This is a flow of thoughts collated for some wider work I'm doing, and is in no way complete; WIP warning!

It is an oft-repeated phrase that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. In fact, culture pretty much eats everything else for any given meal; it’s not a “better way” but a fundamental prerequisite for achieving success long-term.

The reason for this is relatively simple: culture is how we consciously and unconsciously behave, and is often the “Why” – and in some ways, the who - behind the what, how, and when. If culture isn’t addressed when change is required, nothing fundamental will change, poor behaviours will continue, and ultimately the organisation will decline. Eventual symptoms have proven countless times across all markets to include poor/suboptimal delivery, toxicity and micromanagement, a lack of acknowledging the humans in the system, loss of innovation, high attrition, loss of traction in the market, gaming organisational metrics to hide this (often up to board level), and an increasing focus on the immediate short term with results reflected by these metrics. Internally, this is often accompanied by management out of control trying to prove, triage, and firefight, alongside the hubris of “hero leaders” who become increasingly detached from reality due to poor data and a desire to only hear positives – all of which accelerates the decline of an organisation within an orthodoxy, increases the likelihood that weak signals and critical inflection points for change will be missed, and promotes final-days empire-building internally in an attempt to maintain personal benefits through structure. None of this is good for the organisation, obviously.

Whenever I seek to help a client transform, there are fundamental aspects which need to be addressed if success is to sustain, and to avoid these repeated pitfalls. It’s critical to understand that neither success nor culture can be copied, but past failures – both of ourselves and others – can be learned from.

Culture is often either misunderstood or ignored in favour of “Ways of Working”, both in transformation and general organisational running. The concept of Culture (alongside strategy) is often misquoted or misused; it is not a “better way”, or obtained by forcing change on people, but instead, a fundamental, foundational prerequisite for achieving success long-term, which must evolve and grow over time to stabilise and take effect.

The speed of business is such that there is now a discord between the radical and sustained change traditional organisations need to avoid the above symptoms and not fall into obscurity, and the time and effort required to effectively change, especially from senior management. No senior managers can make the requisite decisions with the requisite data and the requisite focus in organisations with such complexity now, so a radical shift in culture and the dissemination of decision-making to the right people is critical.

This means definitions of success need to both embrace less tangible, client-side outcomes over time, and be measured past the short-term. It also requires recognition of measuring the right things and surfacing issues, rather than the easier acceptance of traditional metrics and wants to fit the existing paradigm and the suppression of the “negative” or uncomfortable. Linked to this is the need for the definition of value being something defined through feedback over time, not predefined by management. Finally, as an external provider, a mark of success is how the organisation in macro (overall, over significant time) and in micro (at team or individual level) begins making better decisions and improving consistently in current as well as novel practices.

There is a defined difference between the concepts of management (which is required for systems and structures), and leadership (which is required for culture and people). An organisation will not realise the benefits of leadership by relabelling management as leaders; it is a demonstrable trait over time, not taxonomical, and doing this is one of the first signs that transformation is unlikely to succeed. The two are conflated often to the point where senior management now are routinely called leadership as part of a role title, and this can defocus inspirational support from other leaders.

A Leader is anyone with beneficial positive influence within the organisation, and this is not defined by role or job title. Attempting to confine this to senior management is inhibitive to good culture (indeed, it promotes the unattainable ideal of the hero manager, which is unfair to both workers and managers themselves), and the ability for culture to change and evolve, because all of culture must change, and it must do so itself via evolution over time – it cannot work simply in areas dictated by management by changing ways of working in dictatorial fashion. Culture is defined by what leaders do, not what they say or direct others to do (this very action, as well as the expectation “others will transform”, defines the action of management, not leadership. If you expect to utilise the unique strengths and collective intelligence of your people as a competitive advantage, you must lead, not manage).

