Organizational culture engineering - A process increasingly difficult to ignore

How many times have you said or heard managers say "Stories do not interest me, in business we communicate through numbers!" when someone tried to point out something that was happening in the organization? We can unequivocally rely on numbers, while stories are fickle, deceptive and only cause confusion, right?

I have witnessed far too many managers make similar claims with great confidence at the most critical moments. They simply dismiss the stories they don't want to hear, decide based on what seems rational (to them), and introduce processes they consider logical. They do that unaware they are still under the influence of stories, but those stories that confirm their knowledge of what goes on in the organization. Later, after the important decisions do not yield wanted results and the processes they intended to instill do not take root, they start passing on blame and looking for support in favor of their personal story about the causes of the problem at hand, using data interpretation as ego protection.

Organization as a multitude of processes

An organization’s behavior is determined by the interactions of its members. To achieve their purposes within the organization, they act in accordance with their personal meanings attached to organizational dynamics. The long-term survival of an organization depends on its shared values and beliefs, therefore it is useful to regard it as a multitude of processes, with different representations of reality repeatedly being agreed upon and negotiated.

Leaders and managers are more and more realizing that one of the most important roles today, among all others, is the role of a designer or engineer of the organizational culture.

But let's go back to the very beginning - when, how and why is culture created

In order to survive throughout our evolutionary history, we had to build a system of assumptions about reality and our roles within it. A significant part of the worldview constructed is shared with others from the same social environment, and this common idea is called - culture.

The main purpose of culture is to connect members of a community and ensure the necessary conditions for meaningful communication. As an inevitable product of human interactions, culture will always exist in some form no matter what we do. Created by incorporating experiences, beliefs, attitudes and ideals, it is continuously reshaping its bearers who, consciously or unconsciously, keep it alive.

Culture development is a dynamic, ever-changing process that relies on human characteristics and the principles of social systems. Since it is determined by a multitude of factors, some of which can be influenced and others which cannot, the direction and duration of this process cannot be predicted reliably.

Both the opportunities and the obstacles to the development of culture stem from individuals’ desire and capacity to jointly create their future. Purposeful activities can create and reshape culture again and again, but how successful this process will be is decided by the degree to which these individual activities penetrate and change the shared perception of reality.

What does organizational culture engineering encompass?

It is said that culture eats strategy for breakfast.

The starting point of organizational culture engineering is figuring out what our culture is currently like compared to what we want it to be in order to actively support our goals and help optimize our result-achieving processes. We must consciously design it, make it explicit and implement it successively by bringing it’s present state closer to what we consider desirable. Unlike the objective, tangible reality, culture is immersed in subjectivity. Its emerging ideas, behaviors and customs are transmitted and reinforced through stories and narratives.

The extent to which individual ideas match shared ideas of a group determines the degree of the individual’s belonging to that group. In this regard, the successful organizational culture engineering takes approximately as long as it takes to communicate the vision of the shared future to all the stakeholders, ensuring that all the members of the organization express their own ideas about the vision and witness the consistent implementation of the agreed. Our deeply held beliefs and assumptions change according to our experience of reality, thus changing our culture. The culture carrier is a story we tell ourselves repeatedly. Through changed experience, as we gradually start perceiving the world in a new way, we begin to tell ourselves a new story.

Leaders as consensus managers

Culture is the glue connecting parts of an organization into a unified whole. For this integration to succeed, reaching consensuses is essential. Leadership must clearly articulate their vision of the future in an inclusive way, by calling to action and encouraging stakeholders to take ownership of the vision so they can commit to acting on it. Leadership thus comes down to consensus management (the consensus meaning agreement on action, not unanimity or agreement on principles).

It is easier to build an organizational culture "from scratch" than change the existing one

Building the organizational culture "from scratch" (e.g. when launching a startup), gives us a certain advantage because we can define the starting points and choose the constituent elements as its carriers. Well-thought-out, rigorous selection can prevent the organizational culture from straying in directions that undermine our vision and results. There is a saying "hire hard, manage easy" and it is not for nothing. Toxic cultures are like summer fires, they spread very quickly. If we allow frequent incidents to occur, we might not be able to repair the damage done and get the organization back on track. For that reason, it is highly important to detect and neutralize selection errors as early as possible.

