Today I had the pleasure of presenting with three of my colleagues on ‘the Cultural Conundrum’ at the Association for Change Management Professionals (ACMP) conference in Las Vegas (check it out: www.acmp.info/conference/ ). The cultural conundrum is found in the attempts to apply individual change techniques on cultures that are largely impervious to them.
The conference is full of amazing people who are working on change as a discipline. We had the opportunity to talk through the ways in which changing culture is different from changing individuals. Most change practices focus on cognitive techniques that are then scaled to work with groups of individuals. So communication plans, change agent networks, etc., are designed with underlying assumptions and commitments to how people change, rather than how cultures change or adopt changed environments.
We propose that culture change requires techniques that incorporate a ‘social constructionist’ perspective on organizations, where communication is at the core of everything that creates the organization. Through organic communication and dialog (read unscripted…. unmanaged…. off plan), the culture emerges continuously, and is shaped, and directed in subtle and overt ways. Specifically, we suggest the following five approaches to affecting culture:
- Determine what cultural health means in your organization
- Create strategies for cultural change that include group work
- Establish conversation as a core business process
- Help leaders join the conversation
- Build infrastructure to support emerging conversations
More on each of these in the coming week.