The EPIC conference is always energizing. It is great to see old friends, meet young ambitious ethnographers and UXR folks with bold ideas, and talk shop with peers.

This year’s conference orbited around the theme of Agency. And there were some exceptional talks that explored the agency of users in particular.

But I left a little hungry as I was hoping there would be more reflection about agency in relationship to being an independent contractor.

Usability research has grown so much in recent years that increasingly EPIC participants are embedded researchers working full-time at a company. So it is perhaps understandably not front and center. But as a freelancer, a researcher for hire, I was interested in hearing others talk about their own experiences in relation to what projects they agree to take on.

I have been very lucky to have had the opportunity to work on some extremely interesting projects and with extraordinarily talented and passionate clients. But with three kids and bills to pay, I think I would be compelled to take on work even when I had some moral qualms about the work.

Agency is about choice. And as researchers, we are all cognoscente of how users are often forced to make choices from limited options. We tap gamification and cognitive biases to nudge behaviors in persuasive designs. We leverage habit design to reinforce the repletion of behaviors that our clients want from users. I have worked with financial services clients to try to build systems that save users from themselves, and promote behaviors that as in the users' best interests, even when it means fighting against our human inclinations. A lot of similar work is done in the health space too.

And when engaging in design, as practitioners we are revisiting over and over the ethics of this work, making sure that we are pushing to drive consent by tapping mechanics like commitment devices.

But when it comes to our own decisions, the freedom we have in making choices about what projects we take on, I feel like we turn a blind eye to the pressures and coercive forces at play that drive our choice to take on projects. It is not always easy to say no to work. It is not always viable or feasible to say no when it is desirable to do so. No one likes to feel like they don’t have choice, so perhaps it is a form of mass-denial.

I’d love to hear how other independent contractors feel.

EPIC 2019 — Agency and the Contractor was originally published in The King’s Indian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You can reshape a company culture in the same way selective breeding is used to create new types of organisms. For companies seeking to radically change their corporate culture, there is a science to cultural transformation. Basic, almost mechanical, steps can be followed to achieve large-scale change. And unlike traditional cultural change management approaches, the investment and risks to the organization for failure are small, particularly compared to the potential upside.

Here I outline the core psychologies of cultural learning that, if properly harnessed, can drive the adoption of specific desired cultural traits. With a skeletal team, these psychologies can be tapped to create epic changes through a process of cultural seeding.

Several times now, I have been asked, “how would you deliver a cultural transformation program?” Often the request accompanies an existing digital transformation process. Or it follows a digital transformation process when employees are not adopting the new platforms and workstreams.

I hear, “We want to be more agile” or “We want to embrace risk and fail fast.” With startups tapping bypass technologies and disrupting everything from retail banking to shaving, it is no wonder that organizations are champing on the bit to change. And one of the weapons in the startup’s arsenal is culture. Built newly from the ground up, startups have emergent cultures that map to the challenges of the ever-changing environment. Whereas legacy companies have cultures that are chained to a time and set of needs that frequently no longer exist.

Armed with good intentions and some degree of political air coverage, more often than not the person making the request has little clue of how to get from A to B. Everyone intuitively understands that real change from within an organization comes all-in, not piecemeal. Because culture is all-inclusive and because one component impacts all the other components, culture change can seem impossible. How to execute is a mystery. How can you change everything all at once?

As I have noted in Why “Corporate Culture Change” Fails, And How To Succeed, the folk-models of culture change do not work in large enterprises. Ideas like trickle-down culture from the CEO are fundamentally flawed once you understand and apply what we know about enculturation from anthropology. And “we” know a lot, actually. Just no one seems to know it.

“We want to embrace risk and failure.”

THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE CHANGE

This is not the place for a comprehensive literature review of the state of knowledge of cultural transmission, but it is sufficient to say that a lot of research has been conducted in the space for many years. Scholars like Robert Boyd and Joe Henrich have built a robust body of work on the subject.

For whatever reason, the scholarship that has been done on the subject of cultural transformation in academia has not penetrated the work of consultants and MBAs. Often these domains do not cross-pollinate and operate in distinct markets. And academics most often are writing to their peers and not a larger general audience.

So it is no surprise to find that when it comes to the business of corporate cultural change, it is done mostly in the absence of the knowledge and frameworks that have been developed around the science of culture change.

To help bridge these parallel universes, here is a framework and process for corporate culture change that is based on the science. It is meant to help prevent organizations from embarking on costly culture change management implementations that are doomed to fail.

And note, as I have been asked several times this year, there is no case study yet. One of the ironies of people coming to me and saying they want a company that embraces risk, is that these same companies are incapable of adopting a slightly greater risk posture needed to embark on a culture transformation process. Quite the Catch-22.

So here is the underlying theory in a nutshell. Maybe your organization will have the appetite to apply it.

THE NUTSHELL

Culture is a powerful adaptation. For millennia, our evolved ability and predisposition to learn by taking direction and observing others, has driven the success of our species. These psychological capacities determine the spread of some cultures over others. By understanding and bending these psychological and cognitive predispositions, one can shape a specific culture much they way breeders use artificial selection to shape a breed of dog. An enterprise is no different.

It is not magic, but requires adherence to a step-by-step process. And it does not happen overnight. You cannot change the culture of an enterprise with 60,000 employees in 12 weeks, no matter how much money you throw at it. There is a certain cadence of culture change, slow to start; exponentially speeding up. This will all make sense once you walk through the steps and understand the model.

UNDERSTANDING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BIOLOGY AND CULTURE

There is a genetic/biological basis for cultural learning. But cultural learning escapes the constraints of biology. Language, texts, media — all enable the rapid evolution of behaviors decoupled from biology. What is essential to understand here is that we are born with the underlying biological predispositions, psychological predispositions that do not change for the individual learner. What are these base-line inclinations, or biases?

