“Be the change you want to see in the world” – Mahatma Gandhi
 
Every year, thousands of runners are injured due to leg and foot pain. In response, athletic-shoe companies have invested fortunes into high-tech cushioning, arch support, and shock absorbers. But despite these efforts, as many as six out of 10 runners get injured every year.
 
A great fiction story…or not?
In his latest book Born to Run, Christopher McDougall describes an epic adventure that began with one simple question: ‘Why does my foot hurt?‘ In search of an answer, Christopher McDougall sets off to find a tribe of the world’s greatest distance runners and learn their secrets, and in the process shows us that everything we thought we knew about running is wrong.
 
Born to Run is a compelling story, a page turner full of incredible adventures and a cast of characters worthy of Dickens. So as a reader you may think you are reading a great fiction story. Until … you go surfing on the web and you find out that every fact and character of the book is real.
 
BFT
Barefoot Ted (BFT), for example is one of those amazing characters that have helped McDougall to the flip the question: If shoes are not the solution, could they possibly be the problem?
 
Barefoot Ted is a phenomenon. On his website he describes himself as “committed to re-discovering our primordial human potential”. And boy, is he committed! For more than a decade, BFT is being the change he wants to see in the world.
 
He does not ‘fight’ the old paradigm. Rather he:
- is evidence of the new paradigm
- embraces every positive evidence he can find;
- builds a community of fans and has devoted his whole existence to barefoot running;
 
BFT as an Organizational Change Practitioner
And there is more. BFT has interesting things to share about paradigm shifts and how they occur. Insights that are highly relevant to us a organizational change practitioners implementing SAP.
 
As you can imagine barefoot running is a hot topic in runner’s circles and far beyond because shoe companies and just about half of the medical world’s advice is at stake: barefoot running rocks the status quo.

Slowly but surely, there are shoe companies that have adapted to the virtues of barefoot running: the Vibram FiveFingers is a good example. Barefoot running goes mainstream.

Trojan Horse
Pondering over this evolution here’s what BFT says about barefoot running going mainstream:
“I still think that barefoot is best, but barefoot is free…, and I always knew that the only way barefooting was going to become a true, mainstream hit was that there was going to have to be a product…something people could buy. And the VFF is that product…, or from my perspective, Trojan Horse.



The Vibram Fivefinger is a foot glove. No support, no real cushioning. Yet, it is a thing I can buy. A solution that can be purchased. Consumer cultures feel comfortable with it. But what is its real message? It seems the real message of the VFF is that your foot is just fine AS IT IS! That regaining strength and range of motion in your foot is a worthy goal. That you are not broken by default.”
 
SAP is the FiveFingers of Business Process Reengineering
Implementing SAP is also like a Trojan Horse. People think it’s just a software rollout and that all other things will stay the same. … NOT! People wake up in a new world where the system allows or disallows certain things. People have access to different information. As a consequence, people will start working differently – breaking holes into silo’s and getting grips on input and output.
 
As a matter of fact, SAP is the FiveFingers of Business Process Reengineering (BPR). Like barefoot running, process reengineering is common sense and getting back to basics. BPR suffers the same flaw as barefoot running: it’s free.
 
SAP is the enabler of BPR and nowadays we see lots of organizations implementing SAP ‘because everybody does it’. Like FiveFingers it is a solution that can be purchased. And the real message is the same: your company is not broken by default. SAP is not ‘fixing’ a broken company – just like your foot is just fine the way it is. But SAP makes you run differently (i.e. on on your bare business processes) and therefore BPR becomes way more obvious.

I even like the analogy in the abbreviations: What FiveFingers is to BFR (BareFoot Running), SAP is to BPR (Business Process Reengineering)
BPR = BFR!
 
Thanks BFT (BareFoot Ted) – for this great insight!

During large programs it is very difficult to keep an eye on what is cooking inside the organization and how people’s perceptions of the upcoming change are evolving. Hence, a commonly used instrument to check this ‘change readiness’ is holding surveys. Last week I mentioned the Top-10 signs your employee survey needs to change.

