Ice, Ice... Baby

?‘Yo VIP […] alright. Stop, Collaborate, and Listen.’

With these words from their catchy 1990 hit, Vanilla Ice uncannily advised on corporate culture. Akin to famous Banksy artwork, familiar road signs at the time were ‘decorated’ by fans with words from the song’s riff.

With December 31st approaching, many firms assess results and get ready to formulate or start implementing the strategy for next year. Does corporate culture get in the way?

Company strategies often assert that cultural change is de rigueur to excel, beat competitors, foster learning, generate employee satisfaction and earn customer trust. Change is required to improve, improvement to succeed, and who can argue with success. No change means stalling, stagnating, even regressing. But how can culture improve? Where strategy points to a fix, culture points to a fit.

In business literature, the classic illustration of culture is an iceberg. Above sea level are advertising, mission, policies, behaviours. Beneath are traditions, success and failure stories, beliefs, leadership styles. The visible iceberg is smaller than the submerged one.

To improve culture, staff could dive to the bottom of the iceberg, check for faulty unwritten rules, ingrained false beliefs, outdated traditions, which all take managerial and financial resources. Divers might file away the unseen base of the iceberg, which makes it stay afloat, has been in place for long, and may take long to reshape. This chipping may bring the risk of re-engineering institutional DNA and betraying one’s roots; the fear to lose.

But what if change was to start from what informs culture by design, top-down, strategically? Staff could climb up the visible iceberg, follow the strategic vision, ensure that company values and brand align, and so do conduct, policies and procedures. Going up and down the face of the iceberg might entail a sore slip, with a firm grip possible only with company-wide buy-in, and present the risk of wrong decisions; the fear to win.

Confronting risks and fears necessitates experience and experiment. Experiencing no shame in learning from failures, failing forward; experimenting new solutions, trying new paths to evolve.

The courage to change can’t be choosy. Strategy is important and contributes to redesigning culture. And culture is fundamental and orients new strategies. Change needs to be organic, bottom-up and top-down. It needs teamwork, when the old and new collaborate. It needs movement, as it does stillness and stability. Sometimes, it needs to stop, to learn from those who have been there a while, and hear from those coming in. It needs to listen.

So are we divers, climbers, or DJs?