For one, people are predisposed to imitate the cultural variants of some people over other people. We imitate people who are prestigious and successful. Why? Well, it has been evolutionarily adaptive to adopt the variants of behavior one sees in others who are prestigious and successful. We live in complex systems where causation is often unclear. So the tendency is to just imitate everything a successful person does.

This is different from trickle-down culture from the CEO of a large enterprise in several important ways. For one, often the CEO often does not have a lot of prestige with the employees on the line. Power and dominance, yes. Respect, maybe. Prestige, not so much. See the following article for a discussion on the distinction between dominance and prestige. Also, most employees do not sample the behaviors of the CEO and the internal corporate communications often deployed are not good proxies from an evolutionary psychology perspective. In short, people over-sample prestigious people in their immediate social circles.

We also imitate the cultural traits that are most common in the population around us rather than imitate the outliers. Why is this adaptive? Well if there are two types of mushrooms growing in your pastures, and everyone eats one and does not eat the other, you can bet there is probably a good reason why. And given the high cost of individual experimentation, the tendency is to follow the wisdom of the crowd. It is no different in the office. If the day officially ends at 5 PM but no one leaves the office until 730PM, there is probably a good reason why.

CULTURE PODS

All that is great, but what does it mean for the client who is asking for a culture-change program? So people tend to imitate prestigious individuals and also tend to follow the crowd.

The answer is CulturePods, a specific set of steps to drive organizational change. We can take advantage of those tendencies to intentionally shape a culture. The basic idea is simple. Design a new, desired culture. Implant that culture into the organization. Create the environment for it to thrive and spread on its own. Over time, it comes to displace and dominate the extant culture.

It is analogous to artificial selection. We select the qualities and traits we want in the new culture, we control the propagation by taking advantage of specific proximate psychological mechanisms, and we maintain boundaries that allow the nascent culture to grow.

Here are the basic steps…

1. Mapping

The first step is to create an ethnography of the current culture. For the sake of simplicity, it is easiest to bucket this into three areas:

• economics (basic economic principles, workflows, and incentives)
• organizational structure (reporting structures, governance and KPIs)
• ideology (norms, values, and beliefs)

These are referred to as infrastructure, structure, and superstructure in the literature (Harris 1979)

Equally important is to understand the lines of cultural boundaries. Typically an enterprise is actually comprised of multiple sub-cultures. They may vary by geo, by vertical, or by discipline/line-of-business.

This map is essential as it defines both the minimally viable enterprise, a SuperPod, as well as defines the cultural boundaries that the PODs must navigate within. The significance of these will become clear as we lay out the model here.

2. Culture Design

The next step is to work with key stakeholders to design the desired state. What are the new work practices? What are the metrics by which people are evaluated and compensated? Are you adopting a Teal or a Green organizational structure (Laloux)? What values and norms are you embracing? What is the organizational structure? Reporting? Governance?

The basic tenant here is to apply design thinking to the problem. So get out the PostIt notes. Now, you could go about a cultural redesign with no input from the core actors, but doing so carries obvious and substantial risk.

When mapping the extant culture and planning for the future one, it is essential to understand the distinctions between de facto and de jure ways of behaving, and the underlying causes. As with the desire paths noted by Alexande (1977), workers will subvert the officially sanctioned work-flows if they are not aligned with their interests. And in designing for a future-state, the challenge is even greater as you need to try to project future need states in complex real-world systems. Given these challenges, it is essential to map in detail the basic needs of the users across the organization.

The nature of the business will drive significant design constraints. How many people are needed in each division based on the “jobs to be done,” for example? What are the divisions? How do the different business units interface? How does this dovetail into a technology transformation program?

The design process essentially drafts the culture content of the seed Pods.

3. Seeding

Once the new company design is mapped out in detail, the next step is the initial form of implementation. The idea here is to create a minimum viable unit within any given business group to accomplish the necessary tasks, and that also embodies the new culture.

Let’s use an example for illustration. Say that within the HR group a minimum of 3–4 people are needed to operate within a given territory (a recruiter, a compliance officer, a benefits manager, and a payroll/time sheet administrator). We would work to implement one such group. One Pod. The individuals who comprise this group would be cherry-picked from the larger organization to have certain psychological predispositions. In essence, we look for individuals who are good cultural transmitters. They serve as models for other team members to follow. As models, being successful and having high-prestige also facilitates cultural transmission to others. This team would be immersed in training sessions on the new culture with a cultural docent who would guide them in the early days of implementation.

Likewise, a new Pod would be developed in sales, marketing, operations, etc. These Pods together form the scaffolding for the new culture and the new enterprise. They need to work together to engage and succeed in the overarching function of the enterprise. Simultaneously, the new Pods, which collectively constitute a minimum viable enterprise, would have to be insulated from the rest of the organization.

4. Growth

Once the initial Pods establish and stabilize, more individuals can be introduced to the group slowly over time. These individuals need less training than the original colonizers. New participants are picked to have different psychological dispositions, and we leverage cognitive biases to our advantage. For example, we look for people who are more conforming as we add to our initial Pod. Over time, these new entrants adopt the new dominant culture.

The introduced individuals find themselves in the young Pod, where the majority of people, including very prestigious people, have adopted new behaviors. Without much overt “training,” people will begin to learn and imitate the new ways of working.

5. Grafting

Once the Pod grows in size, we split them into two. Each daughter Pod is placed strategically in the organization and more participants are slowly added to the Pod. Again, because of learning biases such as frequency-bias transmission, the culture in the Pods continues to grow with little intervention. Indeed, less and less direct training is required.

