The Power of Culture — Part 2 of 3, The Power of Infrastructure

So far, in part 1 of our exploration of culture we have focused on the ‘soft side’ addressing the development of the beliefs, values and norms that crystalize our culture. In part 2 we tackle the ‘hard side’ focusing on infrastructure, infrastructure’s grown up sibling institutions, and the relationship between culture and infrastructure / institutions.

The ‘hard side’ evolves from scientific discovery. Over the past 50 years technology has replaced physical infrastructure with technical solutions with examples ranging broadly.

• Paper has largely been replaced by screens and workplace tools.
• Offices and conference rooms have been augmented with video conferencing.
• Business operations of all stripes have been codified into sprawling multipurpose platforms such as enterprise resource planning [ERP], customer relationship management [CRM], and human capital management [HCM]
• Filing cabinets and collaborative tools have been replaced by cloud storage.

We can go on. But, you get the idea. Technology continues to support a greater and greater amount of our infrastructure needs. Science continues to deliver supporting infrastructure. We as change agents need to determine when and how to use those technologies to their best effect.

The Tangled Relationship Between Culture & Infrastructure

Earlier I mentioned that cultural norms inform usage of what is currently available and what your particular organization is producing. That means, among other things, that the operational infrastructure deployed will fit within the confines of norms. That makes sense. You are only going to deploy infrastructure that fits the culture. It works the other way around as well. If you want an aspect of culture to be durable, you can build it into the infrastructure. The two-way relationship can be expressed:

Culture > Dictates Infrastructure > Codifies Culture

That two-way relationship must be observed as you make organization changes. You ignore it at your peril as a change agent.

What do We Mean by Infrastructure

In order to talk about how that relationship works let’s first describe what we mean by infrastructure. Infrastructure provides the basic structure and features. Within most organizations that breaks into:

• Governance — Policies, practices, rewards, penalties, preferred behaviors, organization structure
• Communications — Broadcasting priorities expectations, leading by example to demonstrate values, providing guidance and training if necessary
• Operations structure — Effort specific processes, workflows, technical platforms and solutions, some of which will be common across the enterprise, [such as performance reviews] whereas others may cross some functional boundaries while not touching others, and some will be very specific to function, sub-organization, or even team.

These are the structures that materialize vague concepts and native knowledge into tangible facts for which we all have a common understanding. The fastest way to harden culture is to build it into policy. Then you can make it more durable by injecting it into the rest of your infrastructure.

Institutions, on the other hand, are organizations founded and united for a single purpose. They represent infrastructure in its fully grown state. Within a business organization, the big functions represent internal institutions. In the public sector institutions take on a life of their own. In the United States, some of our public sector institutions include:

• Governance — the executive branch, congress and the federal judiciary. Then there are cabinet level institutions and other federal agencies,
• Department of Agriculture
• The State department
• Department of Commerce
• Homeland Security
• Department of Defense
• Department of Health and Human Service
• Department of Education
• Environmental Protection Agency
• The Federal Communications Commission
• National Institutes of Health
• And so on.

These institutions represent our federal infrastructure. Let’s take a look at the ways that culture and institutions interact with a real world example.

Shaping Public Culture through Institutions

Let’s take a look at an example of how using institutions can powerfully shape cultural shifts around the LGBT community by examining shifts in the US national conversation and infrastructure, a.k.a., national institutions. The key institutions we will include are:

• Medical Institutions — research, treatment and classification of LGBT [lending the credibility of ‘experts’]
• Political Institutions — primarily focused on legality via the executive guidance, legislative solutions and legal actions/decisions.
• Media Conversation — primarily focused on the framing of the LGBT national conversation as portrayed in publications, movies and TV.
• Public Opinion considering general attitudes toward LGBT people, sodomy laws, marriage equality, parenting rights, non­discrimination policies, and open military service.

The table below shows the attitude towards LGBT by the general public and the three public institutions that most impact and support both the LGBT community and impact and support the rest of the country’s population. Before we jump into the analysis let’s acknowledge two caveats:

• The trend analysis excludes Q [questioning] because for most of the decades covered questioning folks were not part of the discussion or political machinations. Nor have they been expressly covered by any legal changes.
• Categorizing by decades is a conceit to make the trends easier to see. The actual incremental events and changes happened in all decades from day to day, week to week.

