Why Most Culture Change Efforts in Organizations Fail

Hello dear reader, 

I’ve been offline lately helping a business with production and marketing strategies, and its been a while since I last had time to write a thoughtful article to share.

While I’ve been away, I’ve also been thinking a great deal about methodology — specifically related to culture development within an organization or business. 

If you’ve been hunting around for an approach to culture change or development and are frustrated by all the approaches you’re finding and believe they are too shallow, too conventional, too fancy, too expensive, too complicated, then you are likely right — and you might find what I have to say here interesting.

In this article I’m going to show you why most efforts to change company or organizational culture fail. It really boils down to one thing: that leaders have the wrong idea about people.

This one thing is why their efforts to change behavior across an organization, in my experience, won’t work.

You see, the real issue with current methods for culture change is that the worldview on which they are based arises out of a philosophy where we study the outward appearance, behaviors, and outcomes of humans at work. There is no real appreciation for the invisible and complex structures of motives (will), thought, and emotional life that arise out of purely inner experiences.

Culture change methods therefore tend to be built out of the same basic assumptions: that culture change must be introduced in persuasive terms, managed, and even forcefully adopted. 

Here’s a quote from Forbes about how to select and build company culture (near the bottom of the article in the link). Forbes is a well respected and conventional voice from the business world:

“Once a clear picture [of current reality] has emerged, use the framework to match strategic objectives to the cultural attributes needed to achieve them and develop a strategy and implementation plan with clear goals and metrics: What behavior are you targeting? How do you want people to act, and why? How will you follow up to ensure the changes are durable and sustainable? Next, build a team capable and motivated to execute the plan, remembering that shifting organizational culture is a marathon, not a sprint.

Reallocate resources and review HR policies, performance management systems and reward structures to support the desired culture. Involve employees in the process to ensure their buy-in and to gather diverse perspectives. Leaders must model the desired behavioral changes and champion the changes frequently and loudly. Recruit and promote individuals whose values align with the company’s cultural aspirations, offer training programs reinforcing desired cultural attributes and celebrate success.”

Do you see what I see? 

The implicit worldview here is as follows: culture is programmable because humans and the human collective is essentially machinic, composed of a set of behaviors and biologically derived impulses. Otherwise why would we believe we can program it in the ways illustrated in this quote? 

Another example I’d like to bring is Simon Sinek’s video about the law of diffusion. When you watch the whole video where he introduces his method, it makes sense and seems clever and wise. Why wouldn’t you work with the early adopters when implementing a change across an organization and focus all your efforts on them, using tactics of persuasion, influence, and whatever else is needed to get their buy in? We are told they are the ones who will bring along everyone else.

Its hard to argue with this logic, until you interrogate the mindset that lies behind this approach. And that is what I want to explore in this article.

The invisible, and as yet generally unexamined, elephant in the room here is that people are not animals, machines, nor brains, to be persuaded, managed, or forced into compliance or adoption of your idea. I’m going to explain why I say this and give you an idea for what to do instead. 

And, by the way, this prevailing belief about getting a collective of people to get in line on something smacks of social engineering tactics. I have a problem with that, and so do many even though they aren’t necessarily clear about why.

The fundamental — and obvious — flaw in behaviorism

I once read the Oxford Handbook of Intergroup Conflict as I was involved in a project as a consultant trying to address systemic violence in Zimbabwe. The entire book, every article, every research project summarized in that book, was built on the behaviorist theory that a true scientific study must limit itself to observing that which can be measured, quantified, and observed: behavior. This is thanks to the efforts of John Watson and others to legitimize psychology (and by extension, social psychology) as a real science.

The basis of behaviorism is built upon studies of animal behavior, therefore this whole effort is flawed from the beginning simply because we are not animals. As those of us with pets know, animal behaviors can be shaped with methods of reward and dominance; manipulated, as Pavlov discovered with his famous experiments on dogs. This is why you’ll see endless varieties of the carrot and the stick to try and manage, control, and engineer human behavior at work.

And because we are not animals nor are we programmable machines, such tactics and strategies won’t work. You don’t have to take my word for this; there are countless studies showing the fallacy of behaviorism and its premise of “trainable” culture.

In fact, some 70% of culture change initiatives are calculated to have failed.

Well thats a real pickle because culture — as everybody knows from the famous quote attributed to Peter Drucker — “... eats strategy for breakfast”.

Ok so what should lie at the heart of every consideration when it comes to culture in an organization, and how it is changed?

Owen Barfield argued that modern ways of knowing and thinking have produced a "world of outsides with no insides to them," a brittle surface world where we are mere objects. According to Barfield, this perspective fails to perceive the full reality of consciousness, the "inside" of everything that exists.

I’m with Owen Barfield; my answer is the inner life. 