In addition to that list, Naomi Karten describes 6 recommendations for conducting surveys and avoiding that they become a waste of time.

1. Set survey objectives. Define those objectives before you start, or you will end up with a list of questions that are unanswered because they were unasked.

2. Keep survey length under control. Avoid nice-to-know-but-so-what questions. A well-designed survey can be completed in less than ten minutes.

3. Make the survey action-oriented. Surveys are often full of thermometer questions. For example, "Did this course match your expectations?" is a thermometer question. Responses may suggest the existence of a problem, but provide too little information for you to understand the problem or recommend changes. If, instead, you ask questions like ‘are you now able to go back to your workplace and put what you have learned into practice?’, ‘Which difficulties did you experience when making the exercises?’, or ‘which topics will require extra attention before using them in practice?’ , you can use the responses you receive to plan a course of action.

4. Balance open-ended and closed questions. Closed questions ask respondents to select from a set of fixed responses. Respondents can answer these questions quickly, and responses can be tabulated, summarized, graphed, charted, analyzed and reported. Open-ended questions, by contrast, ask respondents to answer in their own words. Responses take time to review and are subject to interpretation. However, open-ended questions frequently provide a level of insight into the customer perspective that is impossible to obtain from closed questions. 

5. Ensure an adequate survey response. To generate interest, set the stage by publicizing the importance of the survey in helping you improve your service effectiveness. Explain your objectives and how quickly the survey can be completed. Marketing, branding the survey can dramatically influence the level and quality of the responses you will receive.

6. Tell stakeholders about your survey findings. This is the most important and yet most forgotten about element. Inform stakeholders of your findings and changes you will make as a result of their feedback. When you implement suggested changes, announce that you’re doing so because of their feedback. Don’t overlook this essential element of providing feedback to customers about their feedback to you.

Gathering feedback and taking no action based on the findings is worse than not gathering feedback at all!

The below movie shows an interview with Curt Coffman, co-author of First, Break All the Rules. In my opinion his top ten covers all the pitfalls one can encounter when performing employee surveys.

#10 Your survey hasn’t changed since Bob Dole ran for president;
#9 Your survey has more items than your accounting system;
#8 Employees and managers feel more helpless after completing the survey;
#7 Your customer loyalty scores still have not improved;
#6 You are paying more than $10 per employee for data collection and reporting;
#5 By the time your survey vendor returns the data, your workforce has turned over;
#4 Employee surveys, what are those?…;
#3 You need a 3" binder to hold one report;
#2 The dog ate your action plans;
#1 You keep doing what you’ve been doing and expect a different result.
("When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change")

My both thumbs up for this powerful summary!!

PS: Thank you Craig Smith for pointing me to this video.

You may think of rituals as an exotic thing from far-away cultures and  weird religious communities. Well, it is; but to the same extent it is intimately woven into the way we live our daily lives. Rituals occur wherever more than one person do something together. That is: in tribes, religions, countries, monasties and clubs; but also at work, in families and between partners.

Rituals
We all need rituals. A ritual is a way of shaping reality so you can deal with it. And if the way you and your community fellows have that thing in common it becomes a distinctive feature of your community. The most obvious examples include visual appearances: Aboriginals have white body paint, doctors in a hospital wear white coats, on National Geographic we can see how boys turn into hunters through a manhood ritual, where I live, marriage is a ritual declaring monogamy and the bride has a white dress, etc.

The not-so-obvious examples include: making PowerPoint slideshows for whatever you want to communicate at work but not at home (thank God!), budgeting discussions and the complete cycle of a fiscal year, coffee, KPI’s and Balanced Scorecards (they are the ‘nec plus ultra’ of a tribal belief in numbers), New year, wearing a tie on certain occasions, casual Friday and not wearing a tie, etc.

