Co-create your Culture Change

For this interview, I sat down with Cordelia Krooß, Change Facilitator at BASF (global chemistry company HQ out of Ludwigshafen, Germany). The focus of Cordelia’s work is to guide employees through changes — both in the organizational culture and changes linked to IT and digitalization. Cordelia’s experience with a recent culture change initiative ‘Embrace’ has given her new insights. She feels strongly that to have a real impact we have to actively co-create our organizational culture.

“You can’t roll out culture — culture can only be co-created!”

In her opinion, it’s important that we have stated visions from management as a starting point but then we should be asking employees too, giving them the opportunity to co-create the culture and have their say. It’s all about the culture they want to have, what values are important to them.

Embrace — Culture Change Initiative

When Cordelia headed up the culture change initiative ‘Embrace’ at BASF with two other colleagues (from HR and Communications) they decided not to create and roll out the culture change as a classic top-down approach.

A new division president and his top leadership team had come out with their vision (a mind map) of the culture they wanted to have in this division (5000 employees) of the global company BASF. The reason for the culture change was coming from the top, but Cordelia and her colleagues felt it was important to create a different strategy to create links between the leadership expressed need and peoples’ needs in the division.

Cascading one idea down through the organisation just wasn’t enough or the option they felt would work.

Part of BASF culture had been a mindset of aiming for safe results. It makes sense — this is a company dealing with often lethal chemicals! As Cordelia points out, this is the typical DNA for a chemical company — it’s part of the heritage of the industry. So though BASF wanted to move into agile ways of working, at the same time they were operating in a culture where people had a hard time dealing with mistakes.

There was a lot of fear of failure. So part of ‘Embrace’ was to model a new mindset, a new approach for more openness, taking more risks, being more innovative, encouraging people to support each other, and have trust in the organization. ‘Embrace’ as a culture change initiative was targeting 5000 people in IT and Supply Chain.

A bit about BASF

The company’s tagline is: BASF creates chemistry. This can be anything from basic chemicals to advanced functional materials — think wall paint or the foam in a pair of running shoes, even the plastics in your car. With 122,000 worldwide employees and customers all over the world in all industries, BASF’s HQ is based in Ludwigshafen in Germany. At their headquarters they have the largest chemical site in the world — all the multiple plants at this location are connected to each other. As Cordelia points out, the idea of connection is fundamentally at the heart of the company.

Since it started 150 years ago, BASF has (naturally) grown to have quite a typical corporate culture.

So how can a large global corporation like this make impactful, visionary culture change? It’s not typically the kind of initiative you might associate with an established chemical company, how can they retain a startup-like attitude and capacity for change and innovation?

Embrace — how? Global workshops

The first step was to invite employees to attend a series of global events asking what the needs were. Events were held in Antwerpen, New Jersey, São Paulo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and at different sites in Germany, so that everyone could be involved.

The very intentional message was to show: “This is not a German HQ thing, we want to involve everyone.”

From a global and intercultural inclusion perspective, this is — in my opinion — doing it right. Getting input from all corners of the business. And the feedback Cordelia and her colleagues received was that it was working … for those inside the company.

But for those trying to do business from the outside with the company, things were not so simple. The feedback reflected that the technology and infrastructure was in place but customers, stakeholders, users they struggled to find BASF employees in this division who took ownership and were driving things forward.

What needed fixing was the way things were done. The culture of the division was the missing link. Culture change was where the division could deliver in terms of the new president’s strategy. Processes needed to become transparent. And transparency became a key driver for the culture change initiative — for customers but also between internal colleagues.

Format which supports transparency

The global workshops ran over several days and incorporated different elements but facilitated LEGO Serious Play activities were a central component. Choosing a non-verbal, non-linear, creative format for the exploration of the division’s values turned out to support an equal and inclusive discussion.

