Barriers to Change in Company Transformation

The toughest challenge in business today isn't technology adoption or market volatility - it's navigating meaningful organizational change. Dr. David White, cognitive anthropologist and transformation expert, joins us to reveal why roughly 70% of change initiatives fail despite good intentions and substantial resources.

Drawing from his 30+ years working with organizations like Microsoft, IBM, and many others, Dr. White shares the groundbreaking insights that led him to pursue a doctorate in cognitive anthropology after witnessing repeated transformation failures. His research uncovered a critical blindspot: businesses fundamentally misunderstand what culture is and how it operates. While most leaders focus on values, behaviors, and mindsets, Dr. White demonstrates that culture actually lives in the tacit, taken-for-granted knowledge that manifests through business practices.

The fascinating paradox Dr. White illuminates is that an organization's greatest strengths often become its most formidable barriers to change. The "dominant logics" that created success—whether prioritizing certainty in manufacturing or rapid iteration in software development—frequently become over-applied across domains where they no longer serve the company's evolution. These logics remain largely invisible until you attempt to change them, at which point resistance emerges from seemingly rational business practices.

Through vivid examples and practical frameworks, Dr. White shows how to diagnose these underlying cultural patterns by asking powerful questions like "How do you define success?" or "What makes someone a rock star in your organization?" and listening for revealing patterns. Rather than treating transformation as a mere project or technology implementation, he guides leaders to recognize when fundamental questions about purpose and identity - "What business are we in?" - need addressing.

Looking to drive meaningful change in your organization? This conversation offers crucial insights that go beyond simplistic change management models to help you understand the invisible forces shaping your company's future. Subscribe now for our upcoming series exploring how to identify barriers to change, craft effective strategies, overcome common pitfalls, and sustain transformative change that sticks.

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Patrick Antrim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickantrim/

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:21

Well, welcome back. Welcome to the show Today. What we're tackling here is what we believe to be one of the toughest challenges in business, and we're talking today about the barriers to change and company transformation. Now, if you think about this, every company right now is going through change, and transformative change that maybe you subscribed to, maybe you didn't, and you may be thinking you know you're acquiring another company, you're going through a merger and acquisition, maybe you're involved in a turnaround, maybe you just care about this stuff, right, you may also be one of the CEOs that is experiencing some kind of pain in the organization. Maybe you're thinking about this as you want to deliver this profitable growth for the company. You want to be resilient, you want to know that you can retain the top talent, and some of you are thinking about technology, future-proofing your business, all of these things that are coming, but they impact change the toughest thing about organizational shifts and there's a lot of uncertainty around that as well. So today I've got a guest, dr David White, who has devoted his career to diagnosing the cultural barriers that keep us from making real change and not just change, lasting change. You may be able to hire consultants, let them parachute in and tell you things, but he's developing sustainable change you can hold on to in your business.

Dr. David White's Background

Speaker 1 2:10

We're going to pinpoint in this series the internal practices that are standing in the way of your progress and through this process, I want to extract from him his winning strategy to overcoming these things. And it's probably not what you're thinking these models that companies can use to scale are something that you have the ability to execute today and along this series, what we're going to do is we're going to be talking about how sometimes well-intentioned efforts, even smart people, make silly, stupid decisions about things right Despite our intentions. Even some of the smartest people, we fail in this process. We're going to dive into the study of cognitive anthropology, which, when you speak to Dr David White, he'll tell you that this is some of the answers, through this study, of why businesses cling on to status quo they keep where they are is these practices in their business, and you're going to hear from him on why most organizations, even consultants, today, are just short on the fuse. They want the quick fix and truly the things that we're talking about here are about the practices, not just the people, and why this change requires not just a new way of thinking, but a new way of working, all right.

Speaker 1 3:58

So if you're that leader and you're determined, maybe you're that business owner that you've got to hold on. You're trying to make it happen and you want to bring meaningful change or transformation and you're hitting roadblocks. This is the conversation that will give you the insights and the tools to make change stick. And when we say change, guess what? Nobody likes that. Nobody wants to be changed. It's never easy. David's going to talk to us about how we can do it effectively and empower our teams through that process. Think of it like productively moving through change. You have two choices. You have rapid change. You leave people behind. It's a problem. You have status quo and you're trying to increment and you get outpaced by competition. That's even a bigger problem. So let's bring David on and let's get to this series.

Speaker 2 5:04

David, welcome in and let's get to this series. David, welcome in. Thank you, Patrick. It's quite the introduction. I think you've explained it all very well.

