The Multifamily Innovation® Podcast
Patrick Antrim, Founder and CEO of Multifamily Leadership, Producers of the Multifamily Leadership Innovation & AI Summit, the Multifamily Women® Summit, and the Best Places to Work Multifamily® will bring you success strategies for Multifamily CEOs, executive leaders and aspiring leaders that want to drive high performance results for their portfolio.
The Multifamily Innovation® Podcast
Transforming Your Organization by Overcoming the 75% Failure Rate
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Ever wonder why 75% of major organizational transformations fail? Dr. David White, cognitive anthropologist and transformation expert, reveals the hidden dynamics blocking your company's change efforts.
Most leaders approach transformation by focusing on people: hiring new talent, reorganizing departments, or implementing top-down mandates. Yet the real barriers to change lie in what Dr. White calls "dominant logics" - the deeply embedded ways of thinking that have driven your organization's past success but now actively block its evolution.
These dominant logics aren't abstractions - they manifest in concrete business practices. Your budgeting processes, strategic planning methods, meeting structures, and decision-making frameworks all quietly reinforce the status quo, making transformation nearly impossible without systemic intervention.
Through fascinating examples, Dr. White explains how risk-averse cultures might excel in quality control while suffocating innovation, or how customer-centric organizations can become trapped in patterns that prevent necessary pivots. The paradox? The very dominant logics that created your success now prevent you from adapting to changing market conditions.
Transformation requires more than surface-level changes. Dr. White outlines how organizations must map their entire system of practices, identify where dominant logics are helpful versus harmful, and develop leadership teams capable of implementing sustainable change. This isn't a quick fix - it demands patience, objectivity, and the willingness to examine practices leaders themselves may have created and championed.
Whether you're navigating digital transformation, implementing AI, scaling rapidly, or managing a merger, this episode provides crucial insights into why your smart, experienced team keeps hitting invisible barriers. Discover how to diagnose your organization's cultural DNA and craft transformation strategies that actually stick.
Visit https://www.culture-logics.com/ to connect with Dr. White, or explore his book "Disrupting Corporate Culture" for deeper insights into breaking through organizational barriers to change.
About the Multifamily Innovation® Council:
The Multifamily Innovation® Council is the executive level membership organization that makes a difference in your bottom line, drives a better experience for your employees, and allows you an experience that keeps demand strong for your company. The council is uniquely positioned to focus on the intersection of Leadership, Technology, AI, and Innovation.
The Multifamily Innovation® Council is for Multifamily Business leaders who want to unlock value inside their organization so they can create better experiences and drive profitability inside their company.
To learn more or to join, visit https://multifamilyinnovation.com.
For more information and to engage with leaders shaping the future of multifamily innovation, visit https://multifamilyinnovation.com/.
Connect:
Multifamily Innovation® Council: https://multifamilyinnovation.com/
Patrick Antrim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickantrim/
All right, welcome back. We're back with David White. Dr David White, we are part of a broader series, the Barriers to Company Transformation. If you haven't listened to the episode previous to this, go back at some point and listen to that. It's called Barriers to Company Transformation and I did a up at the top of the episode. We have a little bit more context of who Dr David White is. You'll get a better sense of how he's helping organizations productively move through change and become profitable in how they approach dealing with head-on what we believe to be one of the hardest challenges in business and every company is going through change right now which is this how do you productively move through change? So here with us today is Dr David White. He's a cognitive anthropologist and he's answered the questions about the practices that are shared amongst people within organizations, done a lot of research and actual implementation of these things, and today we're going to dive deeper into our series around identifying the barriers to change. So, david, welcome back, yeah thanks for having me.
Speaker 2Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1Yes, and look, one of the things that you know last episode we talked a lot about the diagnosing culture and you look at this almost like in series, like in steps. This isn't a one shot thing, right, a lot of people read books. They want to go fast, get excited, to go to a conference. There's a great keynote speaker. They go back to the company like, hey, we're going to change, but there's barriers to that change. I'd love to dive into that and kind of in your study and research and conversations we've had, I loved what you said about a lot of people think about fixing people versus looking at the practices. Can you tell me more about that?
