Culture change is often viewed as ambiguous or overwhelming. Our research seeks to decode the complexities of organisational culture, moving beyond superficial “projects” to understand the deep-seated patterns, histories, and social processes that define how people work together.
Key Findings
- Adaptive Challenges: Culture change is most effective when framed as a response to an “adaptive challenge”—one that requires changes in values, relationships, and discoveries rather than just technical fixes.
- The Role of History: An organisation’s past is always present. Understanding how history shapes current beliefs is essential to ensure that redesigns aren’t merely reacting to “ghosts” of the past,.
- Congruence is Key: There is often a gap between an organisation’s “espoused” values and the “lived” experience. True change requires rigour in aligning symbols, structures, processes, and everyday gestures with the desired culture.
- Disrupting Norms: Shifting culture requires the disruption of established assumptions. This involves creating “cultural immersion” and using alternative forms of representation to help people see their patterns of interaction in a new light.
Methodology
The research drew on a blend of ethnography, observation, and inquiry with client organisations. We engaged with leaders and practitioners to understand their lived experiences of trying to shift cultural identities within complex social systems.
Recommendations
- Ensure culture projects focus on what employees care about and want to achieve. Instead of ambiguous and all-encompassing change programmes, leaders should focus on achieving specific and tangible aims that matter to people and will make a difference. This needs to be translated into a simple, coherent and straightforward narrative that links the desired changes with the organisation’s long-term health and survival.
- Create a rich description and shared understanding of the current culture. Exploring stories, artefacts, rituals and myths reveal rich, complex and deeper layers of culture. This can supplement more quantitative and abstract methods, such as surveys. This gives leaders and change agents insights into how to influence deep, sustained and meaningful change in support of what they are trying to achieve strategically.
- Disrupt deep cultural beliefs and assumptions that maintain the status quo. Culture change processes have to challenge and disturb established patterns and habitual ways of working. For this to happen, people need a ‘cultural mirror’ to see how their actions can reinforce the very patterns they wish to change. This requires them to slow down, to notice what is going on and in what context, and to uncover what beliefs and assumptions lie behind their habitual responses.
- Help leaders to act congruently and consistently. The behaviour of influential leaders, such as the CEO and the Executive Team, is highly symbolic, signalling which changes they actually believe in and which they do not. They need to be congruent, reliable and dependable in both their messaging and behaviour. This is only possible if they are fully committed to what they want to change. Ambivalence leads to inconsistency, contradiction and loss of trust.
- Change structures, processes, workspaces and policies to reinforce important cultural messages. Each of these elements communicate cultural assumptions and beliefs. They influence how people think, how they see the world and how they act. Attention needs to be given to what is explicitly and implicitly communicated. If ‘the medium is the message’ then simply changing one without the other is likely to create contradictions and confusing signals about intent.
- Play the long game! Meaningful, deep and sustained change takes time, perhaps two to three years at a minimum. Progress may be slow at first as employees test and wait to see if leaders and their colleagues are serious and willing to act. Be prepared for periods of slow progress, setbacks and sudden shifts. You will need to be clear about how and when you will know that things are changing, and then help people to notice what is different.
Interested in Metalogue’s approach to culture change? Find out more here.