In the process of building a culture "from scratch" (although this "scratch" is rarely a zero), the focus is primarily on laying the foundations and networking for the further development of our vision by the interactions of our culture bearers. Changing an unwanted culture, on the other hand, is more demanding in terms of the complexity of the processes that must be implemented. Long established behaviors and attitudes are hardwired to resist change, so we must take the resistance into account. Therefore, besides focusing on the beginning of the life cycle of the new system we are installing, we must acknowledge and address the withering of the old system disintegrating and disappearing due to our actions. The concepts of the previous system are woven into the collective memory, so we need to ensure they are integrated in a healthy way into the organizational past - and sent away with it. The members of the organization still embodying these concepts should be led through the transition with dignity, by implementing appropriate rituals, so that those ideas, in the form of ghosts of the past, do not disrupt the establishing and functioning of the new value structures.

The connective tissue of organizational culture?????????????????????????

Dealing with culture means continuously observing the organizational reality in search of everything present in the system (stories, history, symbols, relations etc.) that resonates with our guiding concept in a constructive way. We need to follow relevant topics and create events that naturally gravitate towards our main concept and fundamental principles. Encouraging the manifestation of the elements that support our vision helps us to distinguish more easily the elements opposite and/or harmful to it. Removing the harmful elements from the system would be an ideal thing to do, but since that option is not always available, we must develop a rapid risk assessment strategy and the tactics for damage reduction.?

In such assessments, agreeableness can be the crucial factor preventing us from reacting with an adequate intensity and/or in a timely manner. However, we have to come to terms with the reality that not everyone will view ?our vision favorably. There will be antagonisms we won’t be able to avoid no matter what we do, so we must actively face them. Compared to highly agreeable individuals, those who are low on agreeableness have a significantly easier task at hand.

A culture based on truth

In our everyday interactions, it is important to ensure that our culture building elements are based on a solid background theory, the validity and consistency of which can be communicated explicitly and tested on the fly. We must firstly speak and write in a way that avoids misunderstanding and secondly to be properly understood.?

If we can’t find the right person for the role of our "devil's advocate”, we have to become one ourselves and learn to think in terms of everything that might be attributed to us by our opponents. Reconsidering where our story might not add up and which claims might lack sound arguments is a necessity. We have to ?become aware of our personal weaknesses, what makes us feel provoked to do something reckless and undermine our culture building efforts. For everything expressed in words we must have an equivalent in the tangible world. Storytelling is a central skill for building a culture, but telling stories is not the same as creating stories through actions that reinforce the values we advocate for.

Practical guidelines for the optimization of organizational culture

When entering an organization in the role of a coach, with the intention to optimize its culture, we should be aware that the culture changes with our very presence. As a new element introduced into the system, we are given our meaning and place (pre)determined by assumptions, beliefs and other ideas that make up the cultural fabric of the organization. In doing so, we ourselves become a part of the organizational culture, incorporating its themes and influencing the stories that disseminate, much like the circles on water produced by a thrown pebble. Our actions are always immersed in a broader context than the one unfolding before our eyes, and in that sense, we never start from scratch.

?Having the alignment process in mind, it is important to understand the purpose assigned to us by those with whom we interact, compared to the purpose we (think we) are fulfilling for ourselves. The effectiveness of our interventions in a specific organization directly depends on the level of congruence between our personal purpose and the purpose attributed to us. After mapping the existing tendencies present in the observed culture, we need to accept that we cannot predict the future behaviors or outcomes accurately. Our task is not to predict, but to deal with the phenomena that constantly emerge in the system, be involved and participate in conversations shaping the culture and, together with its bearers, co-create as high-quality moves into the future as possible.

Although dealing with culture can often seem ethereal, we must not forget that the culture is our biggest lever of influence, because the key differences among societies and individuals are not biological, but cultural.

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Gharajedaghi, J. (2006): Systems thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity, A Platform for Designing Business Architecture.

Senge P. (1994). The Fifth discipline fieldbook.