Organisations Struggle.

Organisations struggle to become more effective and to realise their strategic goals. They change their strategies without understanding the landscape they operate in or the culture of their own organisation. Why do they so often misunderstand the need to change enough to meet their strategic goals?

It is a phrase repeated frequently; when an product has failed or a team has missed a KPI it is pushed forward. Its regularly used as an excuse for why a team is not delivering with agility or when a product misses the customers desires. It is rarely used as a positive, an outline of the opportunities that are in place for change because businesses are not mapping their environment to understand the landscape they operate in and so are unaware what elements of their culture can or should be changed to be able to effect a strategic goal.

We seek to understand the distinction between culture and strategy. What does each mean and why are so many people willing to give primacy in culture and ignore the end goal when it comes in conflict?

Culture is the universe your organisation has created. It is the essential laws of your operation, its natural mechanics at a basic level.

They show themselves in how interactions occur, both explicitly and implicitly. They are not written down or told to you. There is no easy understanding of them. Strange and unexpected interactions may bring new insights into these natural laws but there is no shortcut.

It is easy to create myths about why certain interactions occur because you’ve not spent the time to experiment and discover the fundamentals. As Wardley explains, you see the world you know and make assumptions:

Each organisation must spend time and effort mapping their universe of Culture to understand their place in it, otherwise they are just following someone else’s pattern.

Your strategy is the equivalent of the legal system. It outlines some ways that good interactions should occur and is designed to reward positive behaviours and discourage negative ones to reach a particular goal. This, by its very nature, operates within the constraints of the invisible structures defined by your business’s culture.

We struggle with understanding this intuitively. Emotionally, we feel that culture is social; it is organic and changeable, soft. Strategy is logical and methodical. In terms of a business’s ability to know itself and predict how it operates, an organisation’s culture is a system of complex interactions of behaviours without a guidebook. A strategy is a clearly defined and desired outcome which is subject to those cultural behaviours by implication.

To help illustrate this concept, lets look at a real world example of how physics and legislation come into conflict and which wins.

In 2011, a Republican movement in the US decided to propose legislating the value of Pi. They decided mandating Pi would be 3.

Physics eats Law for breakfast.

A strategic change (revising the value of Pi via legislation) obviously has no impact what so ever on the culture. (the physical fact that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is 3.1415….).

Culture eats Strategy for breakfast.

Taking an imaginary example: the fictional ShawCorp has a goal.

Currently ShawCorp is selling little online and the industry is feeling the first input of disruptors coming in with their new ideas and customer testing, proving value and measuring success.

In order to achieve our goal the C-Suite has told everyone they’d be “going Agile”. Implementing cross-functional product teams to deliver value to the customer rapidly.

The teams are founded, experienced product owners are hired (priority given to ex-spotify and ex-google of course.), Jira tickets are deleted and wall boards created and everyone pats themselves on the back because now ShawCorp must achieve its goal. After all we’ve taken the best practice steps in realising our strategic goal!

What actually happens is the new product teams start to take on the culture of the organisation. Delays occur because they don’t have the access to release to production a remote team of “DevOps” does this. They don’t have autonomy over the product because the organisation requires external stakeholders to agree to features before release. Any number of governing constraints are found and have to be followed and any agility the team initially found is minimised until they reach the level of effectiveness that existed before.

The new organisation reflects the old. New names are there, we have DevOps not Release Managers. We have Interested Parties not External Stakeholders. We have Product Owners not Project Managers. Nothing has changed.

Fundamentally, this shows the need for three things to be in place to have a chance of achieving the desired strategy by design rather than fortune.

Large organisations often have cultures dating back decades or even hundreds of years. Without a cross-functional, cross-seniority commitment to address the issues causing their inability to adapt nothing meaningful will change. An initial push to agility will slowly, inexorably move back to the status quo.

“Culture eats strategy. “

If you don’t have a commitment and a passion at every level of the organisation to address the issues in play to facilitate the strategic needs you want to realise then you will fail to transform. You will revert to who you were.

The only way to know change is happening, whether positive or negative, is to have a feedback mechanism. It might be surveys or 1–2–1 sessions or a white board where the team feels safe to write the comments. It might be glass-door or following people with drones but a method to review the situation you understand against what the team understands is vital. Why are interactions happening in the way they are happening?

If you do not know the space you are operating in, you are playing chess without knowing there is even a board.(Wardley) You move in a random fashion dictated by the success of others. Understand the terrain your business works in and you will have a clearer view of the nature of your challenges.

Time spent mapping can feel like working on the obvious. Groups of people drawing things everyone knows on a board. Until an insight happens. Until a mismatch appears between expectation and understanding. Then you know something new.

There is no single method. No approach can tell you how to win at business. The only way to gain insight is to spend your time reflecting and reviewing the the work done. What worked. What failed. Why are you sat where you are right now.

Being better is hard. Can you draw a line on where you are now and be better?

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