When looking at exotic or ancient cultures we tend to talk about rites and symbols as if we are way more civilized than that. However, our day-to-day lives are far more abundant with rites and symbols of all kinds, we only have different names for them. In our world we call them agreements, rules, legislation, organization, structure, strategy, common sense, logic, etc.

Habits
A habit is the same as a ritual, but on the individual level. It’s how we deal with reality. We do certain things our own way. Little things. And it’s the sum of a million simple things a day that give us a sense of security and identity. Habit is the daily success of forgetting that the nature of reality is unpredictable and groundless. It’s never the same river twice. We would go crazy if we were to approach reality without rituals and habits.

Addictions
An addiction is a habit exposed in a socially unacceptable way: where habit clashes with ritual. In my opinion an addiction has very little to do with what is good or bad for you, for good and bad are measures set by ritual. Get it?

Attention
I’m sure you can think of another million rituals and habits we use in our world. In fact, not an hour goes by without us shrinking whatever is happening around us to a digestible taste, size and portion by means of ritual, habit or addiction.

There are several ways to become aware of this mechanism.
- Listen to children: It just takes the fresh look of a child to ask ‘why?’ from time to time.
- Connect with weird people – the complete outsiders in rank and order of your community
- Limbo: when you are heavily involved in a change that determines the course of your life and habits drastically. For example when a person close to you deceases, or you lose your job.
- Read all of Dr Suess books, especially The Sneetches.

Takeaway
The takeaway for organizational change managers is quite important. The first thing you bump into whenever you want to implement an organizational change is inertia caused by rituals and habits.

Instead of labeling them as ‘resistance’, we’d better approach them with respect, because they define the very boundaries of people’s comfort zones.

Over the past week I experienced that the good old brainstorming techniques that are derived from de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats don’t need a nudge in the Web 2.0 age.

6 Thinking Hats

I have used this brainstorming technique in a variety of different settings: to generate ideas, to solve complex problems, etc.  The Six Thinking Hats method provides a way for groups to think together more effectively. ‘Together’ is the absolute key word here: instead of having individuals reacting their own way (as usual), the group agrees to deliberately step into each possible ‘way of thinking’ sequentially. There are 6 different types of thinking or hats one can wear in a discussion:

* Neutrality (white) – considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
* Feeling (Red) – instinctive gut reaction or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification)
* Negative judgment (Black) – logic applied to identifying flaws or barriers, seeking mismatch
* Positive Judgment (Yellow) – logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony
* Creative thinking (Green) – statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes
* Process control (Blue) – thinking about thinking

In my experience until last week – the Six Thinking Hats was a powerful tool to generate ideas and solve complex problems through parallel thinking. On top of that it creates a greater feeling of momentum in team that otherwise would be cluttered in a ‘being right’ discussion.

6 hats on Web 2.0??

By now most readers of this blog must have noticed that I am making my first babysteps into the Web 2.0 communities. One of them is LinkedIn, where I am lucky enough to manage the Organizational Change Practitioners group (4.722 members subscribed at the time of writing). Recently I decided to have ask the members contribute in which subgroups we would create in this forum.

What I witnessed next was multi-thinking at different dimensions at the same time. One of the most beautiful examples of Six Thinking Hats I have ever witnessed from close by!  At the time of writing, there were over 85 reactions that demonstrated the six thinking styles:

* Neutrality: people responding directly to the question at hand (e.g.:"I suggest to creat a subgroup on human behavior")
* Feeling: people volunteering to become a subgroup manager (e.g.: "Great idea, Luc. If you need help, I would be ready to facilitate/moderate the Web 2.0 group")
* Negative judgement (Black): people opposing to the idea of subgroups (e.g.:"Seems to me the additional structure may add bureaucracy rather than make it easier to navigate and participate.")
* Positive Judgement (Yellow): people supporting the idea (e.g.: "I think having focused discussions would be great so that when dealing with a particular issue, you wouldn’t be all over the place.")
* Creative thinking (Green): people suggesting additional ideas (e.g.:"Maybe a poll would be a good idea to select the final five")
* Process control (Blue): people looking at this process happening (e.g.: "watching and participating in a wonderful new (to me at least) process: asynchronous, large-group virtual conversation and decision making"); one participant even Twittered this discussion thread!