The 75% Failure Rate of Transformations
Speaker 2Yeah, Well, first off, um, you know the, you know the exuberance and the and the excitement to change your organization is, you know um, universal and wonderful and the anxiety that goes with that. But you know, let's remember, change failure rates have been pretty much stuck at around 75 percent, give or take, since about the late 60s. Now, when I say change, I'm referring to major transformations, major corporate change about improving your, you know, procurement processes by 10% or optimizing a particular business in, you know, margins. In some way those might be important changes for the business. But the context just to set the context for what we're talking about here, is major corporate, what we call transformations, not just to differentiate from sort of garden variety, everyday change which is constant right and what leads to that.
Speaker 1There's some event that happens before that right?
Speaker 2Sure, I mean what I define transformations as are turnaround, rapid scaling, a merger, an acquisition, a divestiture, a new business, major, new business model, digital transformation, of course, very much in that category. And, of course, what we're seeing today with AI, which AI is kind of an interesting animal right now because I think a lot of people don't know what to make of it and people are playing with it as tools, and so it has this kind of idea of it's just another productivity tool. Uh, can help me do my internet searches faster. I just bought a car over the weekend and we use chat, gpt extensively to do research on pricing, on how to what kind of value to get for our trade in. So it was very useful, but it's a tool, right.
Culture as Dominant Logic, Not Just People
Speaker 2So, uh, where I think obviously you know something like AI qualifies as a major transformation is in the fact that it's massively changing the nature of work. That's a transformation. So the context we're talking about is those kinds of major sort of, you know, major injunctions or disjunctions in your business or disjunctions in your business. So for that, where culture rears its ugly head, as I say, or culture is grossly misunderstood because we have historically thought of culture and relegated culture to the realm of people and HR and talent issues and how people feel and sort of things that have to do with what we other, some of us might call more climate kinds of things. And we, because we put culture into that category, we don't necessarily understand or see it. As a cognitive anthropologist who studied sort of the cultural, so-called cultural mind, the things that preclude change are very much cultural and they're very much, you know, need to be sort of unearthed and understood by businesses.
Speaker 1Yeah, I'd love to dive into that, and you mentioned, you know, the work that we're doing with AI. I mean, our biggest challenges is not the technology and not is the misinformation Right, and so I imagine you know there's a lot of people that talk about culture and you know that can get us caught into where even smart, smart people head down a path that they may not know that they're heading down. Right, I'd love to dive more into the practices part, like because culture oftentimes you know it feels like it's a people thing or a happiness or a satisfaction approach. Tell me more about how you think through that, on those things that preclude that change that we're all trying to move through.
Speaker 2Yeah, you know, one of the best examples of what you're talking about, patrick, is just sports media. Right, I don't know if our listeners are sports fans, but if you, if you spend any time listening to coaches in baseball or hockey or football, or or even journalists talk about teams, they'll say well, you know, so-and-so has changed the Patrick has changed the culture, um, and you know, it's always interesting to to to sort of ask what are they talking about when they use the word culture? Are they talking about how people feel? Are they talking about what people do, their behavior? Are they talking about, um, you know, the fact that there's a different color paint on the locker room walls? Are they talking about new practice routines, you know?
How Success Creates Resistance to Change
Speaker 2And so, from the cognitive anthropology perspective, sort of the modern view of culture, from the cognitive sciences, culture is all of those things, but what we really need to understand is that culture has a DNA. Culture has sort of a core, atomic logic or atomic base, which we call a dominant logic. What that simply means is a pervasive way that's completely taken for granted of seeing the world, of the pervasive sort of set of lenses by which we look at the world, and those lenses come from the organization's what I call existential history, the thing that usually it's have closely to do with big barriers that the organization has overcome, challenges that it's solved, technologies that it's brought to market, problems that it's solved that allow it to succeed. Sort of the basis of your success is usually the best clue to what the dominant logics of your organization are, or I should say the barriers that you've overcome, the big problems you've solved. Sometimes it's it's engineers solving hard problems, and so you'll get dominant logics very much oriented to engineering culture, hard problems, and so you'll get dominant logics very much oriented to engineering culture. Or sometimes organizations having, you know, been just radically customer focused and radically customer centric and had proven, and that those sets of activities proving to be successful, you'll see dominant logics associated with those kinds of activities. So, to answer your question, the reason why this matters is that those ways of seeing the world become kind of what we think of as tribal knowledge. They become sort of taken for granted assumptions, sort of schematic ideas, simplified schematic ideas about how things work or should work, that get codified into all these business practices. So if you are radically customer centric and that has proven to be wildly successful for you as a business, those customer centric practices are going to be.