5. Propagation

Growth and grafting continue with supervision. Here it is essential to be attentive to the real boundaries within the organization in terms of both culture and operational demands. Slowly at first, and then quickly, the new culture takes hold and over time replaces the old culture.

If the boundaries are too permeable, then the new culture will not stick. People will revert to the old ways of doing things. For instance, take our HR pod. The new recruiter may not take on the new work practices of the model if they are still sampling and observing and interacting with the old HR recruiters. The sampling pool must be constrained to the new pod. There needs to be a sense of a new norm.

IMPLEMENTATION

It seems simple and in some ways it is, but the recipe must be followed carefully. Large enterprises tend to mimic societies in low-intensity warfare. Delicate truces have been drawn between interest parties in a matrix across the enterprise, and so the entire organization is interested in maintaining the status quo. If not protected, a new CulturePod will be over-run with the forces of the current culture. The results will be the death of the nascent culture.

So it is imperative that one creates the boundaries necessary to protect the Pods as they begin to take root and flourish.

Likewise, one wants to leverage the basic forces at work in cultural learning to make the growth of the Pods easy and the fidelity of the information high. A lot of effort is put into the design of the new culture. If errors are introduced early on in the transmission of the new culture, the end result will deviate from the desired one.

Strong and highly visible support must also be present at the highest levels. Pods will be initially populated with A players, and managers will be reluctant to have these individuals removed from their teams for some cultural transformation program that they likely will think doomed for failure. Without senior support, mid-level managers will sabotage the process.

THE CORPORATE CULTURE SETTING

So if you want to replace an old culture with a new one, you need to tap these propensities. Failure to acknowledge these forces and design a system around them will lead to failure.

REFERENCES

Alexander, Christopher (1977). A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Oxford University Press, USA. p. 1216. ISBN 0–19–501919–9.

Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the evolutionary process. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (OCLC: 11496588)

Cavalli‐Sforza, L. L., & Feldman, M. W. (1981). Cultural transmission and evolution: A quantitative approach. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Harris, M. 1979. Cultural Materialism. Cultural Materialism: the Struggle for a Science of Culture , Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press

Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

CulturePods: The Cultural Transformation Process was originally published in The King’s Indian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This past May (2017), my wife and I decided to pack everything up and take the kids to Spain and neighboring countries on an open-ended adventure. We moved and took up residency. Four, six and eight, we figured it was a once-in-a-lifetime window to be able to take them to another country and culture without being super disruptive to their social and academic lives. Now November, we are still here. The kids attend an international school and they are super happy. Maybe the happiest they have ever been.

But it has not been without any challenges. The uber lesson of our expatriatism , not surprising for an anthropologist, is that culture matters. Everyone in the family experiences this in different ways, the most obvious one being the language which we are all learning only slowly (none of us spoke a lick of Spanish before the trip). There are a myriad of cultural differences, some anticipated and some surprising. Fewer smiles. Frequent tailgating. Siestas and the late dinners we were at least intellectually prepared for, even though they still at times catch us off guard.

Some cultural differences are very appreciated while others we find irritating. A quick lunch is a near impossibility in Mallorca, with all the pros and cons associated with that fact.

And the subsequent lesson for all of us, not just the kids, has been to keep an open mind. Especially as the kids attend an international school, with people from around the world, we cannot be assumptive when it comes to greetings, responses to playdate requests, the meaning or intent of a great many behaviors. Each takes inquiry. Patience. But the upside of the experience has been a tremendous broadening of our kids minds.

It is hard to articulate exactly, but now when our kids see something novel, they consider a range of possible explanations instead of jumping to conclusions. If something is forbidden, they interrogate the reason why. If a behavior is customary but unfamiliar, they do the same. In turn, the behavior of my kids is more flexible. They are more tolerant of ambiguity. And they are able to improvise.

What does this have to do with culture fit in the organization?

When an HR person interviews a candidate, they are often judging if the individual is a good cultural fit for the organization. What does that mean exactly and how do they decide?

Well, let’s put aside for the moment the significant impact that implicit bias plays in candidate selection and the complicit role of culture fit. Here is an interesting article in Forbes that delves a bit into this highly problematic issue. A lot has been written about culture fit as a PC way to discard diversity practices. Certainly an important topic but not what I want to focus on here.

Let’s say, that for the sake of argument, HR was able to somehow set aside their unconscious inherent biases and focus on the fit with the corporate culture — the way the organization goes about completing jobs to be done, the expectations about reporting and hierarch, the norms and values of the organization, its philosophy. (This assumes that the organization actually understands its own culture, a rare situation indeed).

Hiring only people with a good culture fit has two big implications.

The first is that cultural homogeneity can create great solidarity and efficiency among employees. There are significant benefits to be had here. When norms are well understood and shared, transactions are more frictionless. I don’t mean in financial transactions, but the peer-to-peer interactions that occur throughout the day in the vein of Fredrik Barth’s transactionalism. Reduced to a conversation between two individuals, understanding the cultural specifics about conversational pauses, for instance, can make a 5 minute chat much more efficient when the two actors understand all the cultural rules and norms.

And of course, common culture triggers in-group favoritism and out-group distrust as well documented by Henri Tajfel’s work on the minimum group paradigm. So employees feel more bonded. Perhaps this would reduce employee attrition?

But, it comes at a real cost too.

Cultural homogeneity reduces the chance and the ability to innovate. There are a number of reasons why. For one, deviating from the norm has a higher cost, in efficiency. People are also very sensitive to how common a cultural trait is within their environment. The more common it is, the more likely that behavior is highly adaptive. So deviating is perceived to come at great risk. The more homogenous the culture, the less chance someone will deviate, and to a smaller degree.

