Understanding Agile & Innovative Culture

1: Culture and The Japanese Miracle

Although the fervent claims about the efficacy of strong organisational culture have a strong North American feel nowadays, thanks largely to the re-emergence of Silicon Valley since the dotcom crash of 2000, it is important to know that organisational culture is rooted in Eastern organisations. In the late 1970s, the USA was struggling with industrial strife and looking enviously and wondrously at the Japanese miracle, in which Japan, a country devastated by WWII, had risen to become the second most powerful economy in the world.

Frightened Japan would overtake the US, consultancies and researchers determined to find out what Japan was doing differently and introduce it to the USA. Many factors emerged, such as the focus on continuous improvement, lean manufacturing, and a generalist approach to problem-solving. These are all highly relevant to Agile Work, and could be seen as its foundational philosophy. Despite these concepts reaching and becoming established in the US, the concept that caused most excitement was that or organisational culture.

For the Americans, implementing strong organisational cultures would result in hard-working, enthusiastic and loyal employees who would increase their discretionary effort without complaint. 

2: Death by Overwork

Today, we are seeing an extreme variant of this, with US workers increasingly celebrating the notion of never-ending work. 

However, from this perspective, the East still seems to be ahead of the curve. Silicon Valley executives visiting China return feeling their own employees are lazy compared to Shenzhen-based tech-workers’ 6-day-x-12-hour work-week.

While karōshi or gwarosa don’t yet have linguistic or legislative parallels in the USA, research on strong culture has consistently pointed to increases in psychological stress and even death by overwork. This recently culminated in the Stanford Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Jeffrey Pfeffer, publishing a book entitled Dying for a Paycheck.

3: The Complex Reality

One of the core problems with the strong culture movement is that there are few, if any, examples of any large, complex organisation successfully implementing a monoculture. As even a few moments of reflection would make obvious, the cultural reality of a complex organisation, populated by people of many cultures doing many activities, is extremely messy.

While there are many ways in which this can be illustrated, we’ll restrict ourselves to three of the most obvious.

1.      Organisations consistently use psychological profiling to find people whose personalities “fit” with the organisation’s culture. Culture is studied by anthropologists, who would find such a notion incomprehensible. After all, can you be too introvert to be an American or too extrovert to be a Korean?

2.      Employees who are highly educated and/or highly experienced draw from professional understanding and pride to do good work. When the values of their professional disciplines clashes with the value of an organisation’s culture, conflict, contradiction and messiness ensue.

3.      People from different national cultures inevitably have different perceptions of reality, which are used to inform work decisions and choices. To assume that these variations are disregarded to “fit” with one’s organisational culture is extremely na?ve.

4: The Agile and Innovative Paradox

Strong culture becomes a problem for mature, complex organisations as it results in (i) the assumption that everybody is on the same cultural wavelength, leading to a high probability of miscommunication, (ii) the feeling that speaking up in a way that challenges the official cultural narrative is risky, and (iii) a paradoxical blend of one-best way and the innovative possibility of diversity, which is expressed but not solved by the concepts of “innovative culture” or “agile culture”. 

To become agile or innovative, we must begin to appreciate the inevitable sub-cultural interpretations of complex organisational life. Rather than perceive people having such interpretations as bad fits with poor attitudes, we should tap into their creative and critical ways of sensemaking to appreciate organisational dynamics. By doing this, we will begin to design organisations that might truly be considered agile or innovative, rather than those that just are rhetorically so.