What's Lurking Underneath?

One of our executives recently asked me to share the two or three actions that executive leaders could take to change culture.  I probably gave him a deer in the headlights look as my brain tried to process how to distill the complexity of culture to a series of silver-bullet actions.

The truth is that, like interlocking paving stones, cultures have unique and distinguishable patterns on the surface but the components of culture fit so snugly together that any attempt to change one aspect meets resistance from the surrounding components - and you can't really see what's deeply embedded underneath that structure.

Sure, you could replace a faded gray stone with a shiny red one, but instead of the rest of the stones changing to match the new shiny red color, that new stone tends to darken and fade over time as it is absorbed into the larger landscape of the culture.  Single fix approaches rarely work in the long term.

Just as problematic is trying to replace all the stones at once, stressing the existing connections and forcing the interlocking values, attitudes, roles, and assumptions to bind closer together, preventing any attempts at change.  Forced change always meet resistance.

But...what if?  What if you gently peeled back a section of the stones, taking careful note of what binds them together?  What if you then looked beneath the stones at the foundation of the culture and how that foundation supported the interlocking pattern that was so distinguishable from above?

And what if, while you had that section lifted, you intentionally began to reshape those connections and shift that foundation so that when you laid that section back down it didn't quite fit the way it had before?  It might feel a little wonky at first - like there's nothing supporting it, but eventually the foundation would expand around that section, lifting the next adjoining section high enough for you to begin reshaping it.

And what if you repeated that process - lift, look, reshape, expand - until there was a new distinguishable pattern - one that you had intentionally created by understanding what was lurking underneath?