And given what we know about the social psychology of prejudice, they are right. The very act of being non-compliant comes with negative social sanctions in highly homogenous settings.

Beyond that, people operating day in and day out in homogenous settings may lack the tools to think of innovations. It is not because they lack some core cognitive capacity. No. It is because many, perhaps most of our cultural beliefs are so assumptive that we do not even recognize them as such. So they are not the subjects of interrogation.

Hence in my mind some of the paradox of a place like Japan — at once incredibly homogenous and yet also very innovative in certain ways. Unable to innovate in others.

The other way that homogeneity reduces innovation is simply by the lack of a diverse culture pool to draw upon. This is why diversity can breed less assumptive and more agile teams. It is analogous to a the effects of genetic diversity after a population bottleneck, as we see with cheetahs. In recent history there were only 7 cheetahs alive, radically reducing the genetic diversity in the gene pool. They are all very alike. So when faced with environmental changes, the population does not have a wide repertoire of characteristics. If all the cheetahs don’t already have the necessary qualities to survive, the entire population will go extinct. But in other populations with great genetic variance, there are always some in the population with the right characteristics to thrive as the environment shifts.

So organizations must evaluate and balance the pros and cons of cultural homogeneity. Is efficiency or innovation more important? When the environment is very stable, efficiencies and cost-side competitive advantages are important. But in a radically changing world, the ability to adapt and change is existential.

Hence the perennial tension. When times are good, typically when the markets are stable, cost-side efficiencies dominate as a driver of profitability and hence the organization faces pressure to reduce variance and adopt a more risk-averse posture. But then when the markets do suddenly change, they have lost the internal assets, the very variance that they would tap, to be able to adapt and change.

For me and my wife, we have chosen to invest now in our children’s capacity to adopt — in anticipation of an economy that is very competitive and rapidly changing. It comes at a current cost in efficiency. They are learning a second and third language which, in my mind, slows down their uptake of English. They have to make new friends and this process is slower, with cultural mis-understandings and mis-communications. Living in Spain creates a friction for our work too. Some nights we work well into the evenings to map to US time zones and we are on planes a lot more it seems.

We are betting that in a global marketplace where ambiguity is a central quality of creative enterprises, where conceptual plasticity is a key asset, our kids will be better equipped given the cultural diversity they are experiencing now. We are playing a long game, a game where experience with cultural diversity wins.

The Dark Side of Culture Fit was originally published in The King’s Indian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The article below explores some of the reasons why corporate cultural transformation programs fail. If you want to read an article that outlines what can be implemented instead, see: CulturePods: The Cultural Transformation Process

Cultural transformations can be essential for the long-term survival and success of an organization. Markets change. New generations of employees enter. Customers shift and evolve. An enterprise may suddenly find that the fundamental value propositions are loosing meaning. Or that they are no longer competitive due to their work practices. Or that the work environment no longer attracts the best talent.

So companies look to incorporate culture change as a solution.

But it is no secret that many, perhaps most, attempts at corporate cultural change fail. McKinsey states that 1/3 of culture change programs fail. John Kotter writes in HBR that the majority of programs are failures. Here the authors are discussing explicitly culture-change programs, but we should also include an array of other change management programs from corporate reorganizations, M&A, or digital transformations — as each of these is ultimately a culture change process.

And when they do fail, they typically fail big.

With so much at stake, with so much invested, and typically with the support of the C-suite, why are failures so common? And how can you set yourself up for success?

I have seen a lot of rationales as to why culture change programs fail. Some reasons for failure include:

• failure to generate a sense of urgency

• inadequate senior support

• lack of a vision

• under-communicating internally

• not leading by example

These ideas are not wrong per se, but they are also not really correct either. The reason why is that they look at cultural change through the lens of folk theory — phenomenologically somewhat correct but without consideration for the underlying mechanics. Like Copernican Heliocentrism is more correct than Ptolemaic models, current corporate culture models are better than past ones but still erroneous on several levels. We can do better.

Let’s take an example to illustrate: failure to sufficiently communicate internally.

The idea that internal communications can drive culture change is based on a notion that abstract beliefs are the primary drivers of behavioral — that culture is some free-floating set of ideas that are not intimately tied to the physical and social realities that agents operate within. But such notions have never been supported by anthropology. While ideology can be a very strong motivational force, over time the basic economic realities are the driver of culture, not vice versa. Culture is embedded and not detached from the economic and social realities that actors operate within.

Also, wholesale changes in behavior among thousands or millions (WalMart has 2.3 million) of employees at once through “lively newsletters” is virtually impossible. To understand why, it is useful to think of a large enterprise, with different divisions, markets, and lines of business, as analogous to a decentralized society operating through a complex network of alliances and delicate implicit treaties. Wholesale change would threaten these alliances, creating uncertainty and risk for all — a direct attack on people’s careers and livelihood.

Indeed, large organizations are homeostatic entities build for stability and to resist radical change. So no degree of internal communication in isolation will be sufficient to drive culture change. I would argue, in fact, that wide-scale internal communication programs are in fact not necessary for culture change — as will become clear once the basic underlying mechanics are mapped out.

Let’s detail in more broad terms the reasons why culture change fails.

Unclear or Incorrect Definitions of Culture

A basic problem is a lack of clarity as to what culture means. Often time culture is depicted as the “thing in people’s heads.” Or I have seen this list:

• company vision
• values, norms
• systems
• symbols
• language
• assumptions
• beliefs
• habits

Or from HBR another list: vision, values, practices, people, narrative, and place.

