You can’t fix culture

Many of the executives and organisations we work with at Neu21 come to us because they realise they have a “culture problem”. Those organisations are usually lacking on agility, or they can’t innovate, or people are disengaged or they are very slow in deploying products that their customers love, or their leaders lack capability to lead teams in this new complex world of work.

All those are the symptoms they see, but those executives have been around long enough to understand that the symptoms are not the issue – they are just that: symptoms. And the real problem is bigger than that. It is cultural.

However, the problem is that you can’t fix culture. Culture is like a shadow. You can’t grab a shadow. A shadow is a reflection of the reality. And like a shadow, you can’t mold it or shape it. The shadow is already there and as hard as you try, you will never be able to change or transform the shape of a shadow.

 So next time you hear the sentence in a boardroom or meeting room: “We need to fix the culture of this team or organisation”; feel free to respond: “You can’t fix culture”. Now, I understand that may be a career limiting move; but at least you probably will get people’s attention to continue with the second half of that sentence. And the second part is that the only way to fix culture is to fix the elements that make the shape that gets reflected as the culture of an organisation.

 And what are those elements? Well, it depends. Every team and every organisation will have their own elements. In some cases would be the way we are structured, in some cases the way we do budgeting (yes, the way we do budgeting impacts the culture of an organisation), or maybe the way we make decisions, or the way we decide what works gets done by whom and when, or the hierarchies and approvals processes we have built in for compliance rather than agility. And so on…

 At Neu21 we have a name for those elements. We call it “The System of Work”. So when we are called by an executive into an organisation to help “fix their culture”, we start by seeing what are those elements in the system of work that impact most the way an organisation work. And then is when the real cultural transformation work starts; when you identify the right elements and start molding them in a way that start reflecting a more desirable shadow.

So what does the shadow in your team or organisation look like? And most importantly; what are the elements in the system of work that most impact the shape that gets reflected as the culture in your organisation?