Defining Culture in Anthropological Terms

Speaker 1 5:16

I think I can just sort of go home now, right? Well, I've had the opportunity to study a lot of your work and to share the time, and I think that's one of the things that we want people to do is actually, it takes time to do some of these things, and time and practice. I just want to say I appreciate you doing this. I know our audience and literally America cares, the world cares about this topic and I know that it's hard to decipher what's right. A lot of people have tried a lot of things in the past and some of these things have worked and some of them seem marketing and I really love how you cut through that noise. But before we get into this conversation, I'd like to take a moment to just set up a little bit about who you are so the audience can get some context around how you've shown up in organizations. We'll get into this topic around these barriers to change in company transformation, why that impacts our organization. Let me just share a little background on David For those of you that are listening. I want you to grab something. If you're driving, focus, do your thing, but if you're at work, shut the door. Listen to this. This is going to be the most important podcast you listen to in all of 2025. Write things down, take notes, because David has been doing change in business for over 30 years and you know from my time with him and he's shared the stories in the last. In the first two decades of his career, he's led large-scale initiatives for companies like Microsoft, lotus, ibm I mean just to name a few. There's plenty of amazing companies that, just regardless of the amount of talented teams, he had access to the massive budgets, he had access to, even the leadership strong leadership in these organizations. He'll tell you that he never saw transformation fully succeed and that experience got him asking a crucial question, and that question is why do so many efforts that go into driving change? Why do they fail? So he goes back to school, earns a doctorate in cognitive anthropology. This is the study of how brains and cultural environments, how they interact, brains and cultural environments, how they interact, and over seven years of research and spending time with these amazing clients, he's produced two books and developed what I believe and many others believe that are much smarter than me a groundbreaking theory on why most organizational transformations fall short, and what he discovered is that there's actually a wealth of knowledge in the fields of this cognitive science and anthropology, about why change is so different. Now, anthropologists, they care about bigger world things Maybe not business and quarterly returns and the things you're thinking about and yet the business world isn't studying this stuff and they're not even tapping into it because they're not listening to it, they don't have access to it and they want short-term fixes. And, yeah, they just want to fix it fast. And today, david is spending time with organizations that apply this science and he's showing leaders why he's here with us today, not just why big change fails, but how we can use these proven methods that he's not only discovered, but to make this transformation stick within your organization.

Speaker 1 9:31

Now, if you're ready to dig into this what I call the real cultural change and why it's so challenging then grab that pin, open up your notes. Whatever you're taking notes on, get engaged in this conversation. You're going to want to make sure you save it, share it with someone that you think needs to hear it, but I'm going to have David reveal what he truly believes drives sustainable transformation. So let me set this up on what we're going to do. We're going to talk about more of a series. We may not have time to get to it all, but we're going to talk about diagnosing culture. We're going to help them identify the barriers to change, crafting this strategy in the business, looking at the pitfalls, overcoming those and then, after all of that, sustaining this transformation. So, david, long contextual intro and setup, but I think it deserves the gravity of the work that you've studied and worked on. So, second, welcome in.

Speaker 2 10:43

Appreciate that. Thank you yeah.

Speaker 1 10:45

Yeah.

Speaker 2 10:46

Yeah.

Speaker 1 10:46

So you talk, and let's just focus now on this diagnosing culture. You know there's a lot of opinions around this word, what it means, and is it marketing? Is it people, all these things? What are you, I guess? What are you thinking through when you're going in and diagnosing a company's culture? How do you think through that?

Speaker 2 12:11

Yeah, thank you, patrick, for the intro. Let's just begin with the word culture. You ask 10 people what culture means, you'll get 10 different answers. And the funny thing is in business it's.

Cultural Models and Dominant Logic

Speaker 2 12:25

The funny thing is in in business it's not that much different than an anthropology, you know, uh, famous anthropologists in the 1950s identified over a hundred different definitions of culture, um such that anthropologists for a period of time in the in the middle of the 20th century, thought that the whole concept of culture should just be abandoned. Like culture as a concept, as a construct, is just not worth, you know, because we can't identify it, we can't measure it, we can't define it, it's not worth the time and effort to do so. So, luckily, I think that we have backed off anthropologists have backed off that that sort of prevailing view in the 1970s, because I think culture is a very important construct. Culture is real. Any business leader in your audience will know that's true. But getting clear on what it means and what it is and what it's not is very, very important. So the very first step in in in a trans, in a transformation, is really understanding. What is it that we're working with here? What are we, what are we dealing with when it comes to culture, the thing that I've as you said in your intro. I've been working on transformation, organizational transformation for 30 years 30 plus years and not seen many work, and the reason why I came to the conclusion was because of this amorphous thing called culture, and through my discoveries in graduate school and in course of getting a PhD, I realized that, as you said, the way the anthropologists talk about culture and the way business people talk about culture is very, very different, and so what I've devoted myself over the last 15 years to doing is trying to bridge those two worlds. A lot of you know you're very generous in your introduction of me, but the stuff that I'm bringing to the business audience and to the business world isn't really new. It's just not known to business people.