These and other definitions often stress the symbolic and ignore the fact that culture is also phenotypical, or misunderstand the nature of the relationship between the symbolic and the phenotypical. Culture includes the physical manifestations that people move through (from architecture to urban planning). Within the enterprise, the culture is the open plan. It is the design of the parking lot. It is the time people take to eat lunch.

Definitions of culture also suffer from imprecise language. Habits, for instance, ought to refer to habitual behaviors not the total sum of all behaviors.

Think of it as if you were a breeder and engaged in artificial selection. It is true that the information is in the genes. But unless you have a CRISPER lab nearby, what you have to operate with are the physical organisms themselves. Selective breeding is the practice.

A large enterprise is similar. It is very difficult to go into people’s heads and directly modify the symbolic information contained in the mind. I guess that is what the goal is of “lively newsletters.” Rather, you have to alter the culture using the manifestations, the material culture. That is why cultural materialism (ref. Marvin Harris) as a framework is a good place to start in defining the domains of culture that need to be attended to. Because whether someone is talking about culture change or organizational change, what is really being discussed is social change.

And social change occurs on three levels: infrastructure, structure and superstructure.

Infrastructure refers to the fundamental economic activities. Think workflows, procedures, manufacturing activities, incentives, content creation, etc..

Structure connotes how people are organized: reporting, governance, org structure, associations & networks, etc.

Superstructure refers to norms, beliefs, ideologies, visions, and world views (what often gets relegated to the term “culture”)

Any significant change must attend to the inter-relationship between these three components. So when we refer to culture change we should be sure that what we are referring to the entire vertically integrated culture, from base economic behaviors, all the way up to values. One cannot expect people to change their ideology without changing their incentives or decision-making processes. Indeed, it has been argued that the general direction of influence is bottom up — that economics primarily drive ideology and not the other way around. When risk and failure are driven by actual incentives, one adopts a pro-risk and pro-failure ideology. On the other hand, if lip service is given to fast failure, but failures are not celebrated, if people who fail often are not promoted, one cannot expect an employee to adopt failure as a value.

Erroneous Folk Theories of Culture Transmission

Trickle-Down Culture

Faulty theories about the way culture works also impede culture change programs. Take the notion of trickle-down culture. There is a general belief that the culture of an enterprise emanates from the CEO. There are plenty of articles that advocate that senior leaders influence the rank and file by adopting behaviors that imbue the new culture.

The confession is understandable because founders have inordinate impact on a corporate culture. Founders, however, are distinct from leaders. The reason founders have such a strong impact on an organizations culture is analogous to the genetic effect referred to, coincidently, as founders effect (Ernst Myer). As the starting point of a company culture, the founders have tremendous knock-on effect on the culture. But leaders who enter a large enterprise actually have much less impact typically on a company culture.

In large organizations, most people have very little contact with the CEO, if any. And the behaviors of the very senior management have little influence on them day-to-day. Now, it is true that if senior leadership was behaving in a way that was antithetical to a new culture being implemented, this would be detrimental. But unfortunately, the C-Suite does not have the impact on the organization they may think or wish they have.

Urgency

Take the notion of urgency. There is no body of work that I am aware of that would suggest that culture change is driven by urgency. Let’s unpack this a bit. Urgency would seem to suggest a sense of heightened risk and reward. Swift action is needed to either avert disaster to take advantage of a window of opportunity. How does culture change relate to this?

Well, assume that you are able to instill a real sense of urgency to your workforce, this would actually work against any culture change programs in place.

You see, duel inherence theory argues that the population is normally distributed for conformity vs individual experimentation. That is to say, people sit on a spectrum on how much they tend to be conservative and follow socially learned rules and norms, versus tend to be mavericks who scoff at convention in favor of personal experience. This is supported by the body of work done on psychology as well, with the Five Factors personality profiles. When the environment is stable for long periods of time, social learners would be more successful by following tried and true rules and behaviors. But during times of great environmental change, individual experimenters would have the advantage and be able to adopt more quickly. So while people have a general personality posture, they are able to adapt to a degree.

During times of great uncertainty, even conservative social learners will lean a bit more toward individual experimentation vs listening to what they are taught socially. So you see, generating a sense of urgency, in this case, would actually cause the employee population to be less inclined toward social inculcation and more likely to rely on personal experience.

Little Understanding of Cultural Transmission

Another key issue is a failure to understand some of the basic mechanics of cultural transmission. Scholars such as Boyd and Richardson (1985) have identified frequency and prestige as key determinants of successful cultural transmission. We emulate and learn from people who are high prestige and we tend to be sensitive to the distribution of a cultural trait in evaluating the trait’s benefits. Cultural traits that are widespread in the sampled population are probably quite adaptive and unlikely to be highly maladaptive.

Thus you would want high prestige people to be adopting the desired cultural variants. But prestige and power are not the same things. Often senior management has power but not necessarily prestige. So having the CEO adopt a behavior and expecting others to follow, especially if the employees’ immediate cohorts are not following this behavior, is not likely to succeed. Especially if the CEO is not highly charismatic and does not have grassroots support among the rank and file.

Likewise, when engineering corporate cultural change, one would not want to try to push behaviors or traits that are not common in the sample pool. This creates a conundrum for the consultant trying to drive culture change as the new cultural variant would by definition be uncommon. Perhaps this is the single greatest flaw in the implementation of culture change programs. To be successful, one needs to artificially create a situation where the new culture is the dominant culture. And this can only be accomplished by creating artificial barriers.

