April 6th, 2009
My speaking, facilitating and consulting are all connected to the issues of diversity, inclusion, authenticity, innovation and transformation. I see these issues as all being overlapping and inter-related. They also each have a leadership component and a cultural component in my opinion. I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about leadership and a new way of leadership, a truly critical issue for us moving forward. Now I am going to now spend some time examining culture.
I think that some of us tend to think of culture as something specific to nations or ethnic groups, but I want to focus primarily on organizational culture. I think that the culture of organizations has a lot of things in common with the cultural aspects of families, communities, nations and ethnic groups, but it also probably unique in some ways.
Edgar Schein is considered my many to be the “guru” of organizational culture and he has written several books on the topic. I find Schein’s thinking to be valuable, but I also am a big fan of the work of Geert Hofstede, and probably incorporate more of his thinking on culture into my work than anybody else’s. I think that the writing and thinking of Arie de Geus, Brenda Zimmerman, Richard Florida, Bob Sutton, Karen Stephenson, C. Otto Scharmer, Etienne C. Wenger, Margaret Wheatley, Peter Senge and others is also very valuable and very applicable.
There are a lot of different definitions of culture, and I will probably touch on a few of them in my next post, but first a quick consideration of why I think that the issue of culture is so important.
When I was in the Marine Corps we talked about things that were “force-multipliers.” A force multiplier was anything that increased the impact of a unit…basically anything that would allow or help a unit be competitive against a larger unit, and we generally looked at things like technology, speed, surprise, etc. With enough of these types of things a small unit could engage and potentially defeat a larger unit…they multiplied the impact of the resources that you have.
I see organizational culture as a force-multiplier. I also see it as being poorly understood and horribly underutilized in the world of business today. With the philosophy of business that we have today and the philosophy of leadership that we have today, it is far easier to invest in non-living things than it is to invest in living things. The non-living things are predictable. We can measure them and weight them and inventory them. Their essence and value can be captured with spread sheets, formulas and forecasts.
Spread sheets and formulas are sloppy and dishonest when it comes to living things, when it comes to people and their relationships and a shared culture. So, once again we are talking about something that requires a different way of leadership and some different leadership competencies.
Because culture is an intangible and somewhat abstract thing, it often times gets overlooked. This is unfortunate because it is what we are immersed in everyday as employees…it is part of everything that goes on in an organization. I think that misunderstanding culture and overlooking culture is a big part of the reason why change efforts rarely take root…from smaller scale changes to large mergers & acquisitions.
A number of years ago, I started to read Ken Wilber, and while I cannot claim to understand everything that Ken Wilber says there is a great deal of it that I consider to be very real, very true and very valuable. One of the things I find to be very valuable is the four quadrant model:
I like this model and it is valuable to me in helping to remember the variables involved in change, growth, development and planning the future. In the organizational setting, sometimes we just focus on the things in the Upper Right and Lower Right quadrants…those are the more tangible, observable things. But I believer very strongly that if we want to make something happen we have to be considering all four quadrants.
Just putting something into our mission statemtent or changing policy does not mean it is going to happen…we still need to consider the Upper Left and Lower Left…the intangibles, the messy abstract, unpredictable stuff…including culture.
I used to work for a company that said a lot of really wonderful things in its mission and vision statements. It was quite proud of its mission and vision statements and liked to show them off. However. On a day to day baiss, the organization behaved very differently than what it claimed in its mission and vision. Having a mission statement that says you focus on customer serivice (Lower Right) does not necessarily make it so. Training staff on how to deliver customer service (Upper Right) does not necessarily mean that it is going to happen.
And as consumers we know this…different companies feel differently to us.
Small scale and large scale changes and plans often do not work becasue they just focus on the right hand stuff…the neat and orderly stuff. Real change…change that works and that is sustainable requires us to be invested in all four quadrants and that means we have to roll up our sleeves and get knee-deep in culture.
More to come on culture, love to hear your thoughts.
-be good to each other
I’m anxious to read the rest of your posts on Culture, Joe – I’m going to play a game with this, though…I’m going to replace the words "business" and "organization" with the word "community" when I read your posts.
Glad you read Wilber. I read him years ago, and I’m still boggled by his work. But, looking at that chart again after so many years, a sudden bit of epiphany hit me…although "community" could be seen as the lower right quadrant, a community could not exist without the other three quadrants, IMO.