Myth of Culture Change

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” Peter Drucker once said. This is why culture change is often regarded as the supreme discipline in change management. Strategies, organizations, processes or rules can be developed and changed relatively easily on paper. But do people and organizations behave as desired afterwards?
Academics and the consulting industry are therefore constantly developing new models to capture culture in different ways, resulting in veritable consulting fads that promise the philosopher’s stone. Is it all voodoo – what really works?
And: What is culture in an organization anyway? How can it actually be changed in a targeted manner? And what can external consulting do?

Culture is the music that everyone in the organization dances to, even if no one hears it. (Bernd Schmidt)

Culture is an ambiguous term, because every science that deals with it has its own definition of culture. There are cultural artifacts that can be seen, such as the reception area of a proud medium-sized company with a portrait of the company founder. Or the friendly, professional appearance of the service staff. And there are less visible cultural elements such as the values and norms that people in the organization live by. And there are the deeply rooted convictions and beliefs that unite the majority of people in an organization and create their identity. Edgar Schein once very aptly divided the phenomenon of culture into these three levels: visible artifacts such as behaviors, values and norms and deep-rooted shared beliefs.

If you change strategies, organizations or processes, you primarily want to adapt people’s behavior to these new organizations. For example, employees in the new, flatter organization should be more open, more committed, more independent, more ‚agile‘, more collaborative or more customer-oriented than before in the ‚old‘ organization. It is therefore essentially about setting new behavioral norms.

Human behavior has deep roots and behavioral patterns are usually stable. On the one hand, they are rooted in the individual’s personality, motives, values and experiences – and on the other hand, they are shaped by the values, beliefs, thought patterns and identity, i.e. the behavioural norms of the organization in which we operate.

I would have liked to, but I didn’t dare to. (Karl Valentin)

Cultural ‚traditional‘ patterns of behaviour and behavioural norms reduce complexity for us and ensure harmonization. Once I have understood the cultural patterns of an organization, I know how I have to behave in order to fit in. And I adopt these patterns so that I don’t have to keep thinking about how I should behave.

Such patterns save energy and time.

However, this means that both my deep-rooted personality factors and my values, as well as traditional patterns of behaviour in my organization, strongly stabilize my behaviour. These two force fields can have an enormous holding effect and make change difficult.

If people are to change their behaviour, they must have the will and ability (personal factors) as well as the should and may (organizational factors).

Everything is connected to everything else

Like biological systems, organizations are complex systems in which many things are connected to many things. In a broader sense, such a system can be called a culture. In such cultures and with these cultural elements, people satisfy their needs for security, recognition or development. They serve to form identity, self-assurance and demarcation.

Cultures and cultural elements cannot be technically categorized and switched on and off. They are living, organic, dynamic entities and have an instinct for self-preservation. This is another reason why they are initially stable.

Can cultures at least be measured or classified?

There are a variety of tools on the consulting market to measure and at least categorize cultures – some scientifically developed or tested – others are based more on proven theoretical models.

Depending on the approach, they measure aspects such as personality types, values and norms, motives, emotions, behavioral tendencies, leadership styles, identity patterns, self-images or individual willingness to change.

These approaches and survey instruments (we also like to work with some of them) are usually always complex polarities profiles, which are then graphically reduced to two or more dimensions for better representation. Such dimensions include maturity levels, willingness to take risks, openness, external/internal orientation. Or the cultures are simply assigned to certain ‚cultural types‘.

These models therefore work by simplifying the complex phenomenon of culture in some of its facets and thus making it manageable. And they provide rough starting points for change.

Nevertheless, questioning instruments are NOT an exact diagnosis like an MRI scan of the body, which creates transparency down to the last molecule. But even the MRI scan does not take hormonal control circuits into account and therefore only understands a single aspect.

Cultural models are a reduction of reality that reflect one aspect of culture. They do NOT reflect the multi-layered dynamics and causal relationships of human behaviour in an organization. How has a cultural pattern developed, what ‚hard‘ or ’soft‘ factors are involved? Where are the barriers or incentives for change?
This is exactly what change management is all about – especially culture change.

Culture change is empathetic manual and mental work!

If you want to change organizations, you have to try to really understand the visible and invisible interdependencies in order to apply the leverage in the right place. To do this, you have to listen carefully to the people in the organization. And ask the right questions. And develop an empathetic feeling for what lies behind a behavior. You have to understand how the interaction of organizational structures and cultural elements in the past has made the organization what it is now.

And you have to make an important transfer: To analyze which cultural elements are functional for the future of the organization in terms of strategy. And which other cultural elements will be needed in the future.

Because every interaction with people in the organization is also an intervention, it requires respect and appreciation for the past. And yet a clear view of the dysfunctional and future challenges, coupled with a solution-oriented attitude. It is about attentive, subjective understanding. The main skill here is to ask the right questions that enable a change of perspective. It sounds simple, but it requires questioning techniques and experience.