Others have argued that peer-to-peer learning is effective in driving conformity. (https://www.accenture.com/us-en/blogs/blogs-culture-change-fails). But here the concept of peer-to-peer conflates a number of components related to enculturation. People have biases to learn from people who are high prestige, regardless of status. So the fact that the teacher is of equal social status has little bearing. Likewise, one is unlikely to adopt a behavior of a peer if that peer is an outlier. So and peer-to-peer learning must happen within an environment of seclusion from the original culture, where the peer’s behavior, while novel to the learner, is common within the new sample pool.

Failure to Quarantine New Culture/Trying to Change Everything Everywhere All At Once

There is a reason why Darwin found the Galapagos Islands so helpful as a natural experiment. It demonstrates the power of barriers in driving rapid evolutionary change. The same pre-requisites are needed to drive cultural change. It may seem counter-intuitive, but rapid cultural change is more feasible when you focus on changing smaller units than if you try to change the culture of the entire large enterprise.

Another way to think about it is to compare a breeder using artificial selection versus the gradual change in gene frequencies that occur naturally among a large population of organisms over time. In large populations, you typically see gradualism — slow incremental change. We usually see radical change (e.g. punctuated equilibrium) when there has been a catastrophic event and populations are decimated. In these cases, the idiosyncratic characteristics of the few remaining survivors steer a new direction for the descendants. A breeder can have even more impact than a catastrophic event in the creation of a novel breed — achieving this in just a few generations by tightly controlling the reproduction of a small number of organisms.

So when a large enterprise wants more radical change, how do you reconcile the scale and speed of the desired shift with the size of the organization? How do you implement a punctuated equilibrium without decimating an enterprise?

The answer lies in the way one creates and manages boundaries between the existing organizational culture and the new one.

The inconvenient truth is that a large enterprise is not a singular culture to begin with. A number of distinct sub-cultures exist within the organization. Sales and marketing may have a distinct culture from operations. The Tokyo office may have a distinct culture from the Barcelona office. SO rarely are you moving from A to B when implementing a culture change program in an enterprise.

Speed can be achieved by mapping the true cultural boundaries and simultaneously seeding the new culture with a pod within each of these distinct cultural zones. There are lots of moving parts. And as with the Galapagos Islands, protecting these nascent cultures from the larger organization in each sub-culture is imperative. The new culture needs the opportunity to out-compete the old one, and as a breeder knows, this is a design process.

Conclusion

So here are just a few reasons why corporate culture change programs fail. It is not surprising really, that most programs fail, as the programs are defined and driven by individuals with no formal training in cultural transmission. They make valiant attempts, and even have some successes, in the same way that early breeders did not understand genetics.

But once the key mechanics are well understood, it is much easier to design a program around the way culture works. Any attempt to change the culture of an enterprise should be grounded in these basic principles. And while culture change can occur quickly, it cannot be done overnight.

Why “Corporate Culture Change” Fails, And How To Succeed was originally published in The King’s Indian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Paul Bloom recently wrote about the downsides of empathy.

In cases of public policy, anecdotal and emotionally salient outliers can have adverse effects on public policy. I feel that in California , the passage of SB-277, the mandatory vaccine bill, is one excellent case. There is little actual evidence to support the claims of public health risks, but the very uncommon stories of immune suppressed kids catching an infectious disease from an ardent unvaccinated child pushes buttons. So SB-277 forces parents to vaccinate against even things like tetanus despite the fact that tetanus is not contagious and has no risk to the large community.

Personally, I am vaccinated against tetanus. Given the pros and cons, it seems like a good idea. But not sure we need to have the state coerce people into tetanus injections if they have some issue with it. A simple example of empathy run amok.

Empathy is detrimental elsewhere. The dark side of empathy is spite. I see examples of spite while driving — it is the moralistic retribution enforcer who is in fact creating the problem.

Take traffic merging. The zipper merge is the most efficient way for cars to exit. Well, it is more efficient than the typical offramp at least. Living in Mallorca I have come to believe that the roundabout is the most efficient traffic device every devised.

So the zipper merge? This means being the a-hole who merges in at the very last minute. Efficacy demands being a free-rider. I used to get furious at these cutters. I would tail-gait the car in front of me in an effort to block such jerks. I would do this even if I was not intending to exit the highway. Because other people were patiently waiting to the jerk deserved it.

But I was totally wrong. This is the optimal behavior for the common good. Don’t believe me? Take a read here:

Now I happily cut in at the last minute when lanes merge. Yes I get a lot of birds flipped at me but the joke is on them. Here is an example where empathy for your fellow driver does us all harm. Everyone, zipper merge!

When I see someone cut over at he last minute, I applaud them. Hopefully, they are going it in the spirit of cooperation but either way, way to go. And thanks.

Why you should drive like an a-hole was originally published in The King’s Indian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This last Super Bowl was remarkable on how overtly politicized the ads were, along with the absence of ads objectifying women as sex objects. From Nordstrom to LL Bean to Hobby to Anheuser-Bush, brands are taking a political stance.

In the past, companies have taken the high road, citing fiduciary responsibility as being the primary north star, with partisanship being a bad strategy for growth. But, with customers increasingly demanding brands have a political stance, and voting with their wallets, even reluctant brands like Uber are forced to take action.

In some ways, this is the inevitable consequence of purpose-based brands.

For holding companies, the long-term strategy of political agnosticism, is increasingly problematic. The cracks in the strategy were already apparent when companies like Unilever simultaneously pushed the agendas of Dove and Axe. The hypocrisy and the refusal to take a stand was manageable in the past by creating distance between brands and the ownership structure but this line of argument is no longer being accepted by consumers.

With a few exceptions, brands are able to follow along political faults because, other than the largest LCD brands like United Airlines, the brands’ user groups are subject to the same forces of self-selection that the entire population feels. Thus the core Cabela’s user is distinct demographically, politically, and psychologically, from the core Theory customer.

