Practical First Steps to Culture Change
It is the big day! Your boss has scheduled a whole day of off site fun activities. The Engagement Team have been busy putting up posters. The Technology Ambassadors have been busy liaising with stakeholders in business. You and your teammates car share to the hotel where a number of senior managers take to the stage in a caravan of enthusiasm. Finally your big boss gets up there. She is charismatic, attractive, a great performer with energy and just the right set of words. She introduces people from a massive outside consultancy who are here to tell you how to transform. Today is the day we launch the Transformation Initiative!
“We are no longer a company that does <whatever your company does to make money>, we are a Technology Company with a Digital Culture!”.
This scenario has been played out thousands of times as the buzzwords of Technology and Digital Culture whizz through our workplaces. I’ve been on that stage, I’ve been the boss, I’ve released the Kraken. I’ve also seen culture change not change anything, despite all best intentions. After a few times around the circle I got to wondering what is meant by culture anyway, and why is changing it so hard? Are there some basic things that generally get missed that can improve the chances of success?
What do we mean by ‘Culture”
Questioning what is culture has been around a long time. Back in the early 1800s, culture was associated with aesthetics rather than social behaviours. This is where we get the idea of refined art and products being high culture. “Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.” (Matthew Arnold). Early social scientists reacted against this exclusive attitude towards culture. Chaps like Edward Tylor took the leap forward to include all human social organisation as cultures, arranged on a spectrum from “savagery” through to “civilisation”. This is summed up in one of his best known quote, “Culture… is that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by [a human] as a member of society”. This view laid the foundations for Anthropology as we know it today. However, by applying the concept of whole, it led to over-simplifications of complex, many tiered societies. The Indian Caste System, as interpreted by the British, is an example of how this impacted people directly. It also ranked cultures by a Victorian concept of good, validating atrocities against people of cultures perceives as less civilised. It wasn’t until the mid twentieth century when Anthropologists such as Franz Boas and his students started to call out all cultures as being complex, multi-faceted and unrelated to inherited traits but rather based on a multitude of historical moderators. “Culture is a thing sui generis [unique, individual] which can be explained only in terms of itself” (Robert Lowie).
Today, with the springing up of social networks, there has been an explosion in micro-cultures. the work by the great anthropologists is now being used to understand how even small teams of people can have unique practices and behaviours. Looking at a normal workplace, once can see how a ‘company culture’ is actually the result of the interactions between multiple social groups, and how one single employee will be in multiple social groups at any one time. With this complexity resting on everyone’s shoulders, is it no wonder many companies fail miserably to transform.
Social groups?
A social group can be defined as ‘… a set of attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviours shared by a group of people, but different for each individual, communicated from one generation to the next” (Matsumoto). The group will have symbols and artefacts that are important to them (Kroeber & Kluckhohn). The beliefs/ideas of the group have attached values, and are based on a set of espoused and assumed knowledge.
Social groups are the building blocks of a culture. A successful culture has many of internal social groups aligned around some generally accepted concepts. For example, having a consistent set of religious beliefs, or laws that are fairly applied to all people. These universal cultural elements (‘etics’) are the framework upon which the social group’s unique set of concepts (‘emics’). This consistency enables people to belong to multiple social groups without significant conflict. ( Harry C. Triandis)
Without the common set of etics, social cohesion between multiple groups starts to break down. People subconsciously migrate to social groups that do have consistency, often in the more basic of elements. Single issue politics is an example of this clustering around common base elements as social etics break down. In the enterprise world, this may be seen as fixation on company-wide objectives or polarisation between two programming languages in the engineering teams.
Step 1: knowing what culture isn’t
Anthropology has given us a set of inadequate conceptions of culture, that is, common ideas about culture that are incorrect. Being aware of inadequate conceptions of culture is important so to avoid common pitfalls of cultural change. Therefore, the first practical step for culture change is for the leaders of a company to understand, discuss and internalise these inadequate conceptions.
