Here’s Why It’s So Hard To Change A Culture
Lou Gerstner, writing about his legendary turnaround at IBM, said, “Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value… What does the culture reward and punish – individual achievement or team play, risk taking or consensus building?”
Most business gurus would readily agree with that, but if you’d ask them what culture actually is they would be hard pressed to give a coherent answer. Anthropologists, on the other hand, are much more rigorous in their approach and most would agree that three essential elements of a culture are norms, rituals and behaviors.
In a positive organizational culture, norms and rituals support behaviors that honor the mission of the enterprise. Negative cultures undermine that mission. A common problem with many transformation initiatives is that they focus on designing incentives to alter behaviors. Unfortunately, unless you can shift norms and rituals, nothing is likely to change.
The Norms That Underlie Social Contract
Every culture has an underlying social contract made up of norms, many of which we aren’t consciously aware of, like water to fish. Norms are core beliefs that underlie behaviors and they are enforced both formally and socially. You are rewarded for following them scrupulously, but risk ostracism, as well as other sanctions, for failing to recognize them.
For instance, western marriages are mostly monogamous and based on what anthropologists call bilateral descent, meaning that both sides of the family are equally important. Yet as Joseph Henrich explains in The WEIRDest People In The World, most cultures are patrilineal or matrilineal, with the newly married couple belonging to one side or the other.
This may seem trivial, but it influences how a society operates in powerful ways that aren’t always obvious. Patrilineal cultures, for example, support kin-based institutions and powerful clans, with important implications for economic development. In these cultures, individual action—and therefore accountability—is much more constrained than in the west.
Organizations also have norms, which greatly influence how they operate. Amazon’s writing culture helps drive how it innovates. Netflix is famously explicit about its norms such as “people over process,” which help it to adapt more quickly and run circles around its competition. At the same time, norms like the “war for talent” led to practices like stack ranking employees that created toxic cultures at places like Enron, Microsoft and GE.
So the first step toward changing a culture is by identifying the norms which drive it. Western attempts to “reform,” developing countries often run into trouble because they don’t understand the basic beliefs and values that underlie the behavior they are trying to change. Business consultants commonly experience the same pitfall, when what looks smart and effective in a PowerPoint document falls afoul of organizational norms.
How Rituals Encode Norms
Go to a typical western wedding and it’s not hard to notice how the ritual encodes western norms about marriage. There is typically a bride’s side and a groom’s side, signifying bilateral descent. The vows stress the importance of monogamy and lifetime commitment. There are often speeches about both families coming together.
In a similar vein, many societies male-based initiation rituals encode a wide variety of norms, including obedience to elders and loyalty to the tribe as well as passing on crucial skills for things like fashioning weapons. It also helps to widen and deepen ties among a particular age cohort across villages and clans, enabling collective action across larger groups of people and improving the ability to compete against other tribes.
Facebook has its own form of initiation ritual in the form of its six week engineering bootcamp in which new engineers are immersed in its norms and codebase. No matter what their level of experience, every new engineering hire must perform this rite. Much like other tribes, Facebook has found that bootcamping cohorts build bonds during those six weeks that persist long after they moved to disparate clans within the company.
Rituals can be an important source of power. A clan that controls, for example, a male initiation ritual can deny access to a rival, restricting their right to marry and enjoy other benefits. Once a single clan controls enough rituals, it can manipulate important levers. Many anthropologists believe that chiefdoms emerge when one clan gains control over enough key rituals to acquire the power to govern key aspects of life.
Every organization has rituals that encode norms of behavior, governance and power. IT departments control the ticketing process that employees go through to get their technology problems solved. Amazon, quite famously, designs meetings to encode its norms, forbidding PowerPoint and mandating a 30-60 minute reading period at the start.
Behaviors And Their Consequences
The ultimatum game is a popular social science experiment in which one player is given a dollar and needs to propose how to split it with another player. If the offer is accepted, both players get the agreed upon shares. If it is not accepted, neither player gets anything. If people responded perfectly to incentives, the second player would accept even a single penny. After all, a penny is better than nothing.
But they don’t. In fact, the ultimatum game and its variants, such as the dictator game, the public goods game and the third party punishment game reveal that human behavior is incredibly complex. Given varied circumstances and contexts, people will often act directly against their own interests to express what they think is fair and right.
Yet what people think is fair and right can vary dramatically given the context. Western cultures, for example, will reject much higher offers than ones with kin-based institutions and they will be quicker to punish what they see as unfair behavior. Sometimes, even subtle changes in context can result in very different attitudes toward the same actions.
Consider that before the dotcom crash, a profile of Cisco in Fortune reported it to have an unparalleled culture with highly motivated employees. But just one year later, when the market tanked, the very same publication described it as “cocksure” and “naive.” Clearly, Cisco’s culture did not change that much in a year, but perceptions of it did.
None of this makes any sense if we judge behaviors in a vacuum without any cultural context. It is only through norms and the rituals that embed and reinforce them that we can begin to understand what motivates them.
Why Best Practices Are Stupid
My friend Stephen Shapiro argues that best practices are stupid. It’s not that he believes they can’t be useful, in fact in areas of low-competence they can be very helpful in helping a team get up to speed. Yet Steve’s point is that you can’t separate a practice from its context. Copying Netflix’s Culture Deck or Amazon’s six-page memo is unlikely to improve your performance if you don’t develop the norms and rituals to support them.
Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao explained in The Friction Project how organizations will cling on to rituals, such as processes and paperwork, in ways that are so nonsensical they are almost comical, because they support norms embedded in the culture. Often, stakeholders compete for power over norms and rituals because they signal status and create privilege.
Consider the expense authorization ritual. The ability for a clan to deny an authorization gives them power, which they can barter for other goods, such as respect, deference and maybe a favor here or there. They can then, in turn, give deference to other powerful clans, building up clout with which they can use to gain power over other rituals and rites.
That’s what makes cultures so hard to transform. You can’t change behaviors without changing norms and rituals that underlie them. We are, as much as we may hate to admit it, evolved to signal identity and seek status. These truths rarely make it into PowerPoint charts or quarterly strategies, but they lie at the core of every enterprise.
Culture is, among other things, deeply rooted in norms and rituals and, if we aim to change behaviors, that’s where we need to start.
Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
Like this article? Sign up to receive weekly insights from Greg!
Image generated by Microsoft Designer