Invisible Hand

The most fascinating observation however, was that the discussion thread almost chronologically went through all of these hats. In the same way as during brainstorming sessions each thinking hat is triggered by one reaction, which sparks a range of reactions that belong to the same thinking type.

Coincidence? Not in a million years. But then, what caused this to happen? How did the group trigger a specific hat, go to a climax of reactions, a decline and then moved on to a next hat? How did the group decide the order of the hats to think by? Honestly – I DON’T KNOW. But I did experience that we were parallel thinking! We simply cannot deny that there is some kind of invisible hand doing some fine work.

"It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves." -  Edmund Hillary

In the 1944 unfinished novel Mount Analogue, René Daumal describes the travel of a company of eight, who set sail in the yacht Impossible to search for Mount Analogue, a solid, a geographical place that "cannot not exist."  The protagonist of the book is convinced by a certain Father Sogol to undertake this "crazy" expedition. Father Sogol is a figure who likes to invert cause and effect (and is therefore called the inverse of the Greek "Logos" – representing ‘rationality’ and logical thinking). 

"A crazy expedition"

The story of Mount Analogue is about making something happen that all people around you say is impossible and ridiculous.  In this novel about the expedition to a mythical mountain that reaches from earth to heaven, Daumal mentions the chameleon law, which he describes as the inner resonance to influences nearest at hand ("la résonance aux plus proches affimations" if you happen to speak French). As the protagonist of this tale is in the vulnerable starting phase of this expedition, he discovers how he is prone to peer pressure and how difficult it is to commit to something before knowing how.

Father Sogol had really convinced me, and while he was talking to me, I was prepared to follow him in his crazy expedition. But as I neared home, where I would again find all my old habits, I imagined my colleagues at the office, the writers I knew, and my best friends listening to an account of the conversation I had just had. I could imagine their sarcasm, their skepticism, and their pity.

I began to suspect myself of naiveté and credulity, so much so that when I tried to tell my wife about meeting Father Sogol, I caught myself using expressions like "a funny old fellow," "an unfrocked monk," "a slightly daffy inventor," "a crazy idea." After all that I was stupefied to hear her say at the end of my story: "Well, he’s right. I’m going to start packing my truck tonight. For there are not must two of you. There are already three of us!"
"So you take this all seriously?"
"This is the first serious idea I’ve come across in my life."

And the force of the chameleon law is so great that I came back to the thought that Father Sogol’s enterprise was, after all, entirely reasonable.

The Tipping Point

Now what could possibly be the relevance of this chameleon law for us as organizational change managers? Mount Analogue is about inner doubts and how this chameleon law rocks us asleep and prevents us from seeing the other 99% of the possibilities that are at hand in each situation. With rational thinking and conventional ‘common sense’ we easily fall prey to the chameleon law.

However, organizational change projects are mostly about creating a situation that does not yet exist. A situation, a project or any other expedition is "talked into existence". With every word you speak about it, a seed is planted that can give birth to a new reality. Karl Weick refers to this as the process of Enactment to denote that certain phenomena (such as this crazy expedition, or your own ambitious project for that matter!) are created by being talked about. Slowly but surely – if we are persistent enough – our ideas translate to words, our words translate to actions and our actions result into tangible outcomes.

The chameleon law is the biggest enemy during organizational change efforts. This is exemplified by the broken windows theory. Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Scientists in the field of criminology found that disorder invites even more disorder and that a small deviation from the norm can set into motion a cascade of vandalism and criminality. Litter encourages more litter – another way of saying: resonance to the influences nearest at hand.

