March 27, 2025 • 59 mins
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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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/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, welcome back.
Welcome to the show Today.
What we're tackling here iswhat we believe to be one of the
toughest challenges in business, and we're talking today about
the barriers to change andcompany transformation.
Now, if you think about this,every company right now is going
(00:21):
through change, andtransformative change that maybe
you subscribed to, maybe youdidn't, and you may be thinking
you know you're acquiringanother company, you're going
through a merger and acquisition, maybe you're involved in a
turnaround, maybe you just careabout this stuff, right, you may
also be one of the CEOs that isexperiencing some kind of pain
(00:48):
in the organization.
Maybe you're thinking aboutthis as you want to deliver this
profitable growth for thecompany.
You want to be resilient, youwant to know that you can retain
the top talent, and some of youare thinking about technology,
future-proofing your business,all of these things that are
(01:10):
coming, but they impact changethe toughest thing about
organizational shifts andthere's a lot of uncertainty
around that as well.
So today I've got a guest, drDavid White, who has devoted his
career to diagnosing thecultural barriers that keep us
(01:33):
from making real change and notjust change, lasting change.
You may be able to hireconsultants, let them parachute
in and tell you things, but he'sdeveloping sustainable change
you can hold on to in yourbusiness.
We're going to pinpoint in thisseries the internal practices
(01:55):
that are standing in the way ofyour progress and through this
process, I want to extract fromhim his winning strategy to
overcoming these things.
And it's probably not whatyou're thinking these models
(02:16):
that companies can use to scaleare something that you have the
ability to execute today andalong this series, what we're
going to do is we're going to betalking about how sometimes
well-intentioned efforts, evensmart people, make silly, stupid
(02:38):
decisions about things rightDespite our intentions.
Even some of the smartestpeople, we fail in this process.
We're going to dive into thestudy of cognitive anthropology,
which, when you speak to DrDavid White, he'll tell you that
this is some of the answers,through this study, of why
(03:01):
businesses cling on to statusquo they keep where they are is
these practices in theirbusiness, and you're going to
hear from him on why mostorganizations, even consultants,
today, are just short on thefuse.
They want the quick fix andtruly the things that we're
talking about here are about thepractices, not just the people,
(03:25):
and why this change requiresnot just a new way of thinking,
but a new way of working, allright.
So if you're that leader andyou're determined, maybe you're
that business owner that you'vegot to hold on.
(03:45):
You're trying to make it happenand you want to bring
meaningful change ortransformation and you're
hitting roadblocks.
This is the conversation thatwill give you the insights and
the tools to make change stick.
And when we say change, guesswhat?
(04:07):
Nobody likes that.
Nobody wants to be changed.
It's never easy.
David's going to talk to usabout how we can do it
effectively and empower ourteams through that process.
Think of it like productivelymoving through change.
You have two choices.
You have rapid change.
(04:28):
You leave people behind.
It's a problem.
You have status quo and you'retrying to increment and you get
outpaced by competition.
That's even a bigger problem.
So let's bring David on andlet's get to this series.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
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 allvery well.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
I think I can just sort of go home now, right?
Well, I've had the opportunityto study a lot of your work and
to share the time, and I thinkthat's one of the things that we
want people to do is actually,it takes time to do some of
these things, and time andpractice.
I just want to say I appreciateyou doing this.
I know our audience andliterally America cares, the
(05:18):
world cares about this topic andI know that it's hard to
decipher what's right.
A lot of people have tried alot of things in the past and
some of these things have workedand some of them seem marketing
and I really love how you cutthrough that noise.
But before we get into thisconversation, I'd like to take a
(05:39):
moment to just set up a littlebit about who you are so the
audience can get some contextaround how you've shown up in
organizations.
We'll get into this topicaround these barriers to change
in company transformation, whythat impacts our organization.
(06:01):
Let me just share a littlebackground on David For those of
you that are listening.
I want you to grab something.
If you're driving, focus, doyour thing, but if you're at
work, shut the door.
Listen to this.
This is going to be the mostimportant podcast you listen to
(06:23):
in all of 2025.
Write things down, take notes,because David has been doing
change in business for over 30years and you know from my time
with him and he's shared thestories in the last.
