Cultivating and/or changing cultures?

What are organisational cultures, really? How can we change them, if at all?

View from near Cetinje, Montenegro - 28 Augist 2023

Montenegro: a very potted history

This week I visited the beautiful country of Montenegro, with Polish friends who have part of their long term roots there. This is not an article about Montenegro, but I use this short narrative as an indication on what history means for a country, and, by extension, its cultural evolution that can be used as an analogy for business cultures.

Montenegro is a country that has been through many iterations in its colourful history, different parts of it being governed by multiple different conquerors and kings. From the Illyrians, the Romans (Byzantines), the Slavs, parts of it by the Kingdom of Venice, and as much of the entire region as part of the Turkish Ottoman empire. It went through a cycle of being an independent principality and later a kingdom before during World War I eventually being occupied by the Austrian-Hungarian empire.

After that war, it became part of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes before that eventually expanded into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1922). After World War II, Montenegro became one of the six republics within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), under president Tito (1945).

After the SFRY disbanded in 1992, it became part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), together with Serbia, where it participated on the Serbian side in the awful Bosnian and Croatian wars (1991-1995).

Eventually, in 2006, Montenegro voted for independence from Serbia, beating the set threshold of 55% by just 2300 votes. Thus, it became an independent country, but with such a narrow margin, the pro- and anti-Serbian sentiments remain. You can still see many Serbian flags in some locations, and there is the Serbian Orthodox Church (proudly flying the Serbian flag) as well as the renamed Montenegrin Orthodox Church, flying the wide-spread Motenegrin flag.

In 2016 a short-lived coup d’etat was attempted by pro-Serbian parties. And, in 2017 Montenegro joined NATO and it’s currently in the process of trying to join the EU.

It is clear that the country’s history is complex and leads to many different expressions of its culture in different guises. You can also see that in the languages people speak, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Albanian. It’s not easy to define Montenegrin as a language. You also see both Latin and Cyrillic writings all over the country (with, interestingly, Cyrillic being used exclusively on graveyards). I mention this because language is an expression of culture and vice versa.

Cultures and inherently linguistic and languages are inherently cultural.

What is Culture?

Changing an organisational culture is a notoriously difficult process and I have been thinking about some aspects of this for quite some time, very much in the context of my experience.

Things like

1. what actually is culture?

2. why do we want to change the culture; what do we expect from it?

3. why is changing “culture” so difficult and

4. what might be some helpful, perhaps different, ways to think about “culture change”?

Allow us to explore those elements here, based on my experience.

There are of course multiple ways to describe what culture is.

Merriam-Webster dictionary uses as a definition that could lead us to say that

Organisational culture is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organisation.

That is a helpful start, but some immediate questions come to mind when we think about it in the context of the organisations I have worked in. Questions like:

1. Where does our culture come from?

2. Is our culture a static thing? Or a dynamic process? Neither of those? Or both?

3. Is our culture homogenous in our organisation? Or in parts of it?

4. Is our culture experienced the same by everyone as by me or not (at all)?

5. And, of course, can I change our culture in order to drive a certain determined objective?

I would like to suggest that in order to get to grips with those questions we need a model that resonates with our day-to-day experiences in our organisation.

In an earlier article I already indicated that such a model could be to see our  organisation as a set of continuously evolving conversations. Building on that model that worked for me, and is rooted in the scientific thinking from the Complexity & Management Centre, we can get to an updated definition of our organisational culture that can help us in this context:

Our culture is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that emerge out of the continuously evolving conversations and characterises our organisation.

This definition gives us a conversational model that can help us make sense:

1. It seems like the conversations in our organisation stand at the basis of our perceived culture

2. Since these conversations are continuously evolving, they are -by definition- not static but emerging out of dynamic, complex processes

3. It stands to reason that these conversations differ in different parts of our organisation and that therefore the continuously emerging culture might also be quite different depending on which part we choose to look at

4. Since all our experiences and expectations for the future are different, it is very likely that our culture will be experienced differently by different people

5. This implies that the perceived characteristics of our organisation are diverse and continuously evolving

This opens all sorts of new angles on how we might think about changing our organisational culture to achieve some predetermined objective

It may help us understand why changing our organisational culture to what we want it to be is so difficult.

