Reaching for the revolver

The business of change is about the practicalities, so don't try to fix the culture.

Apologies for the delay in getting this one out, but I've been offsite with some nice people who've been letting me practice on them. It went pretty well, although there are a few things that we need to tweak, which is great - I would worry if it had all gone perfectly.

I spent two days with this team - a set of people I trust, who do a tough job very well indeed. They have a transformational role in an international technology firm that is helping to lead a revolution for customers.

I was helping them to scope their quarterly objectives and work out the specific issues and jobs that needed to be done to meet them. This work was counter-cultural - their organisation is very action-oriented, so that people are expected to take objectives and run with them delivering as they go, and not take time to think about them properly.

And this, of course, was the problem. The business is now awash with people running round trying to do things that they only partially understand, have only partly under their control and which have a practical planning horizon of only days or weeks. The outcome is that everyone spends more and more time trying to establish control of vague clouds of action, having endless meetings to establish boundaries and accountabilities for things that are unclear, generating huge amounts of office politics and resulting in...not very much, really.

All I did was enable this team to understand the specifics of what they needed to do. Now they are in a position to take control of their remit, and be very clear about they need from others. In practice, what the rest of the business will see is that this team will question others in more rigorous ways, and set a higher standard for the information that they need to get and use. I expect, however, because they now know how to use such higher quality information, there will be a step change in their performance.

Which is what we wanted to do. It was a good chance for me to prove the Bloomstorm model of using new skills to solve real issues, and a fair return, I think, for two days of their time.

There is, however, a wider point. It is easy to think that the solution to such problems is to understand the culture that leads to the behaviour we were trying to change. This is lazy thinking. You change culture by changing the way the business works - not the other way round. Viewed in this light, efforts to change culture are usually a complete waste of money with little or no return.

If, however, you set out to change specific behaviour for practical purposes, then you get the results you want - and as a side-effect, the culture has to change. But that's not why you make the change. You make the change to make the business better - the culture just follows along.

- Mike