Speaker 2 14:32

But in about the middle of the 1990s, the anthropology went through what's known as the cognitive revolution, and many anthropologists started to think about culture in very different ways from their predecessors, their earlier generations, and they started to realize that culture is in the mind. In fact, I have a newsletter called the cultural mind, and that's how cognitive anthropology was born. As you said, it's the relationship, it's the study of the relationship between the brain and culture, and what the anthropologists of the 1990s were writing about and studying was was how culture really is knowledge at the end of the day. Um, culture fundamentally is is stuff that we know, that we don't know, we know but that we use every single day, and that has become now kind of the de facto cognitive anthropology standard for what is culture?

Speaker 2 15:32

Culture is knowledge, and what kind of knowledge? Specifically, tacit knowledge, implicit knowledge, taken for granted knowledge, and when you start to sort of boil it down to think about culture in those terms and then you start to think about organizational and corporate cultures in these ways, the world starts to look different, right? So that's probably our starting point is you know culture is knowledge? What kind of knowledge? It's stuff we take for granted and the best examples? There's millions of examples in our daily lives.

Speaker 2 16:10

You know, how do you know not to look at people in the eye when you walk into an elevator? Or how do you know how to order food in a restaurant? Or how do you know how to you know get on a subway? When you are in a city with a subway? How do you know how to you know not walk down the middle of the street. I mean, these may seem so obvious and silly examples, but none of these things were ever taught to you formally in school.

Speaker 2 16:37

But you know these things to be truths, like you know, like waking up in the morning, and, and so that is what culture is. It's a shared body of knowledge of how to organize and make sense of the world around us, and that is as true in a society as it is true in a, in a company. Uh, and so you know, just on that point alone, if you start to appreciate that way of thinking about culture, versus thinking of culture as, say, values or behavior or mindsets or attitudes or logos or brands, I mean all those things relate to culture, but they're not what I call the DNA of culture. They're not, they're not the source code.

Speaker 2 17:29

And part of our challenges and part of our problems in business over the last 50, 60 years is that we've been trying to make change happen and make transformation happen and coming up against these, what I call these cultural barriers, and thinking that we've got to address and change the culture by going after these things like attitudes and behaviors and values, when those aren't really the man of the real core of culture. They might be symptomatic. It's like treating. It's like treating a disease. By treating the symptoms, you're never getting at the cause.

Speaker 1 18:10

You're never getting at the pathology underneath and sometimes in practice of work, we're hiring and engaging people that have past knowledge and I'm just curious about that let's lean into that a little more of how that can change a culture, even when somebody has great knowledge, especially when you're introducing a world of changing organizational structures and all these things. So how does that play out? Knowledge?

Speaker 2 18:50

Yeah. So the first thing we have to get clear on is that when we say knowledge, I'm not necessarily meaning book knowledge or your knowledge as an engineer, or you know.

Speaker 1 19:05

But they could be the steps that I took to do the thing that we've always done things.

How Culture Manifests in Business Practices

Speaker 2 19:07

It's, it's, when we say culture as knowledge, what we really mean is shared, uh taken for granted knowledge, and that is more fundamental than than stuff. You consciously know most of the stuff. When, when I say culture is knowledge, most of the stuff that we're talking about is assumed and taken for granted, and it comes from shared experience. And so what you're alluding to is what kind of shared experience? Well, it turns out back to this question of how does culture and the brain interact.

Speaker 2 20:16

It turns out that meaningful experiences tend to form long-lasting bonds in memory, long-lasting neuronal synaptic connections in the brain, chemical connections in the brain. And so when we have meaningful experiences and we share those experiences as a group, we tend to form a common base of knowledge, of this cultural knowledge and let's give this a name, because what I've the word that anthropologists use is these are called cultural models. They're shared mental models I've appropriated that term and changed it a little bit for business audiences and I call that a dominant logic. And what a dominant logic is basically is a set of concepts and ideas and mental models that organize uh or help make sense of the world. So, uh, I'm going to use the word dominant logic going forward, but basically a dominant logic is a cultural model.

Speaker 1 21:19

A cultural model is a shared mental model and so dominant logic um could be a a way that we've experienced success in the past on even going to market Correct.

Diagnosing Cultural Barriers

Speaker 2 21:35

So, if you think about where to let's talk about dominant logics and where they come from, shared meaningful experiences that a group shares will tend to form shared dominant logics. So, yes, think of a startup company that solved a really, really hard problem. The experiences gained in solving that really hard problem technical problem, market problem, customer problem will tend to create shared knowledge about what success looks like and what success entails and what's required to achieve success, and that's becomes a dominant logic for running the business. It makes perfect sense, right? This worked. We, we solve this problem as an organization. So many of the principles or many of the rules of thumb, many of the assumptions, many of the beliefs about what went into solving that problem, then become codified in the business and they become codified as business practices. So that leads to a second Once we understand that culture is shared knowledge in this form of these dominant logics, the second thing to understand is that these dominant logics tend to embed themselves in business practices.