Malcolm Gladwell was the first to bring the broken window theory to our attention when he described it as paramount in reaching a Tipping Point (an idea which he first published in 1996 as an article in The New Yorker and which he later published in a book with the same title).  As Gladwell notes: "Why was the Transit Authority so intent on removing graffiti from every car and cracking down on the people who leaped over turnstiles without paying? Because those two trivial problems were thought to be tipping points-broken windows-that invited far more serious crimes".

So we need to beware of all the broken windows symptoms of cynism and indifference and instantly fix every broken window. This is the intense and step-by-step work of creating a new culture.

Committing without knowing how

However, preventing the chameleon law from taking over goes a little deeper than paying attention to practical details. One has to be crazy enough and stubborn enough to endeavor your objectives against all odds. The Mount Analogue expedition reveals the insight that any expedition or organizational change project is a mountaineering expedition of the inner mind and intrinsic motivation, as much as it is about delivering a project according to a certain methodology. The tipping point is a s much an external and societal process as it is an inner struggle for fueling our own commitment to an expedition with an un-rational (i.e. rationally ‘unreachable’) objective. It’s the ability to pursue a dream.

Alpinism is the art of climbing mountains by confronting the greatest dangers with the greatest prudence. Art is used here to mean the accomplishment of knowledge in action.

You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again… So what’s the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above. While climbing, take note of all the difficulties along your path. During the descent, you will no longer see them, but you will know that they are there if you have observed carefully. There is an art to finding your way in the lower regions by the memory of what you have seen when you were higher up. When you can no longer see, you can at least still know. . .

Daumal, who was apparently one of the most gifted literary figures in twentieth-century France, died before the novel was completed, providing an extra symbolic meaning to the journey. Beware of the chameleon law as you endeavor to live your dream, instead of dreaming your life!

_______________
Related post: Better a wrong decision than no decision (February 14th, 2007)

Last week the manager of a plant involved in a major organizational change project claimed that the return-on-training of his classroom training courses was disappointingly low. Over the past weeks they have been switching over to SAP, by far the most popular platform in the segment of so-called ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software.

We have been preparing the users of his plant by means of extensive classroom trainings, both on process knowledge and systems skills. From his gut feeling he told me that his people demonstrated at best 10 to 15 percent return (i.e.: what they effectively remember and use in their jobs).

Training is the smallest part of Learning

I will not argue about the percentages. The point is that I obviously did not create the right expectations: he should be looking for the return-on-learning instead of the return-on-training! On this same blog I already announced the end of teaching and I also proclaimed that teaching is placebo. I even painted a picture about it in order to demonstrate what this means for SAP implementations specifically.

In retrospect the 10 to 15 percent reported by the plant manager is fairly high compared to what I always have been saying: 99% of what ‘Learning’ really is occurs outside of the classroom. The bottom-line is that training alone is not enough in order to make an organizational change happen. Increasing the quality of your training sessions will not leverage the return-on-training to the same extent. At the very best it is a starting point. From there on you will need to coach your way to the future state. The drawing below is taken from John Seely Brown (again!) and clearly depicts how learning really occurs

Now back to the return-on-training question. What could be the best way to increase that return? The answer is simple: this return can only increase if workplace learning has already occurred BEFORE the training session (in action, action through participation, participation with the world, participation with the problem and participation with other people, i.e., practices). Involvement, participation and ownership are key. 

The concept of Time-to-task is another way to look at it. Normally we use that term to describe that the training should occur as closely as possible to the task at hand. The only way return-on-training can increase is when time-to-task is negative. In plain English this means: people will get more out of a classroom training when they have been frustrated by real-life problems form the task at hand; they will posses an enormous learning pull and they will ask for and absorb every detail that is needed for the job at hand.

Here is a quote from David Maister to support that view:
"A good test for the timing of training would be as follows. If the training was entirely optional and elective, and only available in a remote village accessible only by a mule, but people still came to the training because they were saying to themselves, “I have got to learn this – it’s going to be critical for my future,” then, and ONLY then, you will know you have timed your training well. Anything less than that, and you are doing the training too soon."

