Getting it Together

It is impossible to liberate people if they do not know what overall outcomes are wanted, and liberation only works if everyone is actually participating in a self-disciplined way.

Participation in turn depends heavily on communication. Communication only feels genuine if it is around shared values or the search for these values.

Shared values that do not lead to organizational outcomes are pointless. Outcomes that do not demand innovation and self-discipline are rarely sufficiently challenging.

Innovation depends on new ideas, but these cannot emerge in a usable way without participation, communication, liberation and self-discipline.

In a misguided attempt to force achievement or bulldoze value-change, managers may set challenging outcomes without enabling innovation; or the board pushes for customer-responsiveness, but is unresponsive to relevant staff views; or professionals demand liberation without accepting the need to take shared values seriously.

External control stifles initiative, inhibits local champions, engenders fear, and produces uninformed, unimaginative decisions.

The culture of «order and obey» neglects community-style participation and leads to an over-reliance on being told what to do, deferring to experts, depending on negotiated decisions or just leaving matters to the accountable manager.

Businesses with a rationalist ethos can work on cultural needs, beyond management culture.

Example 1: When the UK's National Health Service was reformed in 1989 to create an internal market, hospitals required new values like dynamic entrepreneurialism, being patient-centred, customer-responsiveness, manager-doctor cooperation, board autonomy, and financial realism. Installing these values meant a revolution in attitudes and beliefs built up over decades: i.e. a new mentality and a new culture.

Example 2: When banking was deregulated in the 1980's, the culture inside banks needed to change to accommodate to the new fast-moving environment. The failure to change internal values was the root cause of massive losses and collapses, needing government-sponsored bail-outs in places and societies as far apart as Japan, Scandinavia, Australia, USA and England. A different sort of cultural failure within banks generated the global financial crisis of 2007-08.

Banks and the NHS are not allowed to fail, but businesses easily go under. Read more on culture.

The Rationalist Mode threatens managers who lack a rationalist spirit. But, in a competitive market, a focus on values (like customer needs) and outcomes (like return on investment) is essential.

In a developed democratic society, enabling liberation and full participation at work seems almost like a common-sense convention. Unfortunately, managers in pragmatic-structuralist cultures don't see it that way. It all seems too vague and risky. Asserting control and making deals seem so natural and safe.

The Rationalist Stage of cultural development emerges as a prototypical systemicist-style culture change project. The very idea of changing a culture demands a focus on values in the organizational community and such things are not seriously or explicitly considered before the Rationalist Stage.

The desired and rather challenging outcome in such a project is the existence and operation of new values. Such an outcome is a form of identity change utterly unlike the usual, tangible outcomes of profit, quality standards or productivity. Working with values is possible if the organization can evolve to this point.

See a brief outline of what needs to be done.