Changing Culture: It's an Imaginary Thing
(Robert E. Schrull, Philip Belove, Ed.D)
Recently, I
was meeting with a senior executive of a major Pharmaceutical company. He was
struggling to understand how to bring about in his division the cultural change
desired by the company. Globally, the company was seeking to change their
culture to drive business results. They had identified desired behaviors. Global
had communicated the initiative, identified observables and developed a method
to measure and report them. To localize the change, divisions now were expected
to conduct meetings, usually as a working project, to align with the desired
cultural behaviors.
But there
was some push back and the desired change didn’t seem to be happening quickly
enough. What would it take for successful implementation?
Target Change
Changing
culture and desired behaviors requires changing how people "automatically
think". That is what a culture is. It is the way the individuals in a
company "automatically think". ....And that takes some
sophistication. You can make a list of
goals and cascade down desires, but that is just a communications program. A
well designed program and implementation will result in how the people in the
organization "automatically think".
However, changing
culture means not only changing how people think. It means changing how
they form relationships and it also means changing their emotional responses, i.e.
changing how they think and feel.
If you want
to change a culture, which means you also want to change a pattern of relationship
habits, you have to give folks an emotional experience. And you need to make it
an emotional experience they welcome.
The
internal task for the company then is to change the habits of imagination for
every person in the company. The iconography has to change. If you
are trying to effect people’s imaginations, you have use more than words. One
way to do this is through pictures and moving pictures with sound and music are
even better. Another way is through acting out and recording the behaviors.
These tools
have been around for centuries, of course. You see them in ancient churches,
and in civic buildings. Where you see them most now is on television and in the
movies. If you want to change corporate culture, words are rarely enough…and
you have to do more than state “how” you want it to change. What you have
to do is flood the culture with a new set of images. Look at the word,
“imagination.” At the heart of the word is the word, “Image.” You
have to change people’s imaginative habits.
So to
summarize, a successful cultural change initiative requires an internal
communications program the scope of which targets changing:
- How the people in the
organization think automatically
- How they form relationships
- Emotional experience to change
peoples emotional responses
- Iconography, to change peoples habits
of imagination
Tell stories
A central
goal of any program should include ways to get people to think in terms of
stories that touch hearts. This is
because humans form and think about relationships, through stories, which is to
say through experiences which are then spoken of and thought about. Deliberated
shaped stories and experiences are, of course, the time tested tools of
advertising and public relations.
A
successful program provides experiences and stories. For example, if you
want people to habitually think about the customer, an interesting and
emotionally engaging video can be made, featuring close up interviews with
several patients and doctors (or convincing actors acting as such). Viewing
this shifts the sense of “what we do,” from an internal operation” to “helping patients
live better” Patients expressions of genuine gratitude become part of the
thinking and feeling of the organization. They become part of the lore.
Another way
to encourage the cultural shift would be to have reps collect stories and bring
them back. This also builds a body of lore. Creating a newsletter of stories
from reps will also help do the same. All of this shifts the conversations
So in
summary you are changing how people imagine, what stories they tell, the
rituals they use, how they tell the stories and you rewarding this change.
You have
changed, not so much what they know but how they know. More than that,
you have to changed how they relate to one another. You have changed what
they notice. You have changed perceptual
habits.
Therefore
in addition to stating clear goals, in addition to naming specific behaviors,
you have created an atmosphere in which people become creative and invent new
ways of fulfilling the culture.
A Little Bit of Soul
Along with
this, it is essential to find ways to reshape the culture from the ground up.
If you only try to change a culture from the top down, by decrees, (key word is
“only”) you fail to tap into the soul of the culture. What you want in
the long-term is to reshape the “soul” of the culture.
Why?
Because if
you don’t get to the soul, then you produce a culture which is sort of like the
old communist cultures, or the more oppressive dictatorships. When
information only flows downward, participants work under threat, which is a
very primitive way of organizing a culture. In those cultures people parrot the
party line and manage to keep their heart and soul out of the mix.
How do you
change the soul of the culture.
It’s a good
idea to start looking at a culture as a mental process. More than that,
it’s a participatory mental process.
You have to
start in several places at once. You change the laws, the rituals and
observances and the expectations people hold toward each other.
You do this
by
- Instituting policies, i.e., you
create rituals that permeate daily life.
- Specific forms of behavior
demonstrating the leadership strengths being nurtured. What regular
behaviors could become a practice which builds customer focus, courage
and candor, rapid decision making?
- Creating times of observance.
- What could happen on a regular
basis that involves the whole group that could also build the objectives.
- Creating a local mythology
- What images and language needs
to be consistently present to support the specific cultural dynamics.
- How can people be inspired,
motivated and fulfilled by the culture. How can they come to love it?
- Creating a regular form of
review
- Creating specific inspirational
resources who can continue to articulate and remind. It helps to
have a resource that is somewhat outside the culture being changed. In many
cultures this catalyst and instruction function is served by a priesthood
of sorts. In a cultural environment it’s served by coaching.
Often on a
divisional level, the policies, observances, mythology, review and inspiration
functions are undefined. Part of the start up phase needs to be
developing these culture shaping tools.
Always ask Why
When an
individual or group decides it wants to achieve some fundamental changes in its
basic pattern of operations, when it wants to change the grid on which it maps
it’s information, then the first question a change agent has to ask is a “why”
question: Why these changes/ why here/ why now? In other
words, the designers of the intervention have to know what was going on before.
What caused this determination to make a change in culture. Minds only
change when they are forced to.
Specifically
to the division, the question needs to be fully answered: “What would be
different in this division with this desired cultural change and change in
behaviors?”.
Some initial steps
The
division needs to gather information locally and then develop culture changing
tasks and policies. These policies have to be tied to a meaningful action.
Give people things to do something to actually do that would have an effect.
Ask for
specific ways to manifest the desired behaviors. Name ten ways to do it. Share
that lore. Create a body of lore about how to do it.
Be clear
about why the change in the culture is desired. Certainly if you want the
culture changed, you want to also be very clear what you do not want to happen
any more and why. Answer the question Why are we doing this?”. Create an
observance about that, too.
These are
just some initial steps.
Always
remember, you want to change the habits of imagination for every person in the
company and thus change the way they automatically think. It’s an
imaginary thing!
(Rob Schrull
is President of GBLA . Philip Belove, Ed.D., is staff psychologist/coach with
GBLA)