Rethinking Knowledge Management

Participation, involvement and enculturation (i.e.: "belonging to") lies at the heart of learning. It also lies at the heart of knowing. Knowing has as much to do with picking up the genres of that particular sub-profession as it does with its conceptual framework. For example, how do you recognize whether a problem is an important problem, or a solution an elegant solution, or even what constitutes a solution in the first place?

Jerome Bruner made a brilliant observation some time ago when he said that we can teach people about a subject matter, for example, physics. That is, we can teach them the concepts, conceptual frameworks and facts of physics – the explicit knowledge of physics. But that does not make the student a physicist. To be a physicist he must also learn the practices of this profession. As he continues:
"We teach a subject not to produce little living libraries on that subject, but rather to get a student to think mathematically for himself, to consider matters as an historian does, to take part in the process of knowledge-getting."

So here we are. Now what? All the evidence tells us that learning is a social thing. It exists in action, participation with the world, participation with the problem and participation with other people, i.e., practices. A lot of the knowledge comes into being through the practices of the people and the environment you’re working in. The return-on-learning question reveals the challenge we face today for rethinking knowledge management:

1. shift our mindset from "pushing knowledge to people" (authority based and explicit) to "supporting people to participate in their productive inquiry" (situational based and on-the-fly)

2. Shift from tools to increase the individual knowledge stock to tools which support relationships and interaction. 

3. Shift rigid structures from managing an academy (where knowledge gathers dust) to facilitating an ecology of different communities-of-practice (where knowledge lives and evolves).

4. Do everything we possibly can in order to introduce Web 2.0 thinking in the boardroom. Think: collaboration and moments of truth instead of teaching!

Talking about organizational change management… there is work to do!

Yes that’s right. And if you don’t know what Web 2.0 (*) means this is your wake-up call. Last week McKinsey Quarterly published its global survey results on the use of Web 2.0 tools and technologies.

Four important observations come to the surface and all four of them are extremely important in the face of organizational change management.

#1: The top-4 reasons to use Web 2.0 technologies are at the core of Organizational Change

Mckinsey reports about 17 reasons why organizations use Web 2.0 technologies. The first four reasons are the following:

- Managing Knowledge
- Fostering collaboration across company
- Enhancing company culture
- Training

This top four roughly contains more than half of the objectives that we want to achieve with organizational change management. 

#2: Web 2.0 changes the way a company is managed and organized

McKinsey asked the respondents to score their satisfaction with Web 2.0 tools and asked whether it changed something in their organization. Among the respondents with a high level of satisfaction the most significant changes that were noted are:

- It has created major new roles or functions in our organization
- It has changed the way our organization is structured

People who are familiar with ERP implementations such as SAP, Oracle or Peoplesoft will note that the level of change reported by these respondents is largely the same as what they have experienced once the ERP is in place. That is exactly why I always declare a company’s intranet as the backbone of communication during an ERP implementation. Through Web 2.0 technologies one can manage the tremendous requirements for collaboration that are necessary during the project lifecycle.

#3: The bottleneck is at the TOP!

In the same survey, McKinsey asked "What are the top three barriers, if any, to the further success of your web 2.0 tools?"  The way I see it, the responses are sadly – but not surprisingly – pointing out a gap between older generations at the top and younger generations in the middle and lower rankings of today’s organizations. Here is the top three of all answers:

- My company doesn’t understand the potential financial return from the use of Web 2.0 tools, technologies
- My company’s culture doesn’t encourage the use of Web 2.0
- My company doesn’t provide sufficient incentives to adopt or experiment with Web 2.0 technologies

It is no secret that the bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle and in this case – just like ERP implementations – leaders at the top need a nudge.

