Productive cultural change can be achieved in your organisation by following these principles.
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Primate committee thinking experiment (actual experiment)
- Start with a cage containing five apes. In the cage, hang a banana on a string and put stairs under it. Before long, an ape will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all apes with cold water.
- After a while, another ape makes an attempt with the same result - all the apes are sprayed with cold water. If later, another ape tries to climb the stairs, the other apes will try to prevent it, even though no water sprays them.
- Now, remove one ape from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new ape sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his horror, all the apes attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.
- Next, remove another one of the five original apes and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with great enthusiasm.
- Again, replace a third original ape with a new one. The new one makes it to the stairs and is attacked as well.
- Two of the four apes that beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs, or why they are participating in the beating of the newest ape.
- After replacing the fourth and fifth original apes, all the apes which have been sprayed with cold water have been replaced. Nevertheless, no ape ever again approaches the stairs.
- Why not? "Because that's the way it has always been around here".
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Sound familiar?
If the apes story even slightly resembles your organisation then don't despair. Help is at hand.
We all know that achieving cultural change can be difficult, slow to implement and hard to sustain. But let's not overly complicate it or indeed be overwhelmed by the task. Productive cultural change has been accomplished by organisations for centuries and is occurring today in numerous workplaces of varying size and type.
It's as simple as ABC.
A = Assessment
B = Belief
C = Consolidation
A = Assessment
Use the following checklist to assess your organisation's readiness for change:
- Do we have top management commitment to the need for change?
- Do we really have top management commitment to the need for change?
- Are we absolutely positively certain that we have top management commitment to the need for change?
- Are we prepared to rigorously apply a combination of relevant tools and techniques to assess the current situation? Tools such as:
- SWOT analysis
- Climate of morale survey
- Force field analysis (to identify the behaviours we need to cultivate and the behaviours we need to leave behind)
- Critical success factor identification
- Are we prepared to do what it takes to identify, address, support, coach and even remove if necessary, people in denial, contentment or who are likely to resist the change?
NB - Do not proceed any further unless all boxes in the checklist are ticked!
B - Belief
Again use the following checklist to determine whether enough people in the organisation believe in a possible future which is considerably and measurably better than what currently exists.
- Do we have a compelling vision of the future we wish to create?
- Do top management and enough other people in the organisation believe this?
- Have all people in the organisation had the opportunity to contribute to this vision?
- Do we have a plan to achieve the vision?
- Does everybody in the organisation understand their role and their unique contribution to achieving the plan?
- Is everybody in Leadership and Management positions in the organisation prepared to commit to being a role model at all times, by modelling the behaviours we need to cultivate and dropping the behaviours we need to leave behind?
- Are we prepared to recognise, reinforce, support and reward people for their positive contributions to the change process?
- Do we understand that the change process follows a U-curve shape and that when we confront obstacles to change, we have the resilience and steadfastness to persevere to achieve our vision?
- Do we understand the principles of ‘The Power of Now" and are we prepared to act with ‘already there-ness' to hasten the change process?
- Do we have appropriate tools to make our plans work?
NB again - Do not proceed any further unless all boxes in the checklist are ticked!
C - Consolidation
Finally use the following checklist to ensure the changed culture is consolidated and has become part of ‘the way we do things around here'.
- Has our Performance Management System been brought into play to ensure all people have goals, actions and measures which reflect their unique contribution to achieving the change?
- Is the recognition and reward system continuing to reinforce the desired behaviours and outcomes?
- Do we have a leadership model which specifies the competencies required to operate in our new culture?
- Do we provide appropriate development opportunities for all our people including training, coaching and monitoring?
- Do we continue to measure and monitor our culture to ensure we are staying on track?
Sustainable change is possible but is not assured in many workplaces unless all of the above points have been addressed.
If you are daunted by the list you can take heart in the fact that there are success stories out there which reassure that the application of these points actually does produce desired results.
A good starting point is for the reader to ask two simple questions which the author of ‘Productive Workplaces' and successful change agent, Marvin Weisbord, always posed to his prospective clients:
"What's possible... AND... Who cares?'