How to change an organization’s culture

change an organization's culture. Image attribution: Animated gif excerpt from "Lawyers in Love" by Jackson BrowneIs it possible to transform a dysfunctional corporate culture like that of United Airlines into the employee engagement of Southwest? Or the indifferent customer service at Kmart into the customer-first approach of Wegmans?

After over thirty forty years (now) of working with organizations, I think it’s possible to change organizational culture. But it’s far from easy!

First, many organizations deny that there’s any problem with their culture. Getting leadership to think otherwise is an uphill or hopeless battle.

Second, if an organization does get to the point where “we want to change our culture”, there’s rarely an explicit consensus of what we “need” or “might” change.

Third, culture is an emergent property of the interactions between people in the organization, not a linear consequence of deeply buried assumptions to challenge and “treat” in isolation. Prescriptive, formulaic approaches to culture change, are therefore rarely if ever successful.

Finally, organizational culture self-perpetuates through a complex web of rules and relationships whose very interconnectedness resists change. Even if you have a clear idea of what you want to do, there are no uncoupled places to start.

So, what can we do?

For concise advice, I recommend Chris Corrigan‘s excellent article The myth of managed culture change. Read it!

In particular, this excerpt caught my eye:

“Culture is an emergent set of patterns that are formed from the interactions between people. These patterns cannot be reverse engineered. Once they exist you need to change the interactions between people if you want to change the patterns.”
—Chris Corrigan, The myth of managed culture change

This is why process tools like those shared in The Power of Participation are so important. Imposed, top-down culture change regimes attempt to force people to do things differently. Chris describes this process as “cruel and violent”. Participation process tools allow people to safely explore interacting in new ways. Organizations can then transform through the resulting emergent changes that such tools facilitate and support.

Image attribution: Animated gif excerpt from “Lawyers in Love” by Jackson Browne

Guaranteeing audience engagement at your events

audience engagement: an illustration with three engaged people at its center. Around them are icons representing people connecting and talking.Most people won’t ask questions at meetings. So how can you get authentic audience engagement at your events?

In a thoughtful article “Audience Engagement – at the Heart of Meetings“, Pádraic Gilligan writes:

“…We all want audience engagement so why doesn’t it take place?…While the speaker can be to blame for lack of audience engagement, in my experience, it’s usually the fault of the audience!”

I disagree.

I’ve found that the lack of audience engagement is due to the generally poor process used during most meeting sessions.

A different workshop

In 2016 I led a two-hour workshop in Boston for 160 members of a national education association. Every participant was active during ~80% of the workshop:

  • Discovering the concerns and experience of other participants;
  • Moving around the room while forming human spectrograms to learn about each other and the group (I used three participant-created chair sets during the session); and
  • Learning and connecting around issues and topics relevant to them throughout.

The hardest task of the workshop was getting people to stop talking with each other so we could move on!

Pádraic suggests that hi-tech polling methods can be used to increase engagement. I agree that such technology can help engagement, but it’s not necessary. During my workshop, I showed 12 slides, but would have been fine without them. Other technology I used included 5″ x 8″ cards, pens, and large post-it notes. We used no high-tech, with one optional exception. We projected a Google Doc at the end, to capture and display feedback during the closing public workshop evaluation.

Facilitating connection

In 25 years of experience, I’ve found that most people have a fundamental need and desire to connect with others with whom they share something in common. When you use good group process to safely facilitate appropriate connection, ~98% embrace the opportunity and learn, connect, and engage effectively with their peers. Anonymity, if needed, can be readily supplied by no-tech/low-tech process. But it turns out that it’s needed a lot less than people think.

Every person in the workshop received a copy of my book The Power of Participation, which explains why participant-driven and participation-rich sessions are so important, how to create an environment for this kind of learning, connection, engagement, and resulting action, and how and when to use a large organized compendium of appropriate process tools. The participants I spoke with after the workshop told me how excited they were. They planned to read the book and start putting what they had experienced into improving their professional development work in education.

It’s possible to create amazing learning and connection through the approaches I’ve outlined above. When I facilitate longer conferences, almost everyone will ask questions in public at some point during the event.

Conclusion

If you aren’t getting excellent audience engagement, don’t blame the audience! Change the processes you use in your sessions, to guarantee engagement!

You can experience how to use process tools to significantly improve the effectiveness of your sessions and events at one of my Participate! labs. If you can’t participate in a workshop, buy a copy of The Power of Participation to learn the why, what, and how of building better learning, connection, engagement, and action outcomes into your events.