Culture eats strategy - can we change our diet?
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At our recent – and first in a while - in person event in London, we had a great session with Mike Bainbridge from AWS on building a culture of Innovation – as Amazon Web Services (AWS) works in an innovation friendly way – with a mental model approach that encourages people to fail fast and try new things.??
Everyone has some simple ‘go to’ ways of working – mental models and patterns - that are culturally accepted and drive forward creative approaches to problems.?
I won’t go into all the details here?- no spoilers – but I do recommend getting Mike to talk to your organization.?
It led me to think about culture and transformation, unhealthy habits and more.
There’s a quote from Peter Drucker, that Culture eats strategy for Breakfast.?
We know that whatever you set out to do – if the people around you don’t want to do it – it's not going to go anywhere fast.?
Your strategy and your priorities can point you to?a set of outcomes, but without any cultural buy in and engagement, you’re inflicting change on people and that will ensure your delivery is an uphill battle.?
People – we’re hard work, aren’t we??
We have competing priorities, personal connections to things and to each other – we have emotional responses, we have bias.??
All these things will present you with bumps in the road for your strategic roadmap and delivery of those outcomes you need to get to.?
So, Culture – what can we do differently??
Can we make some healthy choices to help?
We are embracing so much change – we’re probably entering our capacity for coping with that,?so we need to help people with that as much as possible.??
Listen, invite, co-design, co-operate, co-deliver.??
Assume that if people could, they would – the reasons underneath why they ‘can’t’ see a reason to change may be many and numerous.?
A bit of empathy can go a long way.
2. Build relationships?(h/t to Steve Radcliffe here!)
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This isn’t anything we can do rapidly – it takes time and?it takes relationships too. We can go fast alone and go far together.
Think about the time we can invest into the relationships we have and the ones that will help us get to the outcome we want to.
There may be different and many ways to the same outcome – I’m sure there are!??
3. Communicate and share - and then do it all over again…?
In marketing, it takes 5 - 7?interactions with a brand to remember it and to build your confidence in it, sometimes this can be even more.?
Why would this be any different for?an internal organizational change?
Why would it be that you only have to talk about it once for everyone to be on message and get the sense of direction??
If you’ve built out your strategy, or defined your policy, or set out your targets and you’re hoping your people will help you deliver it – building, innovating and connecting freely with energy to make it work – you will need to communicate and engage on these outcomes' multiple times, in multiple ways.?
You need to be sharing the connection to everyone of how they will help, what they will do, how they are expected to join in.
Then go back to Lesson 1 and do it all over again and bring some humanity to those conversations too.?
What else would you do to aid your own transformation journey?
Please comment and share if you find this useful.
Tell me if you don't.
Product Director
SharpCloud