Evolutionary Culture

The final perspective is that of culture. Over time the organisation builds up a set of conventions about how things should be done. What behaviour is acceptable. How people should work together. What they should wear. Who should make decisions. Whether it's OK to talk to your boss's boss without permission. Whether it's OK to challenge authority. To take initiative without asking permission. These conventions are almost never written down. They form an invisible maze within the organisation that traps everyone inside. You don’t even know the walls are there until you bump into one and are punished for making a cultural transgression. There may be an official policy that is written down but you can bet that there’s an unofficial convention as well, that’s not written down and will be quite different.

These cultural conventions often form the greatest barrier to change. Because they are invisible, they aren’t addressed during change programs and remain in place, acting to quickly drag the organisation back to old patterns of behaviour or ways of doing things. Many leaders, particularly those who are brought in from outside an organisation to enact change, have been undone when cultural conventions they were not even aware of derailed their change programs. Many leaders are themselves trapped within cultural conventions that were created by leaders long since departed. Many leaders become stuck in execution, no matter how hard they try to delegate, because the culture of the organisation forces all decisions upwards.

I worked with a CEO who told me that his biggest problem was that he had no time to be a CEO, that he spent all his time fighting fires and dealing with escalations. No one would make a decision without his input because a previous CEO had ruled with a culture of fear and ensured that no one would do anything without his approval. Now the current CEO was trapped in execution by the corporate culture. All his efforts to delegate decisions were undone by the invisible barriers of culture that surrounded him.

Culture is a nebulous and invisible thing. You can’t reach out and put your hand on “the culture”. It's like the air all around you, vital yet invisible. Unless a wind is blowing you aren’t even aware of it. It's not until the cultural winds blow against a change you are trying to introduce that you become aware of its existence.

For people inside a culture it's just the way things are done. It's normal. People can confidently point out problems with other people’s cultures, look online and it's hard not to be bombarded by people criticising the culture of a particular organisation or country. But it's very hard to see your own culture. All those little rituals or ways of doing things that build up over generations are completely normal to you. But totally weird to outsiders.

There’s an old story about someone bringing their new partner home to meet their parents and to celebrate they cooked a roast dinner for multiple generations of the family. Before putting the roast leg of lamb in the oven they carefully cut off the end 5cm or so and laid it next to the rest in the pan. No one else batted an eyelid but the new partner asked “why do you do that?”. The answer - because that’s what my mother did. Mother was duly summoned from the other room to ask why. Her answer? Because that’s what my mother did as well. Grandmother was summoned. Again, “because that's what my mother always did”. Great grandmother was phoned at the nursing home and answered “because we had a small oven back then and the full leg wouldn’t fit”.

Culture starts for a reason and then becomes tradition. It becomes normal and it persists, possibly mutating a little over time, until it gets challenged. When culture is challenged there is often resistance. Especially if the challenge comes from an outsider. Did the family above change the way they prepared roast lamb when they found out that it didn’t have to be done that way? Or did they keep doing it because “we like our roasts that way”?

The “we’ve always done things that way” effect is a strong one. So much so that there is a famous experiment where a researcher back in the 1950s (when the ethics around animal experiments were a bit looser than they are today) took 5 monkeys and put them in a cage which contained a ladder. At the top of the ladder was a banana. Naturally, the monkeys rushed for the ladder but as soon as they touched it they were soaked with cold water, which monkeys do not like at all. Very soon they learned that the ladder was out of bounds. Not to be touched. The researcher then took out one of the monkeys and replaced them with a new monkey. The new monkey rushed for the ladder but was attacked by the other monkeys who wanted to avoid another soaking. Very soon that monkey also learned that the ladder was out of bounds. This was repeated until there were no original monkeys left in the cage, but any new monkey that was introduced was still prevented from touching the ladder. The monkeys had developed a culture that said - any monkey that moves towards the ladder must be attacked and prevented from doing so. Even if the reasons for doing so had been lost to the mists of time.

As it happens, the famous experiment described above is entirely made up. It never happened. It makes a good story to explain why it feels so hard to change culture, but it never actually happened. There was a similar experiment done though. It was done in 1967 and was called “Cultural Acquisition of A Specific Learned Response Among Rhesus Monkeys”. The setup was similar, a desirable treat, the punishment for reaching for it (in this case blasts of air instead of cold water but the effect was the same). The monkeys all learned to fear reaching for the treat. The intent of the researcher was the same as well - to prove the “it’s always been done that way” effect. But the results of the experiment were very different to the story, and very different from what the researcher expected.

When the new monkey was introduced to the cage, did the other monkeys jump on them and stop the new monkey from reaching the treat? No. They looked at each other fearfully but did nothing to stop the new monkey. Even more surprising, as soon as the new monkey had touched the treat and received no punishment, the old monkeys lost their fear and went for the treat as well. That’s a much more hopeful story. As long as the punishment for transgression is removed, people will lose their fear of transgressing cultural norms very quickly. As soon as they see that the expected punishment is not forthcoming, change is not only possible, but rapid.

If a leader takes the initiative, seizes the treat (metaphorically) and shows that there is nothing to fear, then they can bring the whole organisation along with them. Leaders in organisations must stop viewing culture as an intangible. As a thing that just happens and can’t be changed. They need to become intentional about culture. Leaders in the organisation must objectively assess their organisation’s culture and, like the brave new monkey, show the way in order to move the organisation forward.