Speaker 2When I say practice, I mean like a routine or a process, I don't just mean a set of behavior Practices are going to be. When I say practice, I mean like a routine or a process, I don't just mean a set of behavior. Practices don't pertain to people, they pertain to organizations. Organizational routines, organizational processes, enterprise-wide processes proven to be radically successful for driving customer success and customer centricity in your organization, are going to tend to be repeated as patterns throughout the organization. So that's a dominant logic. And so why does this matter? For change or for transformation?
Speaker 2Well, when those dominant, when those dominant logics are strategically applied in service of your, your business model and you're in service of your goals, they're perfectly, um, wonderful. They're they, they are help you become the, they're sort of the key to your success. However, dominant logics tend to be over applied. So it becomes, you know, the classic um, when your only tool is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. It's that problem.
Speaker 2When you are um, when you have dominant logics of risk aversion, which many sort of industrial manufacturing companies do, that risk aversion logic will get over, tend to get overplayed. So risk aversion. You know, risk management and risk aversion is great on a factory floor. It's great for quality control practices when you're building refrigerators. It's not so great, necessarily, when it comes to hiring people. It's not so great when it comes to running meetings where nobody wants to actually raise any dissenting view for fear of conflict. It's not so great when your strategy, your five-year strategic plan, is so conservative that you're going for 2% growth when you could be going for 20% growth, but you're not willing to make those big bets. So that's the risk Risk, yeah, it's risky, right, and you've got to go sell it to your board and to your institutional investors. And so those are examples of a risk.
Speaker 2Dominant logic over applied. So what you get to what I'm trying to say? The dominant logics are sort of the DNA of your organizational success in many ways, and these things tend to be very adaptive and they tend to prove they want to keep your organization in the status quo. Cultures, historically, evolutionarily speaking, are about allowing humans to adapt to their environment. The exact same thing is true in organizations, your culture, rooted in these dominant logics, these cultural models. The anthropologists call them cultural models, we call them dominant logics in the business world, these atomic bits of sense-making, of sort of assumptive sort of ways of seeing the world, are there to keep you successful. The problem is they block change.
Speaker 1You know it's interesting. I'm going to take a reach here at maybe a scenario you could tell me if I'm accurate here. So you know, historically, in just how we think about going to market with a product, an innovation, a technology, you know it used to be the technology was the hard part. It used to be the technology was the hard part. Yeah, right, now that's the easy part, and the leadership and all the stuff you're doing is the hard part, right, and so I imagine you have great opportunities ahead for that.
Speaker 1But if you were to look at how an organization goes to market historically, you would say subject matter expert gets great idea. Goes to venture capital firm gets capital. Now we have cash. Let's hire a bunch of salespeople and let's attend a trade show and outbooth the other and then get inside a sales conversation. Grow the business and then get inside a sales conversation. Grow the business.
Speaker 1That has been historically a best practice or let's say, a great path of success for a lot of companies over many years before. So, as you mentioned, the basis to your success is like your greatest dominant logics could be also the hardest thing to break or change right in this process. And I'm really curious about that, because I see these patterns over and over right, and you know one would assume that you hire somebody with experience so you may hire the next chief marketing officer. And they've done these things in the past right. And the capital structures changed, the rapid pace of things have changed, the way the customers buy have changed, and so now, as an executive, how do you get that leader to try something new when they've had so much success and evidence that feels like you're making progress, but it may not always be, so I'm curious.
Speaker 2Well, it's the literally, patrick, it's literally the million dollar question, or maybe a hundred million dollar question in some cases's, is because it's the hardest thing to do. I mean, look at, just take it personally, right. I mean, I mean, apply it to your own personal life. If I said to you, patrick, what makes you successful? And then I say to you and you answer the question that I said to you, and now you need to change those things If you want to actually achieve your goals, you're going to. You know you that's probably going to be the. You know. Good luck with that.