Cordelia shares how Shanghai workshops participants were worried whether the format of this very open, informal dialog would work in the context of a Chinese culture. The Chinese participants expected to learn about the new culture and be taught how to embed it in their Shanghai office. But it was the exact opposite which was on the agenda: to come up with ideas for what this new culture should look like!

Both Chinese and German leaders participated in the Shanghai workshop, shares Cordelia, so when a younger Chinese women during the LEGO creations began to challenge the German leader’s ideas and strongly advocate her own.

“It became clear to me that the workshop had managed to unlock something magic. This was a forum for all voices.”

What has been the outcome of ‘Embrace’? Any surprises?

Values for the division

The global workshops produced a list of several hundred prioritized values. Cordelia and her colleagues wanted to boil this massive list down to four essential values. They took the top ten and had the whole division of 5000 vote, with resulted in these four values being the most important for the employees:

• Courage
• Collaboration
• Trust
• Ownership

Culture Hacks

During the workshops people also came up with many really tangible, good ideas which were collected in the workshop documentation. But there were some really cool, good ideas, so the question was what to do with them!

Cordelia and her colleagues wanted to approach these ideas in a way that felt inclusive and playful and made them accessible to all. In her search for ways to put these tangible ideas into a format and spread them Cordelia came across the term CultureHacks.

“It’s about thinking of a culture within an organization as a code, and then using these little ways to hack that code — overwrite it, tweak it, constantly improve it.”

One CultureHack which had emerged was ‘Share the imperfect’. Finding ways to support learning from failures, share the work as it’s in progress. And in this spirit of sharing the imperfect a first prototype of four different CultureHacks were being spread within the division. They were well received at a community meeting and suggested improvements were added so the first prototype was replaced with a series of 19 hacks (shared via email and internal sharepoint site).

Now there are 22 hacks as the first triggers additional co-creations of further hacks. The series also include some blank CultureHack templates, with guidance on how you can add your own CultureHack by reflecting on what the benefits are of the hack, who’s the target, and what the level of ‘spiciness’ is :-)

CultureHacks proved to be something that really helped to trigger the behavioral change which had been the original vision from management (especially when it comes to developed an ‘Agile’ mindset). Cordelia shared that:

“‘Share the imperfect’ really helps people to find the courage they need to share the work in progress. Once it became an “official” culture hack of BASF, it was allowed and even endorsed by top management.”

The series of CultureHacks can now be downloaded by everyone in BASF’s IT and Supply chain, and other divisions too, and as a result CultureHacks have started to pop up all over the organisation. In Cordelia’s own words:

“It turned out to be a secret ‘Easter egg’ and went viral!”

Some advice…

Cordelia says that one thing they initially found really hard to understand was how much time and patience you need for culture change — on a theoretical level the steps in the change process are clear but the evolutionary nature of the behavioral change has its own timeline. Organizational cultural change did happen in BASF but it had its own life.

One byproduct of ‘Embrace’ has been a co-creation of local division strategies: so now the corporate strategy is broken down into each local division. This means the strategy conversation is taking place in an open online community (for full transparency) where everyone can join.

Here the strategy team share what they are working on, what questions and challenges they have and employees can contribute. This has been very successful and has made a big impact. Some very active members of the online community eventually became part of the core strategy team! It was clear that they had a lot of value to add and expertise to bring to the work. Thanks to measures and opportunities like this people are heard and valued in new ways at BASF.

Cordelia’s main piece of advice is to start with that top management vision. Starting with bottom-up initiatives can be difficult, though not impossible, if you link it to top management early in the process and make it clear to everyone that all perspectives are needed. Remember: culture can only be co-created!

The art is to find ways to have your changes take hold and ‘live’ in a sustainable way in the organization. Maybe you need little strategies — like the CultureHacks — to make the culture changes tangible and keep it relevant for people in their every day.

And finally Cordial points out:

“Don’t underestimate what changes you can achieve with time and patience!”

Find ways to bring in the heritage of what has been learned so far, use it for the ongoing work and needs within the organization. If you do all of this, according to Cordelia, “Change is going to continue to happen.”