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Itâs Always the Culture
My job isnât to make you happy. Itâs to not give you an excuse.
âAnonymous help desk analyst
Weâre starting every chapter with an interludeâa tale of either woe or success that is related to the chapterâs subject.
The interludes arenât intended to be Aesop-style fables, perfectly crafted to make the chapterâs points, ending with âthe moral of the story is . . .â Theyâre complementary to the subject matter, not duplicative of it.
We collected these interludes from seven sources we know and trust. While weâve streamlined them, weâve done our best to preserve their essence, and our sources have reviewed and endorsed them. In the Hollywood reality hierarchy, each one is âbased on a true storyââ definitely more accurate than âinspired by a true storyâ but fictionalized enough to not be unvarnished history.
Interlude: A Cultural Transformation
Back in the last century, the company where I worked was acquired. We were a well-established firm with a loyal customer base and a hard-driving national sales team. The acquiring company wanted to transform our successful product manufacturer/sales company into a company that would assist its customers in achieving their objectives through a long-term advisory relationship with their company representative.
No big deal, just move from a culture built on closing sales on as many of our products as you could while being careful not to give advice to the customer (it was a highly regulated industry) to one of intentionally consultative services with products available, as necessaryâbut a rigid, legal requirement to suggest products only when the customer had a proven need for them.
The acquiring company made a brilliant choice in hiring a savvy new leader to run the company. Rather than come in with guns blazing, giving directions on all the things that needed to change, he came in and spent time learning the current culture of the company. He then told us something that startled us. We were not going to be a rules-driven company. You couldnât possibly write enough new rules/requirements to bring about the transformation required.
We were, instead, going to be a Vision/Mission/Values-based company. He put together cross-functional teams of the âheroesâ in the company: the top salespeople, the top product development people, the long-tenured, well-respected sales managers, and so on. He then led them through a set of exercises to define the Vision/Mission/Values of the new company that we would become. They were concise, meaningful, and focused on helping our clients succeed. I remember those statements to this day.
Then, to top it off, he really shocked us. He asked us to operate at an âalmost out of controlâ pace.
For those of us with conservative, risk-averse personality needs, this seemed like crazy talk. What if we made a mistake and it cost the company money or damaged the brand?
The new leader made it clear to the entire leadership team that any âmistakesâ would be viewed through the filter of âCould you demonstrate that what you were doing was consistent with the Vision/Mission/Values and focused on serving customers?â If so, all would be forgiven. Learn from it (donât repeat it) and move on.
It should be noted that there were multiple instances where this guidance was validated. As always, there were also instances where actions driven by a different agenda were taken. Those errors were not forgiven and people were held accountable.
We quickly transformed and created a new culture where staff internalized the companyâs purpose and held each other accountable. In short order, our division became the crown jewel of the parent corporation. Those of us who participated in this transformation marvel at how much we were able to change as an organization and how much we learned. We have all taken that knowledge and experience with us to subsequent organizations and positions; however, whenever we reconnect through industry or social events, we invariably reflect on what an incredible, rewarding time it was to participate in transforming our organization.
In ITâs Precambrian* past, its practitioners held exalted status. They were the high priests of the glass house, and supplicants understood that IT operated at a different intellectual level than the rest of the company.
Then came its Pleistoceneâ fall from grace: IT professionals stopped being mythic gateways to the wonders of computing and became subservient providers to internal customers.
At first this seemed to be just another management fad, to be chuckled at but not taken too seriously.
But what started as a ridiculed change in vocabulary became, over the span of decades, an ingrained part of the IT and business management cultures . . . and subcultures . . . in most of the world here in commerceâs Holocene epoch.*
As is the case with most business change, culture is less of a barrier or enabler than it is the lead story.
And in spite of what you might think, culture is not an intangible Iâll-know-it-when-I-see-it âwarm fuzzy.â Itâs an aspect of the organization thatâs just as susceptible to engineering as its processes and technologies.
Susceptible, but, because those pesky human beings are involved at every step, engineering culture calls for considerably more patience.
What Is This âCultureâ Thing of Which You Speak?
Business leaders talk about culture all the time. What do they mean when they use the word? Chances are, they arenât all that sure themselves. So letâs get precise.
Culture is how we do things around here. Itâs how we think about things. Itâs our attitudes, shared knowledge and values, expectations held in common, and specialized vocabularies. Itâs the organizationâs unofficial policy manualâa collection of unwritten rules that are rigidly enforced by the inexorable power of peer pressure.
It is, in operational terms, the learned behavior employees exhibit in response to their environment, their environment consisting largely of the behavior of the employees who surround them.
That is, itâs the learned behavior employees exhibit in response to the learned behavior employees exhibit in response to the learned behavior . . .
FIGURE 2 Culture is the learned behavior people exhibit in response to the learned behavior people exhibit in response to the learned behavior people exhibit . . .