No Silver Bullets: Systemic Approach to Change
Speaker 2So, and and part of our series, by the way, and I'll tease the listeners is the last part is sustaining the transformation, which is so we don't revert in retreat, and that's where, um, that's where it's interesting, Um, so let's talk about um, come back to your question, because it's a great question, if I may, the question you just asked, because one of the things we have to really get better at, I believe, as organizations, in my view, is we need to stop trying to address cultural problems thesena issues that I keep talking about with single point solutions or single point remedies. Usually, the approach and you've alluded to it to addressing a cultural problem often involves well hiring, like let's hire someone to help fix this problem, let's bring someone in from the outside, or let's promote this person, or let's reorganize, or let's do this one thing to address this cultural issue. And what I want to say is because cultures are these, as we talked about in the previous segment, these reference systems, these operating systems that run in the background, that sort of shape, the way you make sense that they fuel, the way you collectively see the world and operate. As a result, having just one single point kind of solution is nowhere near enough. You need to think of the problem, you need to start thinking of this problem systemically, you need to start thinking of this problem holistically and Operate from that premise. So what does that mean? That means you know it's not just about hiring the marketing guy or gal to kind of come and fix this. It's about, first and foremost, seeing the system and map what we call mapping the system literally and or figuratively mapping the system to see where these dominant logics show up.
Speaker 2So you know, the first thing we would want to do is create a picture, get a bird's eye view of your organization and see where these dominant logics are precluding your desired change. So, risk aversion. So you, you want to grow by 20%, but you, you know you're, you don't want to take big bets as a company because you've got this dominant logic of risk aversion. The first thing we need to do is get the bird's eye view of the of the entire organization and see where you have practices, business practices that are precluding operating in a more dynamic or aggressive way across the enterprise, not just in people, budgets, planning, customer, product. You know the whole. You know the whole.
Speaker 2You know we segment your business into six different areas and we look at each area I don't mean organization, but I mean, in terms of practice areas, kinds of practices and look at which ones are sustaining or supportive of your desired change, which might be to grow by 20%, and which ones are precluding that, and that's a hard-nosed view. That's a diagnostic, hard-nosed view, because, again, what we're looking for are where are those dominant logics, over-applied, over-learned, right? Where do you need to have good risk management practices, like on the factory floor, and where do you need to stop being so risk avoidant, like in your hiring practices, or the way you run meetings, or the way you do budgeting, or the way you do planning, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's the. That's the hard conversation. So it's a systemic, holistic view that requires your executive team to be, um, you know, pretty objective, pretty dispassionate, uh, and that's that takes, that takes a fair amount of coaching, and and that's where the leadership training stuff that we do comes in Um, it's a re, it's a, it's a pretty, you know, it's a pretty, um, significant reorientation.
Speaker 2The other thing, one more thing on this point too, is and as a business owner, right, I'm guilty of this as much as anybody a lot of the business practices that have been associated with your success are things that you personally put in place. Like you designed the, you know, the new business model. You were the architect of this particular strategy, and now we're saying well, the new business model, you are the architect of this particular strategy. And now we're saying well, that strategy or business model is suffused with too much dominant logic that's going to preclude the change that you want to make. And so now you have to kind of you know let your children go. You have to kind of let go of the pride of authorship and realize that where you're trying to get to is being blocked by your success.
Speaker 1Most people don't look at it like that. We're looking at how do we hire more experienced people.
Mapping Business Practices That Block Growth
Speaker 2Better engineers, better salespeople, you know, or bring them in from another industry. Salespeople, you know, or or bring them in from another industry. Um, a lot of times, when our my clients, you know, they try to hire, you know, the in the industrial sector. They try to hire from the tech industry, for example, um thinking that these tech folks will bring in these tech mindsets and help the organization move faster and be more agile, et cetera, et cetera. Um, a lot of times those people run out of the. You know, after six months or a year, they quit. They quit why? Because the culture which is embedded in the business practices is much too strong, much too pervasive, much too, um, much too dominant.
