Destination Is Never A Place
Henry Miller | Culture Change? No: Behavior Change. | More Behavior-First Thinking About Culture | Strategy In Service To Action
If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
| Henry Miller
…
Sometimes it’s helpful — especially when long-held or widely accepted ideas don’t seem to be working — to turn the issue upside down, or, as the physicist Richard Feynman suggested, go back to first principles, and try to explain what appears to be complex in terms as simple as possible. In fact, Feynman maintained you were simple enough unless a 12-year-old could understand your explanation. That’s a very new way to look at things.
I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the present time, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 from $6. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety. I rely on your support, so thanks.
Culture Change? No: Behavior Change.
I read the transcript1 of a discussion led by Bruce Daisley with Rob Briner, professor of organizational psychology at Queen Mary University of London. The title is Stop talking about culture - deal with behaviours.
The transcript is quite long, so here’s the TL;DR.
First of all, Briner is attempting — and seemingly, has been doing so for years — to get people to drop the entire premise that culture can be directed to change behavior.
Daisley seems to have internalized Briner’s work as an attack on the ideology around organizational culture. As he puts it:
At one stage [in the discussion] Rob says: ‘If you tell someone - whose favourite thing is organisational culture - and you tell them it’s not a very useful idea - they don’t like it.’ Well, I felt seen.
I’ve pulled what I think are the most salient points in Briner’s exposition [emphasis mine]
‘I’m not saying you can’t change behavior. There’s hundreds of years of theory and evidence and data that you absolutely can. So I have no doubt about that. So let’s just dispel that. I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is, culture is not a good route to doing that. It’s not a good way to do it. In fact, it’s very poor way to do it.’
‘Let’s say we have got good measures and good assessments of these behaviors. […] They are things we want to change. My question is, what is the most effective way changing them? And my understanding is culture is pretty useless [at doing that]. And I’ll tell you some of the reasons why. But you actually mentioned one of the problems that we talked about, of counterculture. One thing is, people assume organizations have a culture. That is highly contentious.’
‘It’s making assumptions. We feel we can see the culture. You go to a new workplace, you go to a new office, you say, can feel this culture. The amount of data you have about that organization is minuscule. So you’re not in a position to judge it. But I guess we know, cognitive biases, we want to see patterns and things that are consistent in the world around everything kind of make may help us make sense of it. It’s kind of a bit ridiculous. It’s a bit like it’s going to the north of England and saying, oh, I went to Sheffield where I lived for six years. Oh, everybody was really friendly, a really friendly culture. It’s just nuts. How can you possibly have enough data to make that kind of judgment? Are there norms of behavior? Sure. But then, like your example, the WhatsApp group in the metropolitan place, the question is, how many people doing that? Is it shared? Is it not shared? What actually is the problem with that?’
‘So the first issue around culture is: is there a culture? And people never really ask that question. They just assume or you just can feel it. It’s just a vibe. You can kind of sense it.’
‘No, you can’t.’
'If you define culture as ‘the way we do things around here’ then saying you want to use culture to change the way we do things around here is circular reasoning, and it’s circling in the wrong direction.’
Briner implies circling the other way: change the behaviors and culture — whatever the hell that is — will follow. And does so by a Millerian switcheroo in how to look at the knot of culture and behavior: putting behavior change foremost, and that nebulous culture-thing will follow along.
‘So if there’s a group of people behaving in a way, and maybe there is a norm for that behavior, what you need to do still -- let’s just put culture out of the picture -- and say, we still need to change those behaviors. Then the real question is, how do we change behavior? And as I say, there’s hundreds of years of research into this in many different kinds of fields, from psychology, from health psychology, to social policy, which is almost never used in organizations.’
That final statement is one of my enduring pet peeves: how little of social science research results are even considered by managers of even the largest and most ‘well-run’ companies.