But the fissures of division during the Super Bowl were a bit surprising. Perhaps this was Budweiser being tone deaf to its user base. The 2016 Amy Schumer/Seth Rogen spot also did not resonate with consumers, leading to a drop in sales.

When everything is tinged with political meaning, whether intentional or not, brands like Budweiser now risk alienating a core segment of their user base when they are dialectically opposed to the political ideology of their consumers. I wonder, what role do brands have in driving ideological change?

Can brands remain agnostic?

When the audiences themselves are so partisan, when the user demands you take a position, officers are left with a new reality where the brand must respond. Uber discovered that many users were willing to leave the franchise if the brand did not behave according to their political expectations.

Is this a new phenomena?

Over the past number of years, at least, the growth of the B-Corp with the concurrent rise of social entrepreneurialism as a movement has shown that for many brands and companies, being purpose driven from the onset means good business. Here, the metrics of success are not only defined by growth or profitability but by whatever the B-Corp has delineated as the primary goals. Patagonia is but one example of a company that has operationalized the purpose-driven nature of the company in such a a way that offices are not torn between fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders and being aligned with the brand.

But Anheuser-Busch is not a B-Corp. Nor is it a private company like Hobby Lobby. Do the shareholders and officers who have fiduciary duty see eye-to-eye when the company takes a political stance at the cost of alienating large segments? Or is the reality that no brand can successfully maintain a common platform across our increasingly culturally divided country. So a 50% market share represents the entire available market. Given that we live in a country where the corporation is perhaps the most important organizing principle of our lives, how do they navigate partisanship?

The Rise of the Partisan Brand was originally published in The King’s Indian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

First, Anthony wrote:

The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.

This is spot on. “Pulling down the temple” is spite in action. See my brief article on the topic here. The caricature of the other as stupid is an ethnocentric discounting of a divergent world-view.

So Bourdain goes on to state:

I’ve spent a lot of time in gun-country, God-fearing America. There are a hell of a lot of nice people out there, who are doing what everyone else in this world is trying to do: the best they can to get by, and take care of themselves and the people they love. When we deny them their basic humanity and legitimacy of their views, however different they may be than ours, when we mock them at every turn, and treat them with contempt, we do no one any good.(http://reason.com/archives/2016/12/29/anthony-bourdain)

He hits upon the key challenge of the anthropologist, an issue we experience time and again with our clients. On the one hand, there are overwhelming human universals that bind us all together — the fundamental building blocks for empathy. These common denominators make divergent tactics understandable when the core drivers are shared, be they making a living, having choice and freedom, etc.

On the other hand, culture matters. In some ways, culture matters more than anything else — even the most basic of human needs. But the tendency is to think of everyone as being the same. We see it all the time with clients who choose to skip doing research out of a confidence of knowing the intentions of others. It is the same issue that undermines empathy as a design technique. Because it is about presumption. It assumes that the would view of the observer is shared by everyone else.

Startup founders are particularly prone to this cognitive bias. They often define their initial value proposition out of a personal experience. A personal pain point. When others buy into this value proposition, it confirms their belief that others are like them. But as the startup taps a larger market, this logic runs afoul and growth quickly slows.

Because other populations do not share the same values or basic assumptions about the world. They do not have the same pain points necessarily.

The shock of the urban coastal liberal populations of the results of the election are a culture shock. It is disconcerting to think that the core truths about the nature of the word that one hold’s so dear may be arbitrary. And so the tendency is to defensively double-down rather than try to understand the orientation of other groups.

This is not an argument for cultural relativism. I think Robert Edgerton was right when we wrote Sick Societies. Cultures can be maladaptive. They can be derailed from evidence and data. Indeed, we live in a society has is experiencing a deep chasm around the role of evidence versus faith in defining perspective and driving behavior. A topic for another time.

So I would push back against Bourdain’s view that one should not critique the legitimacy of another views. But he is right. Before one can successfully challenge the views of another, one must first establish deep psychological attachment and acceptance. Empathy is core to the process.

So, as the Democratic Party looks to retool itself, design thinking should be a central modality. The DNC should leverage empathetic research to understand the constituents for whom the party no longer resonates, constituents who used to be core to the party. It should then set out to re-design a platform and set of policies that fold in the needs of these large constituencies in such as way that is inclusive but aligned with core principles.

And where these core principles seem to be in conflict, they should re-visit and apply the thinking of Willia Ury and Roger Fisher — who wrote Getting Past No and Getting to Yes. Move away from position and get to the underlying interest. Find the common interests and create solutions that engender coordinated action. Here is where Bernie Sanders was successful. As an independent, he was addressing the core interest and not the political position.

Refine and iterate.

At the end of the day, Bourdain is right. We all want the same basic things in life. If coal is not the path forward, find a real alternative that is meaningful for West Virginia and Kentucky residents.

The real challenge here is a cultural one. It is feasible to re-giggler economic positions along common interests. But ideology is less flexible. Ideology politics are hard to reconcile. Thus the DNC should have a regiment of anthropologists and sociologists to help the party gain a better understanding of the core beliefs and values of a very large segment of our population. A segment for which, they understand little and empathize with even less.

Design Thinking and the DNC was originally published in The King’s Indian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2016 Annual Report was originally published in The King’s Indian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In fact, I would venture to say that they are almost too nice.

Not long ago, I presented to Airbnb on the virtues of spite in creating a game theoretic for trust. I presented this in a conference room modeled after Dr. Strangelove. The irony was not lost on me — thinking about the War Room scene where the generals strategized about tit-fot-tat.

