10. March 2011 16:02
Posted by SamSari
"Yet it moves..."
While it’s quite unlikely that the great Italian physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei actually said these words, they do symbolize his defiance of a world that was neither willing nor able to accept a radical change to the established order. Of course Galileo’s story is hardly unique; cultures have always struggled with change. In fact, many would argue that the very purpose of a culture is to provide people with a sense of identity, stability and purpose in complex world, i.e. to shield individuals from change.
Galileo would undoubtedly have approved of the way many companies in today’s business world approach the concept of culture. After all, his work was based on a similar paradigm: that the world is an orderly and predictable place that can be understood with the right model. Companies often end up viewing their own culture and its ways of working in this mechanistic way; assuming that by acting on their leadership they will naturally initiate changes in the larger workforce. There are dozens of models in the world of change management that work this way, but by trying to ‘fit’ an organization into a particular change model they end up depicting culture the same way Galileo’s skeptics saw their universe; as a static and unmoving system.
Perhaps a more useful way to view culture is to use a term that we hear a lot in fields like artificial intelligence and chaos theory, where complexity rules. That term is ‘emergent properties’ which describes how a complex system or pattern can arise from a lot of relatively simple interactions. Change management expert Richard Seel puts it this way:
“Organizational culture is the emergent result of the continuing negotiations about values, meanings and proprieties between the members of that organization and its environment.”
Like Seel, SamSari likes to think of organizational culture as the result of these daily actions, a complex conversation that emerges from the simple interactions each of us has with our colleagues in our everyday work. In our change model, the key to changing mindsets and attitudes within a culture is to change this conversation, to focus on the stories, symbols, rituals and routines unique to the organization and to apply our energies there. Unfortunately, the majority of change programs tend to be focused not on changing the conversation, but on other ‘mechanistic’ features like organizational structures and reward systems. Given that a recent McKinsey and Company survey estimates that 70% of these programs fail, is it safe to assume that it’s time for a change of perspective?
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