Itâs a self-reinforcing feedback loop, which makes it highly stable and difficult to changeâfrustrating when you want change to happen, but welcome when it lines up with what youâre trying to accomplish (see figure 2).
How to Describe Culture
Before we can talk about how to change culture, we first have to know how to describe it. We need a way to describe the culture we have, the culture we want, and the difference between the two.
Go back to the operational definitionâthe learned behavior employees exhibit in response to their environment. Environment in this context consists of situations. Behavior is how employees respond to situations.
The way to describe culture is as a set of situation/response statements.
But thereâs a caveat to this: itâs easy to fall into the trap of thinking youâre describing culture when all youâre doing is writing procedures.
Letâs start by trying to describe your help deskâs culture:
Situation: The automated call distributor (the system call centers use to queue up calls) routes a caller to a help desk analyst.
Response: The help desk analyst (1) reads the greeting script, (2) records the callerâs name and employee ID, (3) looks for open tickets associated with the employee ID, (4) and so on.
This is entirely unhelpful. It describes procedure, not culture. Hereâs an entry that helps describe help desk culture:
Situation: An employee describes a problem whose solution is, to the help desk analyst, simple and obvious.
Response: The analyst rolls his eyes and, while patiently explaining the solution to the caller, makes a mental note to share the call with his lunch buddies as another dumb-user story.
Descriptions of culture are behavioral, but they reflect attitude.
The Culture We Have; the Culture We Want
When a company describes its major projects in terms of IT delivery, a number of mental habits are commonly in play. Here are a few samples, contrasted with the culture in play in companies that describe them in terms of their intended business changes. Your mileage may vary. If it does, we encourage you to develop equivalents that fit your actual situation:
⢠Where there are IT projects, business executives view project proposals with suspicion. They see their job as screening out bad ideas, which is why they insist that the CIO provide a hard-dollar return on investment, typically calculated as the number of warm bodies to be laid off multiplied by their annual compensation plus benefits.
Where there are no IT projects, business executives view project proposals as opportunities to improve how their company conducts its business. They see their job as helping good ideas succeed. Because of this they insist that all project proposals be described in terms of business change, described that way by a business sponsor who is enthusiastic about the possibilities and supported by an IT SME who attests to the projectâs technical feasibility.
⢠With IT projects, business managers are busy people. They look for parts of their operation that should be automated, figure itâs up to IT to figure out how to provide the automation, but donât have much time to spend with ITâthey want IT to just tell them when itâs done.
With no IT projects, business managers are just as busy. But they make time to talk with ITâs internal business consultants, asking them for ideas on how to make their areas of responsibility more effective. And, they rearrange their calendars so they can stay involved throughout the process of making the ideas real.
⢠In IT project-land, a business analyst wouldnât think of visiting, say, the companyâs raw materials warehouse when designing a warehouse management system. A business analystâs responsibilities begin and end with interviews with SMEs to document requirements.*
In the land of truth and righteousnessâas youâll read in the next chapterâthere are no business analysts. Instead, IT has a staff of internal business consultants. These folks were born with the curiosity gene, which drives them to want to understand in depth the parts of the business theyâre responsible for, so they can envision a variety of ways to improve things.
⢠If business change is a battle to be won, project managers are the sergeants who win it. Thatâs when there are no IT projects. When there are, project managers are the sergeants who make sure IT delivers its defined work products, and then insist thereâs nothing left to be done.
⢠And with IT projects, IT developers, as described in the introduction, see their job as translating written requirements and specifications into a bug-free software product. Understanding the business isnât part of their job description; helping change it is Someone Elseâs Problem entirely.
When projects are defined in terms of successful, intentional business change, in contrast, IT developers spend a lot of time talking with business users because they see no way to succeed without collaborating with their colleagues who work in the affected part of the company.
In even more enlightened companies they sometimes become business users for a while so they can envision firsthand what software can do to improve the situation.
⢠And finally, with IT projects, the projects needed to keep the IT infrastructure current and in good shape are ITâs problem, and that includes funding them, on the grounds that if the project doesnât directly benefit my part of the business, I donât know why I should have to pay for it.
After the no-IT-projects culture change, all business leaders will recognize that an obsolete or poorly engineered IT infrastructure is a serious business risk, whether or not itâs able to run everyoneâs applications right now.
You might have noticed that the âwith IT projectsâ examplesâ those describing the culture weâre coming fromâall sound pretty bad. Thatâs premeditated.
For the most part, cultural traits are neither good nor bad. They are, however, either consistent with and supportive of the business change youâre trying to achieve or run counter to it.
In case the point isnât clear . . . in case you think cultural traits that run counter to what youâre trying to accomplish are bad . . . consider the case of World War II. In World War II we considered those resisting change to be the good guys, which is why we called them âThe Resistance.â Our words for those promoting change were considerably less flattering.
Thatâs the point: while in absolute terms cultural traits are neutral, youâre free to choose the language you use when describing both the âfromâ culture and th...