Here are a few examples of how a little bit of a mean streak could help them out. In fact, it could help us all out in the sense of creating a common benefit. A little bit of spite could go a long way in reducing free riders in the marketplace, increase trust, and give skeptical would-be hosts and guests the confidence they need to join the community.

Here is one example. We have all heard the horror stories of a house getting trashed by a guest — people who are cheats who violate the house rules and the terms of service to say, film a porn or, have a rave. These high profile house-destroying free-riders make the rest of us a bit more hesitant to allow a stranger into our homes. And I have spoken to a number of folks who have considered joining Airbnb but then reconsidered when they heard these stories.

Airbnb responded to these incidences in part by creating an insurance policy to assure homeowners and other hosts that they would be protected in the event that the rare unfortunate psychopath should destroy their place. The problem with that is that it is a rational response. Airbnb is optimizing their economic position by implementing such a policy.

But a retroactive cure to the destruction of a home is not a prophylactic. It does not engender trust in the marketplace because it does not create dis-incentives for the would-vandal.

Instead, Airbnb needs to pursue overt cheaters in a very public and visible way. It should pursue people to trash homes to the ends of the earth with every legal means available. In so doing, they will engender confidence in the marketplace.

Here is a great snippet of Dan Ariely highlighting the value of spitefulness.

But the problem goes beyond these edge cases.

Transactional risks are not shared equally between hosts and guests. A host can define the terms of the cancellation policy in a unilateral manner. For example, the host can choose a “Strict” cancellation policy which allows for a 50% refund no matter how far in advance guest cancels, and no refund within 1 week prior to arrival. But that same host can cancel on the guest 24 hours in advance for a minor fee, either $50 if greater than 7 days prior or $100 if cancelled within 7 days. When a host cancels, Airbnb generates a note in the reviews section noting the cancellation as a penalty. But these non-monetized negative sanctions are difficult to evaluate.

The asymmetries are disruptive to the establishment of trust. When would-be guests do not think that the host has equal skin in the game, those guests cannot rely on the reservation. I have spoken to users who will book Airbnb stays when traveling for work but not when traveling with family. If there is a last-minute cancellation, as a solo business traveller it would bot be so disruptive. But to a family on vacation, there is too much at stake. I can totally relate to this.

In this instance, the cancellation policies should cut both ways. Market-based transactions are efficient when the actors can create balances of risk and reward.

De-spite Airbnb was originally published in The King’s Indian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The unrest has died down in Baltimore and Ferguson; we wait for the next flashpoint. The narrative is well defined. An incident of apparent police brutality leads to demonstrations. During the civil unrest, there is property damage, maybe even some looting.

Those involved are described as thugs, instigators, inciters….. The mainstream media will broadcast talking heads that look in confusion and disgust as they describe the events as incomprehensible and irrational — people wrecking havoc on their own communities. There is a sense of self-destruction and nihilism that is beyond reasoning, a manifestation of deep pathology at beast and an undercurrent of racial evolutionary thinking at worst in the vein of Lewis Morgan.

These narratives are reinforcements of the marginalization of these communities in the generation of the sense of the other. Plus they are deeply idiotic in their inability to incorporate a basic psychology, the psychology of spite.

We see spite, the willingness to incur a cost to myself to inflict a much greater cost to you, whenever people feel deeply wronged. Or when they see other people being wronged. Th Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has done humor experiments with little kids, demonstrating that the impulse to punish the unjust runs deep in our DNA, and that this impulse is so strong, kids will force feed them selves the dreaded broccoli if they think it will hurt abutter kid who is a bully.

The forms of spite depend upon the context, especially the mechanism available to people to inflict damage on others as punishment. For the disenfranchised, these forms can be extreme. Even suicide bombers, I would argue, can be seen as an extreme form of spite.

Protesters in poor marginalized communities like Ferguson, who have experienced deeply unjust costs, are incited to rage. Spite is not a rational response because as we all know, people are not rational machines. It is an impulse. It is uncontrollable like so much of our behavior.

The trust game, the ultimate game, etc, all show how irrational we are. And anyone who has experienced the tinge of road rage knows that the response to a cheater inflicting a cost on you is impulsive. Meaning, one someone cuts you off forcing you to hit the breaks, your anger flares. You might even do something stupid in return.

The rage that is expressed by protestors is not random. They are not lashing out indiscriminately. Who are the targets of their rage? The police, representatives of a system of corrupt rule of law, any more largely, anyone who contributes to the continued marginalization of the community. Layered onto this is a practical tactical evaluation — you would expect recipients of their rage to be defined by who is a facile target. When enraged they want o inflict the greatest damage at the least cost to themselves.

When I hear how protestors are wrecking havoc on their own communities, I also have a hard time understanding what exactly this means other in the most crude sense of geography. The incidences happen in a location to a population that is aggregated in a location, and may not be extremely mobile. And the forms of social manifestation are not necessarily organized. So the location of the civil unrest seems predictable and understandable. And I am also not clear what the meaning of community is in these contexts. They stores that are looted may not been seen to be a part of the community fabric. The liquor store might be seen as exploitative. Are looters and vandals targeting what they see to be key assets of the community? I wonder.

Community is an old concept, meaning it stems from the particularities of our social organization when we lived in small tight-knit communities many 1000s of years ago. What community the news casters are talking abut is unclear to me.

So the next time police brutality incident that leads to unrest, and you hear the old narrative, think about the self-sacrifice that people are willing to make to inflict some harm on the system that seems unjust. It is both comprehensible and predictable. Because it is basic human nature to want justice.

Spite and the Civil Unrest in Baltimore was originally published in The King’s Indian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.