- Company culture is homogeneous (FALSE):
Every company has multiple social groups. A great company has a common set of etics while liberating each group to define their own emics. transformation needs to be set into context of the individual social groups - Company culture is a thing (FALSE):
An outsider looking into your company might perceive a single culture, but people within the company responsible for transformation should never ‘buy their own sales literature”. What is perceived on the outside is the result of layers and layers of social groups all interacting. This helps to explain the phenomenon of Conway’s Law, in which a company’s product reflects the internal organisation of the company. - Company culture is uniformly distributed among all members (FALSE):
Members of a group will perceive the emics differently to other members, and so the impact of transformation is unique to each member. While setting up the company structure, defining the etics and working out how the various social groups can work together is a group effort, helping each individual to change is done through one-to-one communications. - An individual possesses a single culture (FALSE):
Any single employee is involved in multiple social groups, and so combines many emics. Sharing a manager, sharing a profession, sharing a workplace, a hobby, and so on. If the company has conflicting or missing etics, then the emics coming from each social group will drive conflict into individuals. The tension between the etics of the outside world, and the emics from a conflicting number of diverse social groups within work leads to an increase of moral relativism, where good people do bad things at work because it is simply less hassle. - Company culture is custom (FALSE):
Culture is not a set of traditions, though it may seem that way to an outsider. The beliefs, artefacts, attitudes and behaviours are very real and relevant to the members of the group. They cannot be simply dismissed as an anachronism. As the etics of an organisation changes, the various social groups need to adapt their emics. This is most destructive when there was not a sufficiently rigorous set of etics at the start. This makes the behaviours of each social group unpredictable as the group members try to identify common emics from other groups. - Company culture is immutable (FALSE):
What we do, the values we hold, our attitudes change all the time, and therefore how social groups interact within themselves change. Transformation cannot be based on an assumption of a static culture, but rather an accelerated migration of multiple social groups to new beliefs, attitudes and behaviours.
Step 2: define what is the outcome!
If there is a single key to a successful transformation, it is to clearly define the expected outcome, or the etics around which the social groups should crystallise their emics. Defining the outcome needs to be done in a way that is easily consumed by the complexity of social groups that make up the company. Unfortunately, many companies simply do not do this, instead falling back onto corporate speak of ‘technology’, ‘innovation’, ‘digital’, ‘agile’ and so on.
The outcomes of transformation,the etics, are the expectations placed upon the employees of the company on how they will work going forward. The outcomes need to have a very clear benefit to both the customer and the business. This is not the same as the company mission statement, which defines what the company does to make money. As such, the outcomes need to be explicit, applicable to all employees of the company and actionable.
A great example of this is the Amazon Leadership Principles. These principles very clearly set out in simple language how an Amazonian is expected to behave and the reasons why. They guide the actions of an individual, not group, and can be applied to any social group within the company. Amazon has gotten to the point where these principles are used in an objective way to evaluate the behaviours of individuals through crowd-sourced feedback.
Contrast the Amazon Leadership Principles to the more typical set; these are from Shop Direct but are common to many companies. These values are less specific, they can be interpreted many different ways to back up any diverse actions of social groups. How exactly being brave, or being aspirational can benefit the company is unclear. They are just words that look good on a poster, but has very little penetration into the employee mindset.
Establishing the etics is critical as they are the framework by which social groups will evaluate their attitudes, behaviours, beliefs and values. For example, if one was to take “ Working Software over comprehensive documentation” from the Agile Manifesto as an etic, then this drives a focused conversation between engineering, architecture, release management and test on what is enough documentation. Etics brings together social groups in a discussion on how all groups can work together.
A bonus Step 2a, the first social group that should use the set of etics is the Executive Board itself. If the most senior social group in the company cannot live by the etics, then transformation cannot be successful. It also makes the executive take the process of defining etics seriously. The Executive needs to have confidence to stand in front of the company and give real world examples of how the are upholding the etics.
