Organisational Culture Change

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If culture is heavily implicated in organisational success, let's round up the usual suspects: organisations whose culture supports employee participation in decision making, adaptable work methods, sensible work designs, and reasonable and clear goals perform at a significantly higher level than do organisations low on those factors.

So far, so good: these correlations are all fine and dandy, but the cultures that provide certain firms with competitive edge may be hard to emulate. What is more, the classic literature on culture change refers to it as being an extremely difficult, long-term process - 6 to 15 years. These timescales of course, are an unrealistic nonsense in rapidly changing business landscapes.

But here's where it gets interesting: performance results over time are supported by cultures that emphasise anticipating and adapting to environmental change, and that is doable within rapid timescales (providing we let go of those linear prescriptions in old paradigm change management).

If you've read any of our other literature on this web site you already know where we're coming from: rapid change and adaptation comes from getting the whole culture into a room, (or at least a representative microcosm of it i.e. sufficient numbers of people from the organisation to contain the cultural DNA) and then provide them with:

• Some good questions (informed by the organisational diagnosis we'll help you to perform)
• Information, intelligence and data to support and inform their intelligent thinking
• A well-designed process to enable them to work on the questions, and produce coherent plans and actions for changes that have realism factored in, by design

With the right information and a good process, large groups with good groundrules speak the truth, face (tough) reality, and work out how to adapt. Because the process selects the right people, in addition to the diversity of perspectives and intelligences required, the events contain people with the seniority to take some decisions in real time and to prevent the organisation from going off at an unrealistic tangent. For some organisations this level of participative decision-making may be entirely new and may itself be a culture change.

Significant risk results when the culture that is essential to strategy implementation is incompatible with existing patterns of behaviour. Using the interventions we have outlined above, the organisation will successfully finesse an adaptive solution (that will be both excellent and surprising) that addresses:

• Whether implementation plans should be changed to manage around the existing culture
• Whether the culture should be changed
• Whether the strategy itself should be modified or even substituted for another

A summary of what we offer
We don't do it to you, we do it with you:

• We help you select from a number of cultural assessment methods so that you know what culture you've got and the degree of fit it has with your strategy.
• We will co-design with you a process that works and helps you rapidly address the cultural issues in a way that is congruent with the organisation.
• We will support you right through the change, from cultural assessment to facilitating some of the work streams or creating an excellent project and change management environment.
• We use our experience of working across national and multi-national cultures to help you anticipate and avoid the pitfalls.
• We are skilled in engaging the whole system in defining and implementing a cultural shift, helping you work with resistance.

Two brief examples of our work

An electronics company was concerned that the organisation had slipped into a blame culture. We helped them to carefully define what ‘no blame' looks like. (Just to caricature the problem of definition, how can you sack someone in a ‘no blame culture' for serious misconduct without blaming him or her)? Once senior management had accepted the model, it was rolled out across the organisation in a series of large group events, using a process we helped to create, delivered by facilitators we helped to train. These events gave the workforce the opportunity to test out whether senior managers were serious. They were and the staff survey regularly tests the issue. There is now a high level of awareness of the need to manage blame and dial it out at all levels in the company.

A leading soft drinks manufacturer recognised that the only way to remain at the competitive edge in their sector would be through developing their workforce, so that more employees -throughout the organisation- would become ‘responsive and autonomous decision makers'. OPDC rolled out a Coaching Development Programme, which equipped all People Managers with the necessary skills to develop their teams through coaching and establish a coaching culture.