Speaker 2 22:50

And one of the great paradoxes of culture, one of the things, again, cognitive anthropologists understand very well but business people have a hard time getting their head around is that while culture lives in people's heads, their collective brains, where you see culture, and where culture manifests is in these business practices. And when I say a business practice, what I mean by that is an actual process or routine by which you run your business. So think of, like, how you budget, or think about how you define what a customer is and how you go to market, or how you go about building product or how you go about setting up services. The how of that comes from these dominant logics, but also the what and the why come from these dominant logics. So the very ways in which you run your business and structure your business, the routines, the business processes, are the manifestations of these dominant logics. In other words, the culture lives in the practice. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 23:57

And so these are embedded in organizations CEOs, leaders. This is where it comes into that. Don't know that. I don't know. Type of information If culture lives in the mind and it manifests through practice, these practices in business, how do you diagnose it?

Speaker 2 24:20

Yeah, so that's a great question, and so there are many ways to diagnose it. That's a great question, and so the there are many ways to diagnose it. Um, there's I'll give you sort of two answers on that there's sort of the expert way you know, you can, you can hire an anthropologist and who's trained in these in the science, and that you, you can sort of expertly diagnose culture. And we do that through um very structured, um empirically proven means, through interviews and then analyzing those interviews, running surveys, and we can, from listening to how people talk about their business and how people talk about success and how people run and organize their business, and interviewing people on that basis and also surveying people on that basis, we can extract out empirically what those dominant logics are. We can also do it through observations, like ethnographic observations, being in the business, but you don't need actually a trained anthropologist to do this. It helps if you're trying to add legitimacy to your change program. But more fundamentally, the way you look, the way you spot a dominant logic, is to look at the patterns. And if you can take a step back from your business and do what Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky, these researchers from Harvard, write in this book, Leadership on the Line. If you can get onto the balcony or zoom out from your business and start looking down at the dance floor, looking down at the business and seeing how the business is run daily, and start to look for patterns in how the business runs, you can spot these dominant logics. Dominant logics are just pervasive patterns. So what's an example?

Speaker 2 26:15

Think about, I have a client, several clients, in the manufacturing, industrial manufacturing sector. Industrial manufacturing and manufacturing in general is a very obviously labor-intensive process. It's also a process, or it's an industry, that requires a lot of certainty. It costs a lot of money to produce a product usually, and the costs of failure are quite high. So one of the dominant logics that you tend to find in industrial manufacturing is a logic around risk, or what I call certainty, Meaning you want to make sure that whatever you invest in is going to work out the way you want it to work out. You're interested in certainty, and so one of the dominant logics in an industrial manufacturing business is typically around certainty, which is basically another way of saying you want to reduce risk down to its lowest possible set of tolerances. So everything that you do in your business is about mitigating risk Sounds reasonable, right? I mean, this is why you know the old adage you don't ship beta versions of refrigerators. If you're an industrial manufacturer of refrigerators, you typically don't want to ship product that has a lot of defects in it. If you're in the software business, what do you do? Every week you're releasing software that has known bugs. They're advising on that, actually, yeah, yeah. And you're listing out here that there are 250 known defects in this particular release.

Speaker 2 27:47

Right Now you think about the logic of what it goes in to make and ship a refrigerator versus the logic of what it takes to go and ship a piece of software. And this is obvious, it's quite different. But the underlying root logics, the root assumptions, the root beliefs, the root shared sort of heuristics about how you do that and how you do that well, are vastly different, Right? So how? How? You to your question.

Speaker 2 28:17

Long answer to your question how can you spot a dominant logic?

Speaker 2 28:21

Or how can you get at the root of culture? Is you start to spot the patterns by which you run and organize your business? And so in an industrial company you might be looking at how do we deal with risk, and not just in how we build refrigerators, but also in how we hire people, how we set budgets, how we do strategy, how we engage customers, how we think about marketing right we do strategy, how we engage customers, how we think about marketing right. You'll find that a dominant logic around risk in these kinds of companies tends to be what I call over-applied or over-learned. And you'll find that companies you know, industrial manufacturers tend to have this risk logic applied in all sorts of domains of their business, well beyond the manufacturer of the actual product.

Speaker 2 29:13

Yes, we want to not ship refrigerators with a lot of defects in them, but do we need to have our hiring practices structured such that they are all about minimizing risk so we will never take a chance on hiring on someone, For example, we'll never promote anybody from within because we don't think they can do that.