More Behavior-First Thinking About Culture
Last year, I cited work from 2018 by Jon Katzenbach, Carolin Oelschlegel, and James Thomas2 who actively tried to blunt the widespread psychobabble about leader-driven cultural change [emphasis mine]:
We don’t believe that swift, wholesale culture change is possible — or even desirable. After all, a company’s culture is its basic personality, the essence of how its people interact and work. However, it is an elusively complex entity that survives and evolves mostly through gradual shifts in leadership, strategy, and other circumstances. We find the most useful definition is also the simplest: Culture is the self-sustaining pattern of behavior that determines how things are done.
Made of instinctive, repetitive habits and emotional responses, culture can’t be copied or easily pinned down. Corporate cultures are constantly self-renewing and slowly evolving: What people feel, think, and believe is reflected and shaped by the way they go about their business. Formal efforts to change a culture (to replace it with something entirely new and different) seldom manage to get to the heart of what motivates people, what makes them tick. Strongly worded memos from on high are deleted within hours. You can plaster the walls with large banners proclaiming new values, but people will go about their days, right beneath those signs, continuing with the habits that are familiar and comfortable.
Their best takeaway: find the positive deviants — people already displaying the desired behaviors — and hold them up as examples, and have those exemplars explain to others why and how they do what they do [emphasis mine]:
The best way to start is to ask yourself a series of questions. What are the most important emotional forces that determine what your people do? What few behavior changes would matter most in meeting strategic and operational imperatives? Who are the authentic informal leaders you can enlist? And what can you and your fellow senior leaders do differently to signal and reinforce those critical behaviors?
Elsewhen
Strategy in service to action.
Strategic thinking can often seem a bit up-in-the-clouds, looking for grand trends and movements, and then laying out plans to meet the identified challenges. This may not take into account modern realities, like the speed which markets can shift, competitors may innovate, or formerly stable principles that turn out to be ephemeral.
In other words, the conventional approach to strategy can be a trap.
Mike Jones3 pulled this sort of strategic thinking inside out in A Strategy that Survives Contact with Reality Starts by Protecting Your Ability to Act:
We spend too much time assuming strategy fails because of poor thinking, faulty plans, or lack of buy-in. But more often, strategy fails in execution because, when it meets the real world, the organisation is unable to act.
Not unwilling. Unable.
Not because of resistance, laziness, or incompetence, but because the structures that once enabled action have eroded by bureaucracy, or been replaced by performance theatre and a lack of freedom to make decisions. The people closest to the work, those most aware of what’s changing, are too often the least empowered to respond. Execution dies not from lack of effort, but from the slow erosion of agency.
So if you want a strategy that survives contact with reality, start by protecting your organisation’s ability to act.
His argument follows this reasoning:
Orientation without the capacity to act is just awareness. It’s a strategy of observation only.
The missing link is agency. Strategy lives or dies in the organisation’s ability to move. Not just from the top, but throughout the organisation. To shift direction, to adapt, to seize an opportunity before it disappears, to respond to a threat before it becomes a critical issue.
Worse, it becomes a blame mechanism. We ask people to be empowered, then give them no viable way to act.
The point of planning is not certainty. It’s manoeuvrability.
You don’t plan to predict. You plan to act. And that means your planning process should surface risk, expose assumptions, and create the conditions for movement.
The organisations that execute strategy well are the ones that stay loose, not locked.
That is the real job of leadership. Not to command every action, but to shape the environment in which good action becomes possible.
A strategy that survives contact with reality is not the one with the best plan. It’s the one that enables the most meaningful action, that protects the edges of the organisation from centralised dysfunction, that decentralises sensemaking, and that builds structural autonomy, not just rhetorical intent.
Jones' analysis of the paralysis that can follow the hardening of a company’s arteries echoes that of Richard Rumelt4, who also focuses on the capacity for action as the purpose of strategic thinking:
Despite the roar of voices equating strategy with ambition, leadership, vision, or planning, strategy is none of these. Rather, it is coherent action backed by an argument. And the core of the strategist’s work is always the same: discover the crucial factors in a situation and design a way to coordinate and focus actions to deal with them.
Action follows strategy, yes, but strategic planning — and organizational orientation — has to be dedicated toward decreasing impediments to act.
I’m reminded of Heinz von Foester’s Ethical Imperative!
Act always so as to increase the number of choices.
