Stop trying to define your culture and start working with it instead

This is the final of three articles looking at some of the lesser understood or appreciated reasons that change fails in many organisations. Over the past few weeks I’ve trained a psychological lens on shadow networks within your organisation and the risks to your team’s sense of purpose from pushing an efficiency agenda.

This week I am taking on another big one – a subject matter as elusive as it is critical – the role of culture both within organisations and as a key enabler (and disabler) of change.

I recently re-watched (for the third time!) the 7th season of The West Wing. The one where a Hispanic Democrat vies with a Liberal Republican for the US Presidency; both dedicated to their principles but also to the betterment of the nation as a whole. As if.

There’s a great scene where Josh Lyman, running the Democratic campaign, is given some polling data and jumping to his feet shouts, “We got momentum, baby! We got the Big Mo!”

The Big Mo is the critical unspoken driver of success – you either have it or you don’t. It’s a mystical source of inspiration and energy which, whilst uncontrollable, has the potential to fast-track a campaign to victory.

Sound familiar? Yup, the Big Mo is to political campaigning what Culture is to organisational success and change. A great culture sets a business or organisation apart. It drives its new business success, its attractiveness to talent, its retention of its people and clients. It’s the magic sauce but with a frustratingly undetectable set of ingredients.

This je ne sais quoi means that whilst we leaders know that a strong, positive culture is a bottom-up rather than a top-down thing, we still go right ahead and try to define it ourselves. Usually to shape it around our own personality – or at least around those elements of our personality that we believe are most admired by others (and that’s a whole other article on internalised authority figures and how they influence our projections of power!).

We try to define it as a list of values. We try to build it through a social event calendar. We try to capture it in a 60 second film with a carefully selected, much sweated over, soundtrack. We project it into a few select individuals who we see as ‘reflecting’ or ‘embodying’ the organisation’s culture, as if the culture is a spiritual entity that speaks only through certain people. We talk and talk and talk about it in the hope of conjuring it to life. Yet it remains painfully elusive.

The mistake we are all making is in believing that there is only one culture in our organisation – and that everyone in the organisation sees and experiences it in the same way. Usually in the way we, the leadership team, experience it. And therefore, we are also terrified of losing or changing it through our actions, as if we are cradling it in our hands.

There has been great writing by the likes of Pierre Turquet and Vega Zagier Roberts around the organisation-in-the-mind that has greatly helped me understand organisational culture as a fluid, dynamic and experiential state.

The idea is that we all hold within our unconscious a unique view of the organisation we are a member of. That view is influenced not only by our personal experiences but also our professional training which causes us to take more note of certain evidence over other. Therefore, in a business, where we have shared professional experiences, we tend to reinforce each other’s assumptions and build up a collective story – or culture. This can be described as ‘the way we do things here’ but is usually impossible to actually describe or articulate.

A great exercise to do as a leadership team - especially in an organisation such as mine, where the team is made up of several different ‘professions’ (creative, strategist, commercial, salesperson) – is for everyone to draw and share their organisation-in-the-mind. These drawings are a visualisation of each individual’s perception of the ‘culture’ and can be amazing at surfacing the connections and disconnects. Not to define what the culture is – but how it is seen and experienced. It’s not the answer but a tool for helping a group discover a shared truth.

So, okay, culture is mysterious and open to interpretation. What’s that got to do with change? Well firstly, as alluded to above, we leaders are often scared to negatively impact our culture through change. What if we accidentally ‘cross the streams’ and break the organisation?

This is a great projection of our anxieties as leaders. As leaders, we’re meant to have the knowledge and experience to make the right decision. Recognising that our fears about breaking the culture are a representation, a manifestation, of our broader anxieties about change, can help us park those fears and focus instead on using culture as a change enabler.

The key to this was mentioned earlier in the article – stories - or to use the management-speak term, the organisational narrative. If on the one hand we have our hard data, professional training and business experience, then on the other we have the human element of organisations. Organisational narratives recognise the special place that storytelling plays in human connection and the possibility of acting together to a common goal or purpose.

If we are already unconsciously acting together to create an accepted story – the culture – then it follows that co-creating a narrative around whatever change we’re trying to deliver, will harness the same collective drives. If we can tell a story that speaks both to the collective organisation-in-the-mind and to the future state, then culture becomes the means to the end rather than the end itself.

So, as a leader don't try to narrowly define and protect your organisation’s culture and instead embrace the breadth of the narrative that connects all your people in a common understanding. Leverage the power of storytelling and visualisation to incorporate the change you’re trying to make as a thread between each person’s organisation-in-the mind – and see how culture can be your Big Mo.