Step 3: Limit the number of social groups
Our access to communication tools, to easy transportation and increases in leisure time has multiplied the number of social groups to which we each belong. This makes life confusing and hard for all of us. This is even more so in work where social groups are rarely aligned.
For example, it is common for Architects to report up to the CTO outside of engineering. This was a necessity in the days of waterfall when work was project-centric. The Solution Architecture social group have all sorts of documents, patterns and standards as their artefacts, they have review and approval boards as their ceremonies, they hold their position as superior to engineering as their attitude and they believe in the importance of complete modelling, deep architecture, central command and control.
The engineering social group has the code and tests as the artefacts, the code review and merge as their ceremonies, they often have a victim attitude and believe that they have to chuck code out and incur technical debt because the Project Manager is evil. They like to ignore the output of the architects, often because it is simply wrong, but also because of bloody mindedness.
The same exercise can be done with the Business Analysts, Project Managers, Programme Managers, Product Owners, Business Owners, Resource Managers, QA, and so on. All these social groups competing against each other, and in some cases, outright war. It isn’t unusual to find social groups having opposing KPIs. The release team are punished if there are too many production issues, but the engineering team are punished if they don’t get code out quickly.
At the senior leadership social group, the project plans, KPIs, personal objectives and budget are the artefacts, the weekly LT, the steering committees and quarterly planning meetings the ceremonies. The attitude is command and control, from mouth to action, and they believe that they need to make all the decisions. There is an added complexity with the leadership social group; they each represent a different social group (engineering, architecture, etc.) and therefore are battling for both recognition and protection of their team and for recognition for themselves. The Head of Product Management fighting with the Head of Engineering about employee X is better than employee Y.
Even at this very high level, one can see how the conflicts between social groups evolve. If we then add in the problems of getting people to speak up (Organisational Silence), then transformation quickly breaks down into open warfare.
Step 3 is therefore the leaders taking consciously action to reduce the number of social groups that get involved in the delivery of your product to your customer. This step is the hardest for the leadership to take as it means evaluating how they view themselves, the social groups they represent and the artefacts, values, ceremonies and beliefs they have been promoting for years. At this point is is critical not to consider the people themselves. This cannot be a personnel discussion, but one on how they want to operate.
This discussion must be based on the previously defined company etics. To aid in the discussion it is useful to use the outcome-based virtuous cycle as a framework. The outcome-based virtuous cycle has three crucial actors, the customer, the person who understands the customer and company, so can identify the beneficial outcomes for both the customer and the company, and the delivery team that delivers the outcome to the customer. The cycle is optimised by reducing the hand offs between internal groups, eliminating work that isn’t directly benefiting the customer, removing artefacts that have no long term use, limiting ceremonies to just those that are useful and streamlining the process of idea to deployment.
Step 4: Bring in a disruptive, experienced outsider
Outsiders have fresh ways to look at your business. They can hold up a mirror to your behaviours as well as help establish the new ways of working. Disruptive outsiders are great, but need protecting. They will be the lightning conductor for all the anguish and suffering that step 2 and 3 create. The disruptive outside needs to have the confidence to challenge where challenge has not previously existed. Managers who has assumed ‘in charge’ roles in the past, the VP and Head-of roles, in particular can be very destructive if not managed correctly.
The ideal outsider is not a consultancy push some pre-canned solution that worked someplace else. While such consultancies are helpful, they are not building a culture unique to your firm and your etics. Rather, the outsider will come in at a practical level, operating as a Chief Delivery Officer or Chief Technical Officer. Their role is to drive the discussion, of breaking down the problems of corporate silence and driving radical honesty at the highest level. If executives are playing games, then how do they expect the company to succeed?
Step 5: Roll out the etics
We are now back at the start, the big launch day. However, what is different here is that the launch is focused on the etics and the new social groups. Rather than platitudes around being brave, innovation and aspirations, the message is one of clear cultural elements around which the new social groups can unite. The day should be one of having the groups engage and discuss, with the executives being on hand to moderate and drive the conversation.
