What are the signals that your organisation needs to change? Part 3 of 4 - Culture & Complexity

In the first part of this series we shared some key leadership signals that an organisation is ripe for change, and in the second part at operational signals - the engrained habits of business as usual. Both distract the organisation from the ability to be adaptive and resilient in an increasingly dynamic operating environment.

The third tranche of signals can be the most challenging to resolve - beyond ways of leading and doing, ways of being and behaving are a tougher set of signals to identify, unpack and resolve.

Cultural signals

Whilst culture is often modelled by leaders, everyone contributes to and is impacted by the cultural ways of their organisation. It’s intangible yet powerful enough to determine the success or failure of change - it can be highly empowering or frustratingly resistant. Cultural signals can be subtle, pervasive, inconsistent or multifaceted (for example, micro behaviours or gaslighting).?

Key cultural indicators that transformation is needed include:

1. Toxic positivity. Even when staff are feeling powerless compared to the competition, leaders persist that all is well and to carry on regardless. This either accidentally or deliberately masks transparency that might otherwise own up to gaps or issues. It’s also indicative of a fear of differentiation - forcing people to feel that they should all be in the same boat when some may need more focus than others. There’s underlying or implicit frustration about the state of affairs - people know when it feels like issues are being swept under the carpet. Sometimes there’s excessive urgency to ‘move on’ more than any reflection that might lead to? progress
2. Who is the customer? Internal units view the customer as another internal unit rather than the end consumer. Delivery people are surprised by customer centric activity, and many people are too scared to speak to actual customers. Co-design might be happening with customers but not staff, resulting in ideas that shouldn't and can't be operationalised
3. Isolated pockets of change. People are unclear on why they're doing their role or task. There’s accompanying friction between the pocket transforming and the rest of the organisation, amplified by hidden conversations away from the 'crazy ones' doing the innovative work. Change is a hobby rather than core work
4. Innovation theatre. It feels like there’s advertising led (surface) effort and decisions more so than transformative change (deepest levels). There’s accompanying verbal acrobatics masking clarity of purpose. People explain projects in defensive or apologetic terms because there’s underlying feeling that they’re all just for show with little substance or structured commitment lying behind the showcase activities
5. Seeing change management as implementing change rather than ensuring we’re designing the change together.

Culture needs to be steered, adopted and acted out to enable positive change. A toxic or stifling culture will soon result in the more progressive people leaving the organisation for more receptive ground.

Complexity signals

Busywork, internal language, technicality and bureaucracy breed complexity. It can be comfortable for parts of organisations to wrap themselves in the details and dive down rabbit holes to fill their working weeks. This stifles clarity of purpose and builds layers of separation from customer and employee expectations. It’s easy to get lost in your own maze. You’ll know when complexity is suffocating your organisation when there’s:

1. An inability to explain products or services, usually dressed up in corporate speak that could only make sense to people within your organisation. Dazzling on the surface, on further reflection there’ll need to be significant work behind the scenes to bring them to life. You can almost guarantee they’re backed by overly long and complex business cases. The Marketing team ask for an elevator pitch to enable them to talk about it, and the customer isn’t obviously central to the problem the product or service is solving for?
2. A constant game of catch up. Remember the Windows Phone..? Microsoft never caught up in the smartphone game. And rather than making the new, your backlog is dominated by technical debt and burning platforms. It feels like you start from scratch every time, including asking a lot of the same questions rather than creating knowledge systems that can be drawn on by any team to action what has been learned previously
3. Excessive complexity around even the simplest processes. Bureaucracy is creeping and organisations generate their own busywork, usually to the detriment of work that might improve the customer experience. Process and system diagrams that look like bowls of spaghetti which should raise alarm bells immediately. People are regularly verbalising that some tasks will remain too hard to ever resolve successfully
4. Separation of data from fact. Rather than an "evidence-based approach to change", data is interpreted and stories are distorted to support personal agendas. Actual data is regularly challenged or questionable in source, legitimacy and relevance. Egos and the expert mindset rule the roost
5. A lack of balance between what we’re doing and how we’re doing it likely multiplied by it not being clear why we’re doing it. If that sounds unclear, it often is - Steve Jobs famously saw through this in 1998 to save Apple’s product line…and the company itself.

The details are important yet simplicity powers organisations towards forward. Complexity ultimately leads to the stalling of progress, requires additional effort to unpack and understand direction, and it syphons investment away from innovation - usually at the expense of the customer and ultimately at the expense of the organisation.

Signals everywhere

The leadership, operational, culture and complexity signals we’ve highlighted aren’t an exhaustive list - in fact at Meld we identified and discussed many more signals, behaviours and indicators small and large, overt and covert.?

In the fourth and final part of this series we’ll share some approaches and tools we recommend when the signals are compelling you to take action.

The likelihood is that you’re experiencing some of these signals yourself, or your team are trying to tell you that they’re feeling them and are eager for positive action. An organisation that’s high performing embraces change as a constant and an opportunity.?

How might we help?

Meld Studios

Designing better futures, together.