Stari Bar, Montenegro. This ruined site is now a museum helping people understand how things used to be - August 2023

Culture change…  and, how we can get it wrong

Many culture change initiatives that I have experienced are programmes that aim to move the culture from some current state to a future state that we believe is better for our overall strategic goals and that adds value to the business.

Perhaps the first question we ought to ask ourselves what we aim to achieve with our culture change.

I will draw from an example from my experience to highlight an interesting issue that can emerge from our own assumptions about (national or organisational) cultures.

In a large global company with many, hourly, shift workers, it was recognised that to manage the cost of the workforce it was essential to systemise basic activities around determining shift schedules and managing compliance around those schedules and associate pay rules via a Time & Attendance (clocking in and out) solution. Managers spent extra ordinate amounts of time trying to fill and managing shifts via large sheets of people and many telephone calls. Then there were the inevitable monthly payroll queries. All this, rather than spend their time with their people optimising the service they were hired to provide.

There were many aspects to the programme that was set up, but one key aim was to change the culture from being based on paper-based, manual to automated working using a systems solution.

One of the largest countries in this company is Japan, where this manual problem was also recognised to have significant impact on the bottom line.

Given the fact that Japan has a very technologically advanced culture, the logical assumption was therefore that the best way for people to clock in and clock out would be to use their mobile phones. And, when we install a clever app on those phones, people can look at their shift schedule, request holidays and even automatically swap shifts with their manager only having to approve or reject the requests on their mobile device! The potential efficiency improvements were massive because the manual workaround shift filling disappears and with employees being able to attest their timesheets on their mobiles prior to submission, the payroll queries certainly ought to disappear.

Yes, young academically schooled people in Japan all seem to have their mobile phones, but for the older generation -especially the managers that need to approve the requests- this is far from the truth. Many might not even know well enough how their computer works. The penetration of mobile phones in this company’s environment was a very low 25% or so.

This means that our mobile phone idea would be dead in the water.

It appears that the managers have assistants doing their mail, diary and so on. It creates a culturally very important power dynamic that cannot be changed just like that without upsetting some deeply engrained cultural values.

Perhaps we need to reframe our culture change objective in Japan to “how can we change the culture so that managers want to work with mobile phones whilst not perceiving to have their power position undermined?”. A nice wicked question right there.

In my native Netherlands this would never have been considered a question to be answered.

In other words, the objective from the culture change initiatives needed to be carefully adapted in Japan. And I would suggest that is just as true in other national cultures or business environments.

So, how can we get it (more) right?

Based on the conversational model suggested above, two facets that seem most problematic to achieve our culture change aims are

• The inherent, continuously evolving and diverse nature of our culture, asking questions on how we can know the current or future state with any meaningful certainty, and

• The fact that different people perceive their culture (quite) differently, making a common goal difficult to define and therefore to achieve.

But the conversational model also provides insights on how we might want to think about culture change differently, so that our programme can be meaningful and add significant value to our business.

Let’s suggest some learnings from the aboveHow

1. What are we trying to achieve with our culture change? And how do we think a different culture can support our overall strategy?

2. How do we even define culture? How do we know what and where it is? Culture is not something we can move from A to B; abandon the reification of culture and initiatives to change the culture to some preset outcome

3. Cultures are diverse within different parts of our organisation; attempts to have a singular company culture that is the same everywhere are doomed to fail. Can we define high level behaviours (as expressions of culture) we would like to see

4. Don’t assume our own national or organisational culture resonates with other constituents (see Japan example); accept that values or behaviours can be very different elswhere.

5. Culture expresses itself in language (and vice versa), this means that we need to be tapped into that language via actively participating in our organisational conversations with the intention to see more of these high level behaviours or cultureal differences

6. Cultures are continuously evolving; every interaction has the potential to shape the overall organisational conversation; since these conversations are happening all the time, the emerging culture is continuously evolving as well; again, participating in the organisational conversation with intent is an important element.

Does this all make sense? Do you have good examples of successful culture change? And, if so, how did you define success?