Why Change Initiatives Typically Fail

Speaker 2 29:35

We don't know if they can do the job. Or our planning, our strategic planning processes are such that they're so risk avoidant that we will never make a bet or take a big bet on a strategy which might be essential for our future growth and our future resilience as an organization. But we are hesitant to make big bets. So everything that we do is incremental, Everything that we do is hedged right. So you get the idea, this idea of I'm just using this one example of you know, a certainty or risk mitigation, dominant logic gets over, applied in all these different parts of your business. And now suddenly we have, we can start to see the mosaic, the picture start to take shape. A little bit about how one logic can start to become a barrier to change.

Speaker 1 30:40

So it makes sense. Yeah, so well, let me give you a real example. Does that make sense? And when you're forecasting finance programs 10 years out, you have to what ifs and the thinking of the risk management and seasons and all kinds of things to budget and predict income over the next decade. Let's say that leaking into. When you're making a software choice, yeah, very different, like so overdeveloped in how we take care of real estate, physical real estate, physical plant investment returns, things like that in a software decision, uh, where you gotta be quick, move quickly and it may not work right out of the gate. You know all that stuff. Is that an example of where an overdeveloped dominant logic and this is probably an industry logic and that then becomes company logic then becomes yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 31:45

That's a great example. You know the other from what I've gained from talking to you and talking to others. Question how do you spot a dominant logic? Well, you might think about where do we over apply, uh, this investment or transactional logic in our business when it's not appropriate or less appropriate to be so transactional, like in some cases? Maybe we want to have long-term relationships with our partners, our business partners, and not think of business partners in such a transactional. You know who's got the best price, you know who can satisfy myapply these logics in domains where over-application might actually be detrimental to not necessarily your business, but your change or transformation strategy, and that's where culture becomes a barrier to change. That's exactly where culture rears its head, because the business practices that have made you so successful as a business will always be the ones that are preventing you from change. And this is one of the hardest things about culture change and about change and transformation in general, and why, for the last 50 years, failure rates of change remain around 70%. No matter how you define change. Most up to almost three quarters of planned change does not meet its objectives. And one of the major reasons why is this reason, this culture. Reason we don't understand culture and culture inevitably is the thing that is precluding where we want to get to Another way of saying it, in a more appreciative way of saying it, and the way the anthropologists would think of it is cultures are ultimately also adaptive.

Speaker 2 33:55

The reason why humans invented culture or humans have culture, is essentially for adaptive reasons. We survive and adapt, and not only survive and adapt but actually thrive in our various local environments because of culture. Think about and now I'm drawing from you know 200 years of anthropology, but think about how islanders in polynesia survived and thrived in environments far removed from other societies and cultures. You know they survived and thrived by appropriating the tools and the ecologies and the nature and the environments and the biology that was available to them to survive and thrive in their environments and make societies in these far-flung islands that are thousands of miles from other civilizations and yet develop these very um sophisticated um cultures and societies, you know, without too much outside input yeah, business owners wake up concerned about profits.

Speaker 1 35:10

Today, you know costs are going up and up, it's harder and harder to retain talent, attract it, identify it. And you know there's change coming to an industry, from technical, from operational, from new emerging competitors I mean you name it CEOs and leaders are their heads on a swivel right now and this is very interesting because you said it to me the other day which is business leaders aren't seeking this out, they're not studying what you just shared. And, ultimately, if talent is the last real competitive advantage for a business, the true differentiator between who executes, who implements, who provides that experience, it stands to say that we need to bring a little more gravity to this body of work. And that's the confusing part, because I think people want stuff, they want change, they want a great culture, they want what has been sold to them, progress, um, and you know it's, it's a lot of work. And so back to your point of that balcony view, looking down onto your business, looking at it. You do that really well as an outside person coming into an organization. What does that look like in those conversations? And I wrote down how you listen to how people talk about their success. You listen to how people talk about how they operate and run their business, and that's part of your diagnosis of this culture. Correct, yes? And if someone hasn't done that study, I know at the tail end of our series we'll talk about sustainability of all of this, and I think that's ultimately the end game, is where you're showing them how to do this themselves, even as they grow more aware. Talk me through that process, the interviewing, the discovery, this diagnosis.

Speaker 2 37:32

That maybe isn't a quick, you know, survey or yeah, well, the challenge here is yeah, I mean, there's an awful lot in what you just said. Um, the challenge here is and I bring you back to kind of first principles, here we're we're talking about, um, knowledge that we hold, that we don't know we hold. One of the things we have to remember is that most of what we have, no, most of knowledge, most of most of what's in our brains, we only are consciously aware of a very small fraction of it. If we think about memory and we think about the brain, most of what's in our brains is not consciously known, but it can be evoked and triggered in context. I can ask you a question and I can bring forward a memory of yours Patrick just by the question I asked, and I can bring forward a memory of yours Patrick just by the question I asked.

