Drivers of Cultural Evolution

Prepare for a Long-term Staged Process

Strengthening the management culture is a progressive and cumulative process that must be explicit and staged. It means altering the taken-for-granted way of working, managing and thinking so that the whole organization is permeated by a new ethos.

Each Stage has to be installed on a secure base because no installed value ever loses its importance.  That new Stage must then become securely embedded. The whole process has an evolutionary quality, in that each Stage leads naturally on to the next until the process is complete.

Success of any transition is evident when the new values are supported explicitly in word and deed, and when they naturally come to the fore under stress.

While THEE's staged trajectory of growth is natural, its evolution does not just happen. The secret, to be revealed in TOP, is getting the right timing and sequencing for introducing new sets of values.  Try to install values that do not fit and are not widely seen as necessary, and you will surely fail.

Culture refers to values that are recognized by all as important, and that are habitually applied by most in their everyday working habits. If we use those criteria, the following mistakes and misunderstandings can be understood:

  • If the atmosphere is reasonably tolerant, values from any Mode may be applied at any time by anyone. Changing the values in an organization is far more demanding than that. Strategies for change like 'one-big-push' or 'softly-softly-catchee-monkey' invariably fail.
  • Developing a strong management culture is not about occasionally using a different decision approach when times are easy. Use of a decision method is irrelevant to culture. Culture refers to values in a group, not the methods of one individual or found amongst many individuals.
  • Any organization will drag bits of all decision approaches into its effort to achieve, and so it should. Individual staff members do the same (often incorrectly equating this with use of the methods). Neither of these behaviours provides any guidance as to the culture. 

The Drivers of Culture Change

Despite a sequence for the installation of values that feels and is natural, cultural evolution is itself arduous and unnatural. By contrast, degeneration of values and regression after each Stage, are ever-present tendencies. The forces for progressive additions of values are fourfold.

Extrinsic: Output-focused

i.e. competitors, investor demands, customer demands, political forces

Intrinsic: Culture-focused

i.e. inherent limitations and degeneration of the existing management culture

Individual: Leader-focused

i.e. the "fire in the belly" of the CEO &/or Chairman of the Board

Organizational: Follower-focused

i.e. aspirations and discontents of most managers/professionals in the organization.

Originally posted: 17-Jun-2011