This inner life is what makes us human. That is not to say animals don’t have an inner life as well because I’m personally convinced they do. However, an animal’s inner life is ruled by the profoundly wise and intelligent instinctual world. Animals have a hard time understanding human behavior because we are no longer in touch with such cosmic wisdom. Just ask my horse, Spitfire 🙂

Human inner life has in common with animals the life of sentience (though without the wise instincts), but what sets us apart from the animal kingdom is something I have called in previous articles, the “I”. That part of us from which our autonomy arises. If you meet any horse in any country anywhere in the world, you can speak their species-wide body language and talk with them about personal space, or relationships, or food — the kinds of things that concern a horse no matter the breed. 

Humans have, by contrast, multiple languages, cultures, and other differentiators that have been superconsciously created, arising from the activity of the “I”. Choice is possible for us; will you be evil or good today? Will you choose a path of degeneration or growth? Its entirely up to you.

A horse, by contrast, will follow their instincts completely un-self-consciously and with no freedom to decide to act like a cat instead.

Our inner life, as humans, consists of thinking, logic, the intellect. It is our thinking — or more precisely the beliefs and conclusions derived from thinking — that dictates what we end up feeling about things, and then it follows that what we think and feel about something drives what we do, the source of our will power or motive. 

Motive is quite far downstream of the source point that is our thinking.

So if we want to intervene in the culture of an organization, trying to manipulate and influence behavior is probably among the lowest and most ineffective of the leverage points in a human social system to do so. 

The attempt to social engineer culture change is the kind of nonsense that comes from no understanding of the inner life. So here’s what I suggest you do instead — and this is touching on a methodology for culture change that I believe belongs to our time and the challenges leaders and organizations face today and into the future.

You get to know the inner life as it shows up in you; you understand its anatomy and work with its tendencies. For example, if you want to learn to play an instrument, such as the violin, you have to get to know the tendencies of the violin and the techniques of playing it. You experience the limitations of your physical abilities, and the limitations of the instrument. You learn the language of music and structure, tone and melody. Over time, you become proficient — but only if you work at it diligently and often.

It is exactly the same with the inner life: you have to get to know the anatomy, structure, tendencies, and archetypes of the inner life of the human being. And, naturally following from this, you can more accurately diagnose and effectively address social and team dynamics because they become much more understandable with better knowledge about what the human being is. 

Without this knowledge, you are swimming in the dark, making mistakes with organizational design, hiring consultants who create more problems than they solve, and wondering why your people are not aligned with the changes you’re trying to implement.

And likely you are frustrated also because you have an intuition that there is more to this than what you’ve been lead to believe.

Getting to know the nature of the medium

Einstein wisely has implied in the quote attributed to him that you can’t expect to understand your current worldview — and make effective changes — so long as you are so embedded in it that you can’t see it. You have to step outside of it and then you’re no longer a part of it in all the ways that you THINK.

But to think in new ways independent of your habit and the conventions in which you are embedded will require you to practice. Because stepping outside of the predominating worldview of our times — of which behaviorism and social engineering are symptoms — and into something truly new will require building new capabilities in how you think, feel, and act.

Within the current modern world view, there is little to no understanding of how capability is built. In other words, how humans grow into their potential beyond their current abilities. And there is little interest in this within an organization where typically they will hire a qualified individual for the job based on their external credentials and work experience — their current and past capabilities — rather than having a reliable plan for how the organization can support the GROWTH of their people in service to the mission of the organization.

And perhaps I’m justified in assuming that hardly anyone knows how to build the inner growth and transformation of their people into the very fabric of their organization. A notable exemption is Carol Sanford’s radical and large body of work.

What lies at the heart of practice and building capabilities is that really you’re working with the medium of the inner life — your own and those whom you lead in an organization. In fact, all culture change efforts are actually working with the inner life of many humans.

What you see around you is the product of the inner life of us all: roads, houses, assumptions, beliefs, priorities, organizational design. We shape the world according to what we think, believe, feel, and downstream of that is what we end up doing.

And let me be blunt: if your culture development method doesn’t take that into consideration, then it likely won’t work. 

The place to start with this is to get to know the forces, surges, tendencies, and compulsions that arise within you out of your subconscious and put in the practices of taming, healing, and transforming such limiting influences over your daily life.

And, at the same time, practice growing and stretching into something that is freer, higher, and that lies as yet only in potential within you.

In short, getting to know the anatomy and structure of the inner life as it expresses itself in you.

Here is a question I have been working with from Carol Sanford’s book, No More Gold Stars: 

“Identify an area in which you are avoiding a call to step up to a different level of challenge, integrity, performance, and consciousness.”

So in a nutshell, here is the solution you can get started on right away: study the inner life as it shows up in you by exploring the source of it: your thinking, beliefs, and worldview.

I am going to talk more about how to do this and how this can offset toxic practices in the workplace in my next articles. So if you want to learn more, please make sure you are subscribed to my newsletter, and, if you like, leave me a comment on my blog, or hit reply to this email about what toxic practices you would like me to discuss.

I’m going to be sharing more about the methodology I’ve developed and used with clients all over the world from individual leaders to management teams to businesses. Over the years I’ve found the essential concepts and practices that I believe cut through the noise of a very crowded field in personal and leadership development, culture development, and change.