#4: Web 2.0 is a business initiative, not an IT initiative

I saved the best part for the last: McKinsey also asked how organizations have deployed their Web 2.0 initiatives. According to the results, satisfied respondents say that, in large measure, business units rather than IT departments are driving the selection of Web 2.0 technologies. Dissatisfied respondents report the reverse: IT units take the lead, choosing the tools and then delivering them to business.

Here as well, the parallel with ERP implementations is pretty clear: a devastating effect if IT takes the lead. Just like ERP implementations, Web 2.0 initiatives should be owned by the business in order to be successful.

If all this terminology sounds weird and far-fetched to you, just remember: Web 2.0 may be a buzzword for now but it surely is the best way to support your organizational change initiatives now and in the future.

___________
(*) Web 2.0 refers to all web-applications and technologies such as wikis, blogs, social-networking, open-source, open-content, file-sharing, peer-production, etc. All of these applications and technologies thrive on  user created data, an architecture of participation and high usability. In their book Wikinomics, Tapscott and Williams argue that the economy of "the new web" depends on this kind of mass collaboration.

In an earlier post I have upset some HR managers who are spending fortunes on culture audits and climate indexes. First of all I underscored these initiatives either scare the hell out of people, confuse them, or bore them to death.

And there was more … I stated that cultural surveys simplify the world into the dimensions of the survey (that part is OK – it’s called ‘focus’) and desperately try to make cause-and-effect relationships with these dimensions (this is the not-OK part – it’s called ’stereotyping’). Not only will you be restricted to measure what you want to measure, you will also push the organization into the forced ranking of your statements and purge any other cause-and-effect relationship.

In his 1994 book ‘The Unwritten Rules of the Game’, Peter Scott-Morgan gives us an interesting insight on why these cause-and-effect relationships resulting from cultural surveys are untrustworthy. Although I’m not a fan of this book, there is a hilarious passage on ‘Culture Vultures’ as he calls them. Here are some quotes from that part of the book:

‘I remember in the mid 1980s getting really excited by culture audits and climate indexes. But the trouble was that after you had conducted such an audit, and described (sometimes in excruciating detail) just what was there, you tended to find that you were not very much further. You might gather unimpeachable evidence that teamwork was a problem, or that innovation was not highly regarded. But then, what did you do?’

‘The anthropologically-based models for conducting audits [...] are derived from academic models that were never intended to do more than describe – so never needed to build in cause-and-effect.’

‘It’s as if we went into a company and took a photocopy of the balance sheet and the profit and loss account, noted the color of the leather binding on a ledger, recorded the pattern on the carpet in the Accounts department, and wrote a memo documenting the age, make, color and weight of one of the doors of the car driven by chief financial officer and claimed that we had just conducted a financial audit. Of course we haven’t. All we have done is record a large number of facts that are loosely related to finance. Do they all have links to finance? Yes, but just as when we conduct a culture audit we have no idea when to stop, where to draw the line. Should we expect all these facts to guide us in improving the process of financial bookkeeping? No. Should we expect them to serve any practical purpose at all – other than act as an interesting record of what the finance department is like? Probably not.’

But it Takes Guts

In this article I want to pick up the broken pieces that resulted from my organizational culture rant of an earlier post. I stated that measuring culture is the wrong pot to piss in (well, not in those exact words, but I did meet some HR managers who were not too happy about the directness). In contrast to that particular article, I now want to focus on how to approach organizational culture. More in particular, I argue that philosophy and not psychology holds the keys to organizational culture.

Doing Versus Being
Without getting too philosophical we should note that the way you are being is the source of your reality, which in turn is the source of your actions. But the domain of being is hidden because it is not referred to in everyday action oriented language. ‘Being denies its own coming into existence’, as Martin Heidegger notes.

The point is that changing an organizational culture is creating something that is currently not possible in your reality. It is not improving something that is now already possible in your context by making it better, different or more (which is the domain of DOING). Instead, it is exchanging the current context for a new one in which certain things all of a sudden become possible (context is the domain of BEING).

