layered with multiple flavors including national identity, regional variations, and industry drivers. Even within an organization, each function has its own culture and concerns. So culture is not a one-size fits all proposition.

National Identity — Close your eyes and picture yourself in the south of France, central Tokyo, then Venice Beach in Santa Monica, California. What sort of conversations would you have, people would you see, experiences you might have. I’m guessing that those images will have a strong sense of national identity specific to each of those countries.

Regional Variations — Colin Woodard, in his book ‘American Nations, A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America,’ describes eleven distinct regional cultures spanning Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Each of the regions have unique cultures based on how that region developed and the type of people that we are drawn to in the early beginnings of that area. These regions do not consider states. For example, California is bisected by two regions, the ‘Left Coast’, a narrow band that runs along the Pacific coast from southern California up through British Columbia, and the ‘Far West’ which encompasses most of the inland west coast the western states to the mid Dakotas and Nebraska. Each of those regions have cultural norms that are common to that region.

Industry Drivers — The mission, goals and risk orientation are going to be substantially different between the financial industry and the software platform industry. The biomedical and organic farming industries have very different norms. Nongovernmental organizations and tourism industries prioritize very different values. Whatever industry your organization is in will flavor its culture.

Functional Culture — Functions can have wildly different cultures as well. The folks that are attracted to finance are very different from the people that go into marketing. They have different aesthetics, satisfiers, interests, and appetite for risk. They speak their own languages. An engineering team’s vocabulary will be quite different from the logistician team’s.

All of these layers come into play when you are driving a cause and/or changing how we are operating. With these fundamentals in place we are ready to set up the case study.

Culture Must Adjust when it No Longer Serves

We want to operate within values that inspire us. But sometimes even the most inspirational values can put us at a disadvantage. The illustration below provides an example of a company’s core value becoming a limiting factor.

In this article we focused on the ‘soft side of culture establishing cultural values, norms and organizational beliefs that support our mission and goals. We have made the case for curating your culture to best serve your organization. The subsequent articles in this series will provide the tools for that curation and a case study to show how it works.

Takeaways

Cultural values and norms drive both intended and unintended perspectives and behaviors. Organizational culture, with its associated values and norms, must be curated in order to ensure that your team behaves in a healthy, productive way and maintains cultural perspective in choosing offerings, navigating engagements, and interacting with each other day-to-day. While culture is a powerful force that should not be underestimated, it is fragile and can be destroyed in a moment if not carefully curated. Culture dictates how we humans interact with each other, our partners, our competitors, and our organization’s infrastructure and resources. While scientific principles inform what we CAN do while our cultural norms inform what we WILL and WON’T do.

Cultural norms give you a traffic light for what is and is not okay in what you make, how you behave, and how you get work done. Engaging with and addressing opportunities and threats require considering the impacts to your culture. Is the light green for your redress plan? If not, do you have to change your plan or the organization’s culture? You are either going to operate within your norms, or if that is insufficient, thoughtfully make changes to your culture to support this new direction, without breaking your culture.

Organizations are ever evolving whether by incremental evolution or in giant leaps of transformation. As the organization shifts culture curators must ask:

• Does this direction shift fit within our current cultural values and norms? If NO, then,
• How must our culture change and what does it imply for our offerings, engagements and ways of working together?

Cultural Assessment Questions:

• What are the cultural sacred cows? [We don’t mess with sacred cows.]
• What values and norms support the new direction? [Turn the traffic lights to green.]
• Are changes required to our documented vision, mission and/or values?
• What are the potential negative results or unintended consequences of the change?
• What cultural variations [by function, location, etc.] should be considered?
• What are the necessary governance changes to support the new cultural norms and values?
• What communications [change drivers] are required to drive and support the change?
• What accelerators can we leverage to justify and otherwise give credibility to the shift? [How and when should we use them?]

Culture… The Rest of the Story

In part 2 we will explore the scientific method side of the ‘Why?’ model discussed above, the resulting infrastructure that is possible, and the relationship between culture and infrastructure.

In part 3 we will introduce a case study to tie the two sides together in shifting the organization to the new cultural paradigm.

Find more articles from Sarah at: www.operations-architect.com.