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November 2009 | Volume 5 | Issue 8
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“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing”
– Albert Einstein
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As some of you may know, Russ Ackoff passed away last month. He was a giant in the field of Systems Thinking and will be missed by us all. Rest in peace, Russ - you will never be replaced.
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Leading Strategic and Cultural Change – Best Practices Research Report
PROBLEM 9: Failing to Understand and Appreciate the Structural Nature of Cultural Change
BEST PRACTICE: Understand the Need for a focus on the Seven Pillars of Cultural Change
Culture Change is a phrase bandied about quite freely. When Steve Haines was giving a talk to 150 ASTD members at one of their recent annual conferences, practically every hand it the room was raised in response to whether or not they were involved in culture change in their organization. Wonder what each of their definitions of culture change was? Since they were in training, it reinforced what we see regularly in that culture change, most often is seen as an individual issue, and if we just train them, the culture will change.
That idea is so naive it is laughable. Culture is “the way we do things around here”. Ideally it is a set of Core Values that become Guiding Principles for our behaviors that collectively describe the culture – it is interlocking collectively, approved behaviors – not just individual behaviors.
However, what are the impacts on our behaviors? Aren’t they much more complex than just teaching them supposedly new skills?
One set of our behaviors comes from our background, genes and make up, ethnicity and family and society culture that we learn growing up.
Another set of guiding principles comes from our education, especially our advanced education in college and beyond that provides us with the traditions of the profession/function in which we earn a degree.
These first two sets of sources of a person’s cultural norms of behaviors in an organization are deeply personal, and are rooted and structured in us as a person—thus quite hard to change.
However, the third set of sources for guiding an employee are the set of policies, procedures, stories, myths, rewards and processes that the organization has adopted. Our Best Practices Research mirrors that of the Baldrige Quality Award when we took two years to study their view of an organization as a system vs. ours. The combined result was seven pillars that together are an integrated holistic source of the desired and reinforced culture of an organization.
The seven pillars either work together and reinforce each other to create the Desired Culture or they are fragmented and cause confusion as a piecemeal set of cultural norms that do NOT help your organization become a high performing organization.
If we have a desired culture in mind, we must focus on each of these Seven Pillars and reinforce them with all employees regularly.
Your Core Values should be guides to behavior that create your desired culture.
Which Core Value needs changing?
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