Speaker 2 38:30

So the reason I say that is to get at what a group of business leaders you know, what are their dominant logics or what's the dominant logic of the business. What I have to do as an anthropologist is get at the assumptions and the beliefs and the ideologies by which you run your business. But I can't often do that by just asking you hey, patrick, what are your dominant logics? You're not. You probably would struggle to answer that question and you wouldn't try to orchestrate it and you wouldn't necessarily know, because you'd give me. You'd give me stuff that was consciously in your brain, in your head, versus the, the stuff that you assume to be true, and you just operate as if it is true, which is really what a dominant logic is.

Speaker 2 39:16

So the way we get at that and the way we train leaders to do this for themselves, with their teams, is to ask questions like how do you define success? And you can think about that. And then I would ask you questions like what makes for a rock star in your company? What do they do? And then I would ask you questions like what are the biggest challenges that you face as a business? And then, how are you going about addressing those challenges?

Speaker 2 39:47

And if I ask you enough of those kinds of questions and then listen very closely to how you're answering the questions, I can actually extract out the core dominant logics by which you are making sense of these very big, complex, open-ended questions, and that in and of itself starts to paint the picture of what are your dominant logics. And of course, you in this case is the plural right, because we individually hold millions of these kinds of schemas and cultural models in our heads. It's the ones that we share that are the ones that matter. It's the ones that we share that are the ones that matter, the ones that we share as a business that make up the culture of the business Right Make sense.

Identifying Resistance to Transformation

Speaker 1 40:42

Yeah, I'm just writing notes after notes. It was really interesting and what you're interested in is how they go about in natural expression, solving those challenges, that in the expression of those ideas, where you're getting into the areas of the memory or reflections that they may not even know.

Speaker 2 41:08

Entirely taken for granted. What I'm after is what do you assume to be true? What do you take entirely for granted? Um, and a lot of it is simply you know the technique of the five wise. Yeah, if the if, if you've been trained in any kind of process methodology and you know the technique of the five wise a lot of what anthropologists do is an application of the five wise.

Speaker 2 41:32

I keep, if, I keep asking you why, or why do or why do you believe that to be true, or how do you come to that position, or what makes this person you know. I ask you sort of why and what questions we can get down to sort of core assumptions and core beliefs. It is a process, it is kind of an iterative questioning process and you know all the we anthropologists are all the. You know what we're doing is. We're trained on how to do that and we're trained on how to listen very closely for the answers and look for patterns in the answers, because, at the end of the day day, a dominant logic is a pervasive pattern of belief that structures multiple domains of your business, from how you hired, how you, how you think about customers, to how you do product, to how you set strategy, to how you allocate resources, etc. Etc. Etc on down the line. And that's the key.

Speaker 1 42:33

You know somebody that's wanting to diagnose culture or they're they've got those events that I talked about at the top of the hour, which is the something going on in the business. You know there's a merger, there's a sale, there's an exit, there's an acquisition, stressors, all that stuff that we've got to make a change. So, to the point where someone's actually intentionally saying we need to diagnose culture In your reflections and body of work, what do you believe would be the indicators in some of these conversations that you've had and that maybe have been shared even amongst other companies, uh, when someone might be resisting change yeah, that's, that's very, that's very straightforward.

Speaker 2 43:24

I mean, you, um, the, the indicators are the transformation or the change that we want to make is not working. Or you know, I often hear my clients tell me, uh, those people are really resisting this change. Or you know we can't get the sales people to, um, do consultative selling. They have to sell. You know they have to sell a thing. Or we can't get those marketers to think beyond. You know what's in the brochure. I can't get the engineers to. You know, do you know to move faster? Or I can't get the finance people. You know, it's those people, it's, it's the. You know, if I simply ask the question how is your train, how is your transformation going, and what's, what's precluding it, then quickly, you, you can come to, you can come to this question, this answer. That's always the, always the litmus test.

Speaker 2 44:34

The other interesting thing that was embedded in your question, patrick, is the interesting thing about culture is that cultures are largely invisible and they only become visible when you try to change them. Right, I mean, think about your own personal life. You know you want to, you want to lose 20 pounds, or you want to stop eating sugar, or you want to go to the gym more right. And it's only when you want to actually start to make that change happen that you start to realize how much you're resisting yourself. You know, I want to work out three days a week but I can't seem to get into the car and go to the gym. I really want to work out and I need to work out, but you know, I just I always find that, you know, come three o'clock in the afternoon, I've got 22 other things I need to do besides that. It's that resistance. That is where the culture resides, in the, in the, in the reasons for and the nature of the resistance.

