Culture in the simplest terms is – ‘How we do things here’

Ask yourself a simple question – ‘Am I doing anything that will change the way things are done here’. If your answer is Yes, then be rest assured that you are undertaking a culture change.

Do this for any and every change you are trying to introduce in an organisational environment and you will be surprised how many times the answer is Yes. You might suddenly realise that you are actually impacting the organisational culture with most of your change initiatives. The question is why does it matter and what can you do differently?

It matters because it can help explain user behaviour in most of the cases. In many of the change initiatives, even a simple logical change fails to land and users just refuse to adopt the change. Change managers are left scratching their heads to no avail. From my perspective the explanation is mostly straightforward -Your change is not in sync with ‘how we do things here’. What makes it worse that we have never realised this and done nothing to be in-sync with ‘How we do things here’ aka Culture. We might have looked at the change as a business process change, technology change, Organisational restructure or many other things but not as a ‘culture change’.

Even when we realise that every change is a culture change, many a times another question still goes unanswered – ‘So what?’. It is all good to know something but what is the point if it does not help our cause?

The moment you realise that every change is cultural change, you can start looking at it from the Cultural lens. You questions and the answers you are seeking change. You start unearthing deep rooted fears and apprehensions that are stopping people from adopting change. Instead of focusing on just the symptoms aka ‘adoption stats’, you will start diagnosing the problem.

Let’s look at a simple example

Bottom-up sales reporting through a system vs reporting through excel – On the face of it , this seems like a technology challenge or at best behaviour challenge. Think again! The real challenge is around transparency and fear of being exposed/ judged. ‘The way things are done’ are going to be changed and people are not ready. Yes a bad system might be causing the issues and the IT support might not be good enough but if users cannot get over their deep rooted fears around being exposed..

As I said at the start, if we look carefully every change is a culture change. Just that in most cases we take time to realise it..