Despite all the instrumentalized subjectivity, it must also be made clear that a consulting process does not mean anything arbitrary or purely subjective. It is important to always look for evidence, for plausible causes and causal relationships. And if categories and models are needed to reduce complexity for the customer, then these methods should be evidence-based. In other words: if models are used, then not arbitrary ones, but ones with a scientific background.

For the customer: Golden nuggets, focus points and fields of action

It’s about putting out all your antennae in the consulting process. And to try to capture as many aspects of the culture as possible and allow them to have an effect on you in order to understand them in context. There are tools for this. We like to use the tools of design thinking.

As a consultant, you can really find ‚golden nuggets‘ when conducting qualitative interviews in this way (which should always be guided!)! Deep insights into connections that may not be visible to the client (usually a manager) because they are usually part of the system.

However, such surprising insights are usually not enough in a culture change project. What do you do with these insights? It is not enough to simply offload the entire complexity and the connections between culture and structure onto the client’s organization in a descriptive manner.

A consultant must be able to focus and prioritize.

In a change project, the consultant must reduce this complexity (together with the client) and work out concrete options for action. This is a creative act that makes the important and effective focus topics and change levers visible.

But it also involves making the systemic connections and consequences of using these levers clear to the client. Sometimes this can lead to the desire for change being relativized again.

If this is the solution, I want my problem back!

Like biological systems, organizational cultures have a certain stability and resistance to change. This is not only due to inertia or traditional behavior. Many things are connected to many things and cultural elements stabilize each other.

This is even more complex in human organizations – unlike a forest, humans have an awareness and see through strategies and question them. In most cases, change also entails risks or costs for the individual. Change management by tool or checklist (or more recently by canvas) is often too trivial. Example: Changes often create dilemmas. For example, if you want to preserve the cultural core (e.g. the ‚family‘ cultural element) of a company, but want to introduce corporate structures. These dilemmas must be resolved or at least addressed in order for change to work.

Sustainable change tools

There are a number of generic change levers that correspond to the systemic nature of cultures and, above all, are effective:

• Leadership and trust – investing in credibility and shared alignment of leadership teams
• Attention and a sense of urgency can be created. It often takes a loud bang at the beginning to generate the necessary attention.
• Communicate a clear visual vision of the future that is attractive
• Develop a credible storyline (where do we come from, what is the threat, where do we have to go and how do we get there?), effective narratives that involve everyone and address their needs and feelings
• Change hard contexts by removing organizational or process barriers (you have to know them)
• Create targeted incentives – and I don’t just mean money!
• Set symbolic behavioral norms and thus effectively replace old ones. This can also mean replacing a management function.
• Addressing dilemmas, contradictions and setbacks
• Reducing the risks for employees to get involved in new things
• Addressing needs and feelings
• Generate self-reflection – reach every individual – what does that mean for me and my behavior?
• Saying goodbye to the past with appreciation
• Changing perspectives of perception
• Simplify, work with images and symbols and draw attention
• Working with communicative elements of belonging and identity

The supreme discipline within the supreme discipline

There is a patent remedy for change that works in almost every culture change project:

Participation!

As described above, every change brings with it uncertainty and risks – even if it is only that familiar behavioral patterns become ineffective. This always harbors the risk of negative emotions and overt or covert resistance. In most cases, however, actively involving employees in the change is exactly the right remedy. If people can help shape their future and their new jobs themselves, then they become part of the new and lose their fear. Self-efficacy generates self-confidence, makes you open and free for creativity. Allowing participation and sometimes enduring detours is a real demonstration of trust in management. We therefore try to incorporate as many participative elements as possible into every change project. Even if it costs time and resources. In contrast to traditional strategy consulting, it would be a mistake in culture change to deliver ready-made concepts. This is the reason why strategy consultancies have such a hard time with culture change projects.
The self-reflection of the individual is already built into a participative consulting and change process and only needs to be supported by consultants and managers (e.g. through coaching). Employees and talents often surpass themselves in such change projects and show their talents. At the same time, such self-designed changes are often more sustainable.

Like any project, a culture change project also needs an agile roadmap, a classic project plan. And in most cases, it needs a professional communication structure.

Culture change can work, but it resembles an expedition.

To summarize, I would like to say that culture change can work. But it is more like a long expedition that needs to be well planned, prepared for eventualities and able to react spontaneously. Human behavioral patterns are deeply rooted and cultural elements are often very stable and resistant to change. Every change in the system always has its price, which should be known before taking action. And changing human perspectives and behaviors should be more like dancing the tango than working through a checklist.

The more you can actively involve everyone in the change, the better it will work. It also makes sense, at least in the analysis and planning phase, to seek external advice that has experience in such change projects and, above all, brings an external perspective to the table.

Incidentally, there is one ‚contraindication‘ for me to reject a change project: If there is no clearly strategically justified intention for change in the management. Not all the details of a business strategy have to be worked out. Purely culturally based ideas for change – conceived from a humanistic ideal, for example – are often predestined to fail because there is no factual context to justify them.

I think it is similar to the old Bauhaus guiding principle “Form follows Function”:“Change follows Strategy”