As we all continue to come to terms with ‘hybrid’ ways of working, it inevitably means that we should adapt the way we enable transformation and change in organisational life. Getting colleagues – who have become even more dispersed and time poor - to collaborate across role and departmental boundaries has become even more challenging. In our experience, it has profound implications too for the role of consultants.
Most of our clients are engaged in attempts to develop or change their culture in some way, shape or form. They tend however to tell us they find such initiatives to be tricky, demanding and, ultimately, disappointing. To understand why this is the case, we have been inquiring with leaders and OD practitioners into their experience of trying to change culture.
One perspective that informs our consulting practice at Metalogue is cultural anthropology. We see value in trying to understand the symbolic meaning of behaviour, language, artefacts, rituals and ways of working. This lens often reveals new and different ways of making sense of what goes on in organisations.
The quote “CULTURE EATS STRATEGY FOR BREAKFAST!” often pops up (in big bold letters) on LinkedIn posts and has variously been attributed to Peter Drucker, Gary Hamel (and with more veracity) Bill Moore and Jerry Rose.
Finding new possibilities for how to enable cultural change and transformation. In our last blog, we talked about applying “a liberal dose of science and an equal measure of art” when exploring organisational culture and change. As practitioners, one frame we find helpful comes from John Heron and Peter Reason (2008), who talk about there being 4 “ways of knowing”:
In our work with culture and transformation, we often talk about the importance of narrative and metaphor. In fact we wrote a report about this just recently. So it’s always pleasing when what we say is illustrated by others – in this case by Greta Thunberg in particular. If you managed to miss her speech to the UK parliament here it is.
As part of our research into the practice of designing organisations, we spoke to leaders and practitioners about their experience and reflections on organisation design projects. Most of them acknowledged that, with the benefit of hindsight, they had not given sufficient attention to how changes would be brought to life.
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