Speaker 1For them, it's beyond the force of one let let's, let's lean into this, because we we have a little bit more time left and I want to talk about why, even being intelligent or smart, or even success like why, why do people, um, do these things that don't support that type of growth? I mean number one we have to first understand. That's what the purpose of a show like this is to get clarity around what is possible, what is happening, and, and now that they know that, they can unlearn that, right, we now know that. But what? What is? What do you see in most approaches where great, successful people get it wrong or attacking it the wrong way?
Speaker 2Well, I think the first thing to say to that is we have to be appreciative of the fact that this is really hard. And you know, it's like any any deep change in your own life or your family's life is going to be hard. It's going to involve a little bit of anxiety, it's going to involve some pain. So, you know, I we start with just trying to appreciate the fact that this is hard. And sometimes the stuff that we're talking about, these practices that need to change, as I said earlier, are things that you personally authored, you certainly personally put in place. You're responsible for the fact that the company operates in this particular way. And now we're saying, well, that's got to change. So it does take some dispassionate you know, a dispassionate stance, but an appreciative stance like this got us, you know what got us to where we are today ain't going to get us to where we are tomorrow or where we want to be tomorrow, and so, appreciating that it's hard. That's the first step. The second step is, as I said earlier, it's there's no single magic bullet. It's not. You pull one lever, hire one person, do one thing, bring in McKinsey, you know they'll fix it. Give it to the HR department, they'll fix it. It's not.
Speaker 2Culture doesn't work that way. These cultural barriers are insidious, they're deep and they're based in you know, they're rooted in your business and they're rooted in your business success. So it's going to take a team effort. We always talk about change leadership teams, not change leaders, and these change leadership teams are more like SWAT teams or teams that work throughout the organization. You know, on these problems, these business practice change problems. So team effort, no silver bullet.
Speaker 2Appreciate that it's difficult, it's a long game. Culture change and removing barriers to change is the long game. You know we don't do it overnight, so we have to kind of be a little bit more patient, right. And these are things that are hard for business leaders. We want it now, we want it fast, we want it cheap and we want it. You know we want it done and I want to hold you accountable for it, right.
Speaker 2So the kind of, as you can appreciate, the stuff I'm talking about is a little bit contrary or a little bit different than the things I've just said, and so we need to. You know, the first step is just bringing leaders to the appreciative place of understanding that this is going to be a little bit difficult. And look, 75% of these major transformations give or take fail. So you want to be in that 75% category. Keep doing the things you've been doing. You want to actually make this major leap into AI or digital transformation, or you want to make this merger work, or you want to make this divestiture work. Let's think about doing some things differently interesting.
Speaker 1Uh, you know, I think about something as simple as um cooking a chef, right like the, is. There's a process and there's a lot of ingredients and, um you know, keep opening the oven. You're never gonna look at this is it done yet?
Speaker 1yeah, exactly. Uh, we have some little ones that are baking right now, so that's a medium rare chocolate chip cookies. But the point of the process is like just going back to understanding. I love the empathy around like this is difficult and this is the greatest opportunity to have the ability to feel sort of somewhat in control in a world where it's changing so much that can feel out of control. Like this is the stuff we can choose to do. We'd have to set expectations around it, right, um and uh, because the at the ceo level or these leadership levels you have, you know the board and you got the pressures of competition.
Leadership Skills for Sustainable Transformation
Speaker 2You have all these things that require speed and progress, and yet it may be the slow down go faster, kind of thing, work that we do, helping organizations transform, do these major transformations, is all is all around, um, leadership, uh, and and building, you know, really deep change, leadership skills, which are really life skills for leaders in at all levels of the organization. Um, you know, the great paradox is, yes, culture is about people, culture lives inside, but the barriers to cultural barriers to change in organizations are in practices. And so, and practices are not people, practices are organizational routines, organizational processes, right, so that's that's the first paradox. The second paradox is but yet to change those practices requires people to do different things. Yet to change those practices requires people to do different things.
Speaker 2You know, your budgeting process is usually owned by an individual or a group of people who have a deep vested interest in running the budgeting process for your organization in that particular way. So, if you want to actually and budgeting, I use that example all the time, because budgeting is one of the great examples of practices that preclude change who gets the resources? Who gets the resources? Who gets the money? Who gets the resources and who doesn't? Those kinds of decisions always are imbued with dominant logics. So budgeting is one of the first places we look at.
