Culture Change
carynvanstone October 24th, 2007
Any large scale change work increases anxiety and the desire to control. When people are trying to change or “align” an organisational culture, this can be particularly true.
When working with clients on this, we anticipate that there will be a strong attraction to highly prescriptive approaches, alignment orientation, ‘leverage’ points and precise timetables. We are aware that our competitors may well offer approaches talking of ‘levers’ for change and ‘driving’ success. While those approaches bring significant benefits to some change agendas, our experience is that human community cultures (for example, in organisations) do not respond well to being re-engineered, or aligned, as if they were complex machines.
We offer the challenge that culture is a phenomenon which is not suitable for mechanistic approaches, or ‘push’ methodologies associated with a ‘control’ mentality. People create culture everyday, in the mundane interactions and decisions. It is fragile and under constant change, and at the same time enormously resistant to externally imposed change advocacies, training programmes or glossy campaigns.
Our offer to clients is to bring a uniquely human and social orientation to this change effort – to work WITH the human dynamics of interaction and conversation, rather than against or over it.
This is even more important when innovation and engagement are important. For more details about creating cultures of innovation and engagement, see the article “Intro to Culture Change – creating innovation cultures”.
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