Again the key insight comes from the philosopher Martin Heidegger. According to him, language is the only leverage for changing the world around you. This is because people apprehend and construct reality through the way they speak and listen. In her book The Last Word On Power, Tracy Goss continues Heidegger’s statement. According to her, by learning to uncover the concealed aspects of your current conversations and learning to engage in different types of new conversation, you can alter the way you are being, which, in turn, alters what’s possible.

The Anatomy of our Perception
In the previous article on culture I ended by saying that hat our inability to measure culture does not prevent us from creating one. But first, let us have a look at what it is made out of. As you remember, culture is a sense making mechanism that works like a pair of glasses you are wearing. It determines your perception, i.e.: the data you select.

Sense making is hard coded into all human beings. It is something we do all the time (you can not ‘not do it‘, like it is impossible to ‘not taste’ the food that is in our mouth) and it always follows the seven steps that are derived from Karl Weick’s seven characteristics of Sense Making in organizations:
(Click on the drawing to enlarge)

1. The Past: We make sense of our experiences by comparing them with previous experiences. The organizational past is an important indicator in predicting the reaction to the current organizational change. The past is something that comes walking in through the back door of emotions. People remember events that have the same emotional tone as what they currently feel. Past events are reconstructed in the present as explanations, not because they look the same but because they feel the same.

2. My Relations: We make sense of changes in organizations while in conversation with others, while reading communications from others, and while exchanging ideas with others.

3. My Labels: People are sense-making creatures. Whenever a change happens that affects us we give it a label and put it into a known category (dangerous, stupid, beautiful, etc.). Almost instinctively, we respond with familiar questions: Who is behind this? What are the credentials of those people? Who said so? What will become of us after that change? Do they have the support of management?

4. A Declaration: Words have consequences. We should never underestimate the power of words and conversations. A situation is “talked” into existence, and the basis is laid for action to deal with it. Declarations are the way we translate stuff from below the surface into explicit knowledge. As a simple example, when people constantly say that “this project stinks” they create a climate in which the observation of difficulties is stimulated and the observation of possibilities is constrained.

5. The Real Story: People are interested in the truth, not the details. And people are not stupid. We construct the meanings of things based on reasonable explanations of what might be happening rather than through scientific discovery of “the real story.” Here is a warning flag to heed at this point: What is a simple truth for one group, such as managers, often proves implausible for another group, such as employees.

6. The Timeslot: Sense making is linked to timing. Like an airplane waiting for takeoff, an event will only get a limited slot for takeoff in the attention span of an individual. If that moment of attention happens to be the right one, it helps in setting a culture.

7. The Triggers: Nobody is capable of observing it all. Our observation is based on extracted cues. The cues that we observe depend on what we expect to observe, As a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, we shape our reality according to how we expect it to be. When we think we are going to succeed at something, we will be triggered by every cue that confirms this reality and act upon it, and vice versa.

The Anatomy of Culture Creation
In the table below and the drawing on the right I have taken the anatomy of our perception and created seven matching steps that are necessary for creating an new organizational culture.

(Click on the drawing to enlarge)

Working on these seven components, all at the same time ensures a shift on the level of ‘being’ of the organization by setting a new context in which different things are possible.

Audit your “ROC” – Return On Communications
All of these elements (not necessarily in that order) constitute the key points of an organizational culture. This is what you need to monitor during the complete lifecycle of any change program. A successful communication strategy during organizational change takes into account the anatomy of our perception and works towards a similar mechanism in order to create a new culture.

Eventually, when scanning through your communication plan, all of these steps should be catered for; either in communication principles or in concrete actions. More important, this should also work the other way around: if you identify any communication action that does not accomplish any of the seven steps above, you should seriously question its added value for the program and the return on investment of attention, time, and money (exactly in that ranking order of scarcity).
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Sources used in this article:
Goss, T.: The Last Word On Power, Currency: Doubleday. 1996
Weick, K.: Sensemaking in Organizations, Thousand Oaks: Sage Pubications. 1995