Speaker 2You know, strategic planning, another example. These are places where we look at to see how the practices associated with budgeting or planning are supportive of or blocking transformation, and then what changes can be made. Leaders who are very skilled at dealing with resistance, dealing with, you know, having great relational skills, having a lot of range, having a lot of ability to engage people at all different levels in the organization, listening, being curious, right, etc. We can get into that in a future session of sort of what is change leadership? What does transformational leadership really look like in action? But you can begin to see, if we want to excuse me, you know change a very important business practice like budgeting, what it might entail.
Speaker 1I love it. I love it. I have coming up in our next episode and time together crafting that strategy. So I really want to kind of get into more of the mapping out that process. I love what you said about the system, seeing the system, and if I pick on a real estate team, you know construction or development, we, we, you know the building is the system right. We have a lot of things have to come together and I think from an investment standpoint, they make millions of dollars on an acquisition, right, sometimes a company makes an acquisition of a property or another company, uh, we call talent sometimes an acquisition and so when we're, when we're doing those things, there's certain, there's certain things that, um, we do that.
Episode Wrap-Up and Future Topics
Speaker 1I think there's a lot of appreciation for a process, right, like, I think developers think long-term, they're looking forward about how the world, who's going to live in the community even years ahead. Uh, they, they understand they got to move through a city process. They got to move through a development process. Architects understand they got to move through a city process. They got to move through a development process. Architects, they got to bring people together. But the system, there's plans, there's practices in that. That I would imagine. But I think the dominant logic there is that we all appreciate that that does take time. You just can't throw up something that quick if you want it to stand up strong over time.
Speaker 2That would be a dominant logic, that if we were working with a developer, that would be a dominant logic. We want to enhance and bring forward right Versus, say, other dominant logics, perhaps in these kinds of real estate developers which might be very transactional, very cost-sensitive, profit-driven right. Those are things you might want to actually look at to see how they block change.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Well, very good, this has been great. There's so much more to cover in each one of these things. Tell us, the listeners, just a little bit about how to get in touch with you. I think some of us if you're not, if you just tuned into this episode you're going to want to go back and listen to the one previous to this. It's called Barriers to Company Transformation and that's the first part of the series. This today is the Identifying Barriers to Change, and then our next episode, we'll be talking about crafting an actual strategy and then leading. After that, we'll talk about overcoming pitfalls and then sustaining the transformation, because we don't want to do all this great work and then retreat, and it's about your team even getting the ability to sustain that, not just, you know, an outside party. So, David, tell us a little bit about who you help and where people can get in touch with you.
Speaker 2Well, thank you, yes again. So David White, and our firm is Culture Logics, which has to do with dominant logics. We spend a lot of time helping organizations do the kind of work we've just been talking about in this last bit and, if you actually want to get into a little bit more detail about what I've been talking, about two sources One is a book I wrote recently, in 2021, called Disrupting Corporate Culture. It's got a lot of the uh details and case studies and, um, you know the concepts and theories, uh, and how that applies in practice. All that's laid out in that book. Um, that's, of course, on Amazon, disrupting corporate culture, or your favorite local retailer. And um, also, um, our YouTube channel, called uh, the cultural mind, has videos, podcasts, uh, uh, other bits of information that are, uh, change leaders and executives might find quite useful. So that would be the places I would go Culturalogicscom disrupting corporate culture and the cultural mind on YouTube.
Speaker 1Awesome, awesome and a great keynote speaker, by the way.
Speaker 1We've had you in a couple of times and the work we're doing as part of the Multifamily Innovation Council is really helping people productively move through these things, and the way that I contextually set this up was you know, the technology and the AI and all the change that's happening so rapidly.
Speaker 1What this is really helpful to understand is it gives us more information to, at the end of the day, make better decisions, giving us more choices, as David would say. As David would say and that feels good as an executive to have a broader range of perspective, to make better decisions and, you know, iterate quickly on those decisions. We're in a time where we can take risks that we've been afraid to take before because we can quickly fix things, and so, just having more information with all the things that are coming to our organizations, it's really interesting to see that play out. I think we'll look back and study this period of time at some point and we'll be candidates of that case study. But, david, appreciate you coming on, looking forward to the next episode and we'll see you in the next one.