We’ll break out the timeline by decade. A more detailed event timeline can be found here. [Detailed timeline with key events can be found here]

LGBT Acceptance Trends Timeline Summary 1950s through 2020s

Analysis: Public Opinion vs. US National Institutions

What does the table tell us? Remember the cultural traffic lights mentioned above? The color coding in the table tells a story of social value lights slowly changing over the decades. Public opinion has shifted radically more positively toward LGBT equality and inclusion over the last 50 years. Medical institutions were the first to shift but did not appear to directly impact public opinion. Media, on the other hand, has a strong correlation with public opinion while political institutions have lagged in their support. A more detailed analysis can be found with the detailed timeline.

Culture-Relationship Questions from the Analysis

With my change management hat on, the analysis opens a few questions for me.

1. Is the media relationship with public opinion causal or corollary? Likely a bit of both given our complex media tapestry. Academic studies indicate a reasonably strong causal relationship for media impacting culture. Regardless, it appears that while the media can ‘pull public opinion along’ it cannot get too far ahead of public opinion to be a real force. Anytime you hear the term, “It was ahead of its time,” it is likely that the predominant culture was not ready to receive that particular offering.
2. What is the most effective way to use ‘credibility’ or ‘accelerator’ institutions to support a change? As noted above, while the medical institution led without shifting public opinion directly, it did seem to, in effect, provide ‘credibility’ or ‘permission’ to the other institutions to make their own shifts. In other words, the medical institution acted more as a catalyst in accelerating shifts in the media and political institutions. These are accelerator institutions.
3. With political institutions having the most obvious impact on the LGBT community, and clearly following public opinion, what does it imply if political institutions were to lead public opinion? While that question is purely a mind experiment for this particular case, the question is more important when driving change within your organization. We will discuss this more below.

What does this Imply for Org Culture and Change?

Translating the above analysis to organizational culture and implications for change:

• Public opinion is a proxy for culture and norms.
• Institutions are a proxy for organization infrastructure.
• Media is a proxy for communications strategy and planning.
• Political institutions are a proxy for governance, policy, and practices.

Generally, when making changes within an organization, either leave culture untouched or incrementally shift the culture to drive desired behaviors. One of the key messages from the above assessment is that, intentional or not, changes to your governance, communications, and other key infrastructures can and will impact your culture. The three types of cultural change infrastructure include:

Governance Infrastructure — The policy, values, practices, and leadership delivered to the organization has the strongest, most defining impact on culture. In organizational change, governance infrastructure changes need to be well thought out and structured so to not drive unintended culture shifts. Use governance infrastructure changes to ‘lock in’ cultural shifts. Governance infrastructure establishes the house in which culture lives. Like water adjusting its shape to the container, culture adjusts to the governance framework.

Communications Infrastructure — Executive messaging, newsletter publications, vision/mission statements, guides, training, slogans, icons, and even the decor of your office space/campus provide spoken, written, and visual cue communications that can guide the culture shift. Communications infrastructure is the active element driving culture shift while addressing why we are changing and what things will look like when we get there figuratively painting the picture for the desired tomorrow.

Accelerator infrastructure — Infrastructure that is engaged in the cultural shift but not necessarily actively or directly changing it. Its relationship to change is catalytic in nature. Anything that injects intelligence, is derived from expert input, and provides factual rationale can be leveraged as an accelerator. The key quality of an accelerator is that the intelligence it provides is factual whether or not it is applied to cultural change. It may be used as a rationale but stands true regardless. A few examples might include:

• Customers/clients/constituents — direct feedback, observed behavior, survey responses, sociological/psychological expertise, and so on.
• Products/services — performance analysis, engineering/design expertise, returns analysis, technology white papers, etc.
• Employees — survey and direct feedback, performance analysis, org design expertise, and beyond.

We could continue with examples. There are almost endless aspects for which we can explore accelerator sources. But this handful of examples give you a sense of them.

Culture Fitting Infrastructure

We now have a set of tools with which we can address and/or support culture.

• The container — governance
• The change driver — communications
• The credibility providers — accelerators

In the LGBT example above you can see a seven decade broad shift in public opinion which was both urged forward by public institutions and resulted in real institutional changes. Let’s look at another example, which shows what happens when public opinion evolves to diverge so greatly from its associated institutions that it forces a radical change in the institution’s position.