Speaker 2 45:30

The same thing in organizations Organizations typically what they tend to think about, what leaders often think culture is, you know, is the corporate values and sort of the corporate ideology. You know what we want to be as a business and how we want to treat people and what we aspire to be, and these are all wonderful things, but these are ideologies. These are what we aspire to be and these are all wonderful things, but these are ideologies. These are what we call espoused culture, what we want to be, and one should never confuse what we want with who we are and what we are and why we are, and so what we are looking for always is what's the delta, what's the gap between what you want to be when you grow up you want to go to the gym and what actually what you actually do?

Speaker 2 46:42

Well, at three o'clock every day, every day, I I find other things to do besides going to the gym, or you know. In this, in this effort to become more of a agile digital business as an industrial company, I keep finding ways to kill all initiative in my software teams, despite my best intentions, because I subject my software developers to endless amounts of code reviews and endless amounts of gate reviews to have their products and projects establish profitability long before they're ready to be even thought of. In that way, that makes sense, right? You know, it's like we unwittingly preclude efforts to change because we impose logic or we impose rationales that seem to make perfect sense but and are perfectly justifiable, but they they inevitably kill or retard the desired change it's hard.

Speaker 1 47:50

You've said before I wouldn't, and we'll get into this in other segments around why it's so difficult. And just even the fitness analogy is a great one, because the benefits are wonderful. I mean you get to keep, you know, being healthy, I mean right. But on business, the benefits to what you're talking about are really special, and also financial. Yeah, right, we can do some math for the listeners, but it's also not easy, right. So often people retreat when they start something. I mean there may be even dominant logics in that, right. What do you say to somebody that's tried many things and they, they just keep finding themselves back in the same spot. You know, how do you even get the encouragement to move through this? Because there, if there's a champion in an organization even it could be the CEO or it could be the organizational leader they may be the one person in the organization that believes in moving through things. There's that resistance too. People have past successes and positional power and influence like authority. Yeah, lots of.

Mischaracterizing the Nature of Change

Speaker 2 49:27

Yeah, well, that's the key right there, because it's the past success which has given rise to the dominant logic to begin with, which is what then keeps you from future success. And this is one of the great paradoxes and complexities of culture. When I resist going to the gym at three in the afternoon, I've got 20 good reasons why. You know, I've got deliverables, I've got to make dinner, I've got to pick up the kids. I mean I've got all sorts of terrific reasons why. And all those reasons are legitimate. And you know the same with organizations. The reasons why we can't do X are all very legitimate and all rooted in successful previous experiences.

Speaker 2 50:10

The problem is to do the kinds of radical transformations or major disruptive transformations that many businesses are faced with today. You can't increment your way, you can't sort of status quo your way to change. One of my clients once said to me it was a brilliant thing. He said this is a change leader at a utility said if you always do what you've always done, that if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've got. And it's so simple and so powerful because to really do major transformation and this leads me into the other point, just parenthetically.

Speaker 2 50:50

One of the other big challenges is that we tend to misdiagnose or mischaracterize the nature of the change, that we're to misdiagnose or mischaracterize the nature of the change that we're up against. We, you know, we are actually trying to fundamentally transform our business, but we tend to think of that as a project plan, as a digital technology implementation or as an AI implementation, and it's just like bringing in a new piece of software Just the technology will take care of the change. And that, you know. We mischaracterized the nature of the problem, sort of our head in the sand right now. We think, you know, we think it's just an incremental change, when it's a fundamentally radical shift in how people need to work.

Speaker 2 51:27

Ai, as you well know, is fundamentally implicates different ways of working. The knowledge worker will forever be changed by AI, but most of us think of AI as just a tool. Maybe you can rewrite this paragraph for me a little bit better. Right? Fundamentally mischaracterizing the nature of the change before us. Why? Because we're using the paradigm of tool to think about AI, when we actually should be thinking about AI as fundamentally restructuring the nature of work, right? So this is a little bit off topic here, but this is the challenge.

Speaker 1 52:15

Well, at the top of the show, this is what people are experiencing today.

Speaker 2 52:19

Yeah, yeah, and the same is true with change. You know we fundamental, you know rapid scaling, a common problem of many smaller companies right new in 16 months. Or you know acquiring a business or a turnaround, or you know becoming, you know fundamentally changing their business model to a digitally, a digital business model from a product centric business model. I mean these are fundamental redefinitions of you know. They're what we call ontological or existential, definite redefinitions of who you are as a business. But we tend to think of them as just initiatives and project plans. And if we just put a good project plan together and implement the technology and you know, devote an office of transformation, create an office of transformation around it, you know, and sort of treat it like a complex project, we'll get there when the whole nature of the, you know the paradigms by which we even think about the nature of the change need to be re-examined. We reduce everything to a project plan when we actually should be asking the question what business are we in? And you know I use an example of a very significant example today is happening in the utility industry, especially in the water utility industry.