Culture is:

• DRIVEN from the top down by Leadership (innovative)
• DISSEMINATED from the bottom up by the interactions between people and teams (disruptive)
• DEFINED by the actions AND INACTIONS of Leadership (live-in, not just buy-in, is required; people note what leaders do, not what they say)
• DEPENDENT upon the model of legitimacy (if how we reward people does not change, people will not change - in fact they will fight to undermine anything changing this structure)
• DARK - you cannot measure or see culture per se, only the effects it has on other systems and people

Most organisations and transformations are viewed in the extreme short term – traditional management metrics support this (delivery of a thing by external suppliers and a team’s ability to delivery higher numbers are not causally related to long-term change, but often used as extreme short term measurements). Since measurements are powerful drivers of behaviour, this is highly problematic; without true cultural change, the right measurements, the correct language, and distributed cognition and decision-making, the overwhelming majority of modern transformations follow a roughly-defined trend:

• Initially announce a big transformation and the accompanying disruptions. This creates fear of change and potentially fatigue if it’s a repeat of a recent disruption
• Predefine the desired constraints and the accompanying requirement of structure, often in the form of an established framework or methodology, and require the people to conform to it. This is often blanket-applied and highly disruptive, which can provide the reverse of what change is trying to achieve – less engagement, poor delivery, and so forth
• Quickly realise that this is problematic and doesn’t fit current procedures, and opt for maintaining current ideologies over the discomfort of the radical new
• Reinforce and “map” current legitimacy to the preferred perception of what is new
• Change language peripherally to support this mapping
• As it becomes apparent that nothing is fundamentally changing, review metrics and change them so “success” is reached

Unfortunately, nothing is fundamentally changed when this occurs, and the culture, definition of value from the wrong end, and fixation on delivery and metrics remains. For a transformation to take and succeed, we need to focus less on buzzwords such as “relentless”, “frictionless”, "agile", "product" (and related mislabelling), "delivery", and anything else which is poorly understood, predefined, meaningless, or deliberately misused, and start using the correct language from the start - both consciously and unconsciously - before we look at what is applicable in context with a true understanding of not only what these all are but how they intersect... and when not to use them.

To change culture, there also needs to be a refocus on changing the environment, not the people. The people change over time in response to the environment, and this is a feedback loop where the environment then evolves further. This is a complex process and cannot be hurried, forced, or controlled; unfortunately, this is where management has issues, as there is conditioning to try to do all these things. You should not and cannot force changes in people; if there isn't a fit, this is something to explore - on either side. The overfocus on speed and demand for old-fashioned tangible proof for something which can’t be measured this way all but ensures that a transformation will fail through premature convergence and escalation of commitment, and yet be positioned as a success through metrics manipulation and retrospective coherence.

Management should be guided by leadership here so as to:

• Enable not empower
• Inform, not control information
• Prove intent, not demand disconnected actions
• Change management actions and rewards
• Have the right people make the right decisions
• Co-ordinate and co-operate, not coerce
• Ask teams to achieve outcomes, not control how they deliver according to short term metrics
• If you want to be trusted and see results, extend trust and lead through intent-based leadership

There is a fallacy that management is justified in continuing to tightly control information and people because governance and regulation exists; in reality, these things should be constantly revisited and revised to prevent them becoming excuses for maintaining bureaucracy, rather than enablers for optimal organisational delivery within the appropriate guide rails.

If you expect a transformation to succeed, you must give it time, focus on the right measurements and trust the people who, ultimately, will be transforming the company. The culture is made form the interactions between people and teams; this is the crux of transforming - not focusing on control, pace, systems, policies, governance, sign-off on change, or management direction. Whether these things are effective or not will be dependent upon the culture and interactions, but what they can do as constraints is inhibit the very change they purport to need.

And those interactions are dictated by the experiences people undergo, which define beliefs, which define actions they take long-term; you can force faster changes through bureaucratic structure, but - even if it isn't so damaging you experience immediate attrition or dips in results - it will not sustain or embed. Ultimately, without these fundamental aspects addressed and allowed to evolve themselves before anything else, whatever other changes occur will fail past the immediate short-term. Discovering and addressing culture must always come first, or everything else we do will not matter.

We can't emulate the success of others, as it's usually quite contextual; but we can learn from their failures, which are usually a little more context-free, and I have seen an awful lot of catastrophic transformation failures due to ignoring fundamental aspects.

Your organisation is a complex building, capable of amazing things. Don't build it on sand, without foundations, or you only have yourself to blame for it sinking and being unable to support its own structure over time.