Example: UC Berkeley’s Theoretical Physics Program

The recent Christopher Nolan movie ‘Oppenheimer’ highlighted UC Berkeley’s role in the Manhattan project, first identifying Plutonium and then developing the process for synthesizing Plutonium using cyclotrons. In fact, Oppenheimer himself took a post there for 12 years as an assistant professor establishing one of the greatest theoretical physics programs in the world. The campus physics department continued to be at the forefront of nuclear physics discovery, including commissioning a small nuclear reactor in 1966. However, despite the nuclear physics bonafides, the reactor was shut down in 1985 and all nuclear weapons research banned altogether in 1986. What happened?

During the early discovery period the city of Berkeley culture supported discovery that supported the war effort. Most of the country adamantly supported the war effort. The cultural lights were Green. Over the next 30 years the culture of the city radically shifted to a much more anti-war research stance. In 1985, when the on campus reactor experienced a fuel cladding failure resulting in unusually high concentrations of radioisotopes in the reactor-room air, that potential danger happened the cultural traffic lights were bright Red. Demonstrations and then lawsuits led to the passage of the Nuclear Free Berkeley act in 1986, prohibiting nuclear weapons related research and activities within the city of Berkeley. The shift in culture over 30 years changed the local response to nuclear research. In terms of the cultural norms and infrastructure:

• Culture: Social values across the country had shifted, with the City of Berkeley at the vanguard of an anti establishment, progressive movement. The US was no longer in an existential race against a clear and present threat. While the university remained more conservatively and academically focused, the culture of the city around it was anti-war.
• Governance / Political Institutions: The local government, reflecting that anti-war stance, legislated against continued weapons research. At the state and federal level, nuclear weapons research and development had been purposefully diffused across the country. So that research could be moved away from Berkeley. In fact, much of that research was moved to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory just 37 miles away in Livermore, California.
• Communications / Media Institutions: The Vietnam War ended in 1975 leaving a bitter taste in media coverage for military engagement. The ’80 fell late in the Cold War period making the mid-’80s a rare moment in time that was relatively peaceful. [The Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and Desert Shield [first Iraq War] started in 1989.] The media was focused on a peacetime disposition. No military preparation urgency flavored reporting.
• Accelerators / Military Institutions: The Department of Defense [DoD] undertook a realignment that impacted 307 military bases in the mid-’60s and the closure announcement for 223 bases in1973. In 1983, the Grace Commission called for additional base closures and a cost reduction measure. Simply put, the DoD, amid reconciliation measures, had no appetite to press for continued research at Berkeley.

In short, while the mission and work of the program had not changed at all, the institutional and public support that drove the Manhattan Project support in the ’40s had evaporated by the mid-’80s. The UC Berkeley theoretical physics program’s focus on nuclear physics provides an example of an initial cultural and scientific parity, in the pursuit of publicly desired and institutionally supported scientific principles, which devolves into disunity on all fronts.

Takeaways

The coexistence between the mission, public opinion, institutions, and situational dynamics are inextricable. They make up an ecosystem. If something changes within the ecosystem it will affect everything within the ecosystem. Conversely, if you need to change something within that ecosystem you need to understand the effects to the entire ecosystem.

Intentional or not, changes to your governance, communications, and other key infrastructures can and will impact your culture. While culture stems from beliefs and infrastructure is developed based on the scientific method, culture and infrastructure interact to either reinforce each other or in dissonance with each other. Changes to culture are either supported by infrastructure, or require changes to infrastructure. In like kind, changes to infrastructure must consider whether or not they impact culture. Otherwise, you will experience the unintended consequences of the change.

There are lots of good reasons to not build norms into infrastructure. However, if you need to, the fastest way to harden culture is to build it into policy. Then you can make it more durable by injecting it into the rest of your infrastructure. Governance infrastructure establishes the house in which culture lives. Like water adjusting its shape to the container, culture adjusts to the governance framework. Communications infrastructure is the active element driving culture shift. The key quality of an accelerator is that the intelligence it provides is factual whether or not it is applied to cultural change.

Cultural Assessment Questions:

Once you are clear on the necessary culture shift and associated implications you can determine the:

• What are the necessary governance changes to support the new cultural norms and values?
• What communications are required to drive and support the change?
• What accelerators can we leverage to justify and otherwise give credibility to the shift?

Culture curation never ends. We live in a constantly changing world in an ecosystem of ever shifting opportunities and threats. As we face our evolving reality, we change to deal with the circumstances with which we find ourselves experiencing. Curating your culture, as we address these changes, is one of the most critical aspects to ensuring the continued success of your journey.

In part 3, we will walk through curating a cultural change via a use case designed for this discussion.

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