Speaker 2 53:47

Climate change is fundamentally disrupting life as we know it on this planet. I mean just the nature of storms. You know the power of storms. Amount of rain that falls in an hour is today in many parts of the world. You know, triple what it was 10 years ago. How much rain can fall in an hour in a monsoon, right, and utilities can't keep up. You know the flooding that is happening in places like Valencia in Spain or Sydney, australia, in these massive storms is way beyond the capacity of storm drains and sewage systems and monitoring systems.

Speaker 2 54:29

Utilities are trying to deal with this by just continuing to sort of think that they can just add technology or better sensors to their, their pipe networks, when fundamentally they need to be asking what business are we in? I mean, are we, are we still able to do and run our business, our utility business, in the same way that we did 15 years ago in the face of massively different climate? Right, so it's a and so this is a. You know that what. What really needs to shift is the dominant logic of what does it mean to be a water utility in Sydney, australia today, in the? You know, given how much rain can fall in one hour versus 20 years ago. But you also can appreciate just even that little scenario, how difficult it might be to do that Right. Utilities are regulated Utilities are. You know. They're many years, hundreds of years old in many cases and they think in 10 year and 15 year increments. And to sort of ask the question of a utility CEO, maybe you need to really fundamentally rethink what business you're in is like speaking Swahili.

Key Takeaways and Series Preview

Speaker 1 55:41

Well, I start to think about people don't go to court sometimes without an attorney, right, and here what you just described is like you come in as that attorney under these practice shared model, like we've been doing it ourselves, you know, and the outcome isn't, isn't there, and you know that you've, you've seen it happen. We are coming up towards the end of our time together. This is an exciting series I'm going to remind our listeners. Today we're talking about identifying the barriers to change, or diagnosing, I'm sorry, the culture. And then next series, we're going to be talking about identifying the barriers to change. We're going to be talking about crafting a strategy as we talk through this. We're going to be talking about crafting a strategy as we talk through this and then overcoming these pitfalls that most companies will face. How do you deal with those head on, productively, right, so you don't leave people behind and you don't have this rapid mess to deal with. And then, at the end of this, how you sustain it and I just mentioned, you don't go to court without an attorney. Well, now you become, you are able to sustain some of these things in the organization by having more body of knowledge around it. So you see the business differently.

Speaker 1 57:10

Ask those questions, and I'm going to summarize a few things I thought were useful in just today's discussion around. That is, getting to the assumptions. Number one who do you know that you know would find value in an episode like this? Text it to them, share it. Whatever you've got to do, let them know about this. I think it would be one of those gifts that I do as a call to action. You need to do that. The second thing is write down, get to your assumptions.

Speaker 1 57:49

I wrote down these questions that David mentioned in the episode here how do you define success? Asking our teams this and what does it look like? What does winning look like? What does that rock star look like? Letting them describe that? And then you know, this is where I think in his response is getting to the challenges. So what are your biggest challenges you face? And then the follow-on questions to that around how do you go about solving those challenges? Or how would you go about, you know, like listening into those things? Those are some really great takeaways from today's discussion that I wrote down, and I loved this idea about it's invisible until you start doing the work. I thought that was really compelling, david.

Speaker 1 58:45

Before we wrap. Are there any final thoughts that you want to leave our listeners with? I know we couldn't get to all of it in one episode and so I'm breaking it up into these series for the time that we share together. Really do appreciate you taking the time and showing up for our audience. Any final thoughts you want to leave our listeners with? Around diagnosing culture.

Speaker 2 59:12

Well, we've kind of veered a little bit away from that Culture. Well, we've kind of veered a little bit away from that. But I hope listeners have developing an appreciation for the complexity of culture. Complexity is a four-letter word in business. We all want it simple, we want it fast, we want it cheap and we want it now and just, unfortunately, culture is not one of those topics that lends itself to that way of thinking. I hate to break it to you, but that's one of the reasons why so much money is wasted on culture change. And what I'm trying to do I think, if I could sort of characterize my mission as an anthropologist is to help business leaders come to a much more honest and fruitful and effective appreciation for the complexities of culture. And I think we started to touch on that today.

Speaker 1 1:00:07

And what I love about your style is you actually have a lot of appreciation for them, a lot of empathy, that they've tried things and they've prioritized things and, and, and, and in many ways built great businesses. I mean a lot of success.

Speaker 2 1:00:23

And it would be great and we would never even be having this conversation if those great businesses weren't trying to actually change. And that's where the rubber meets the proverbial road, yeah.

Speaker 1 1:00:33

Well, that's great, all right. Well, we's great, all right. Well, we'll wrap at that, and then we'll see you in the next, next series on this. Thank you, david.

Speaker 2 1:00:43

Thank you.