In the first two decades of hiscareer, he's led large-scale
(06:46):
initiatives for companies likeMicrosoft, lotus, ibm I mean
just to name a few.
There's plenty of amazingcompanies that, just regardless
of the amount of talented teams,he had access to the massive
budgets, he had access to, eventhe leadership strong leadership
(07:08):
in these organizations.
He'll tell you that he neversaw transformation fully succeed
and that experience got himasking a crucial question, and
that question is why do so manyefforts that go into driving
(07:28):
change?
Why do they fail?
So he goes back to school,earns a doctorate in cognitive
anthropology.
This is the study of how brainsand cultural environments, how
they interact, brains andcultural environments, how they
interact, and over seven yearsof research and spending time
(07:49):
with these amazing clients, he'sproduced two books and
developed what I believe andmany others believe that are
much smarter than me agroundbreaking theory on why
most organizationaltransformations fall short, and
what he discovered is thatthere's actually a wealth of
(08:11):
knowledge in the fields of thiscognitive science and
anthropology, about why changeis so different.
Now, anthropologists, they careabout bigger world things Maybe
not business and quarterlyreturns and the things you're
thinking about and yet thebusiness world isn't studying
this stuff and they're not eventapping into it because they're
(08:34):
not listening to it, they don'thave access to it and they want
short-term fixes.
And, yeah, they just want tofix it fast.
And today, david is spendingtime with organizations that
apply this science and he'sshowing leaders why he's here
(08:56):
with us today, not just why bigchange fails, but how we can use
these proven methods that he'snot only discovered, but to make
this transformation stickwithin your organization.
Now, if you're ready to dig intothis what I call the real
cultural change and why it's sochallenging then grab that pin,
(09:22):
open up your notes.
Whatever you're taking notes on, get engaged in this
conversation.
You're going to want to makesure you save it, share it with
someone that you think needs tohear it, but I'm going to have
David reveal what he trulybelieves drives sustainable
transformation.
So let me set this up on whatwe're going to do.
We're going to talk about moreof a series.
(09:44):
We may not have time to get toit all, but we're going to talk
about diagnosing culture.
We're going to help themidentify the barriers to change,
crafting this strategy in thebusiness, looking at the
pitfalls, overcoming those andthen, after all of that,
(10:05):
sustaining this transformation.
So, david, long contextualintro and setup, but I think it
deserves the gravity of the workthat you've studied and worked
on.
So, second, welcome in.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Appreciate that.
Thank you yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
So you talk, and let's just focus now on this
diagnosing culture.
You know there's a lot ofopinions 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 throughwhen you're going in and
(10:48):
diagnosing a company's culture?
How do you think through that?
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah, thank you, patrick, for the intro.
Let's just begin with the wordculture.
You ask 10 people what culturemeans, you'll get 10 different
answers.
And the funny thing is inbusiness it's.
The funny thing is in inbusiness it's not that much
different than an anthropology,you know, uh, famous
(11:13):
anthropologists in the 1950sidentified over a hundred
different definitions of culture, um such that anthropologists
for a period of time in the inthe middle of the 20th century,
thought that the whole conceptof culture should just be
abandoned.
Like culture as a concept, as aconstruct, is just not worth,
you know, because we can'tidentify it, we can't measure it
(11:35):
, we can't define it, it's notworth the time and effort to do
so.
So, luckily, I think that wehave backed off anthropologists
have backed off that that sortof prevailing view in the 1970s,
because I think culture is avery important construct.
Culture is real.
(11:55):
Any business leader in youraudience will know that's true.
But getting clear on what itmeans and what it is and what
it's not is very, very important.
So the very first step in in ina trans, in a transformation,
is really understanding.
What is it that we're workingwith here?
What are we, what are wedealing with when it comes to
(12:18):
culture, the thing that I've asyou said in your intro.
I've been working ontransformation, organizational
transformation for 30 years 30plus years and not seen many
work, and the reason why I cameto the conclusion was because of
this amorphous thing calledculture, and through my
(12:42):
discoveries in graduate schooland in course of getting a PhD,
I realized that, as you said,the way the anthropologists talk
about culture and the waybusiness people talk about
culture is very, very different,and so what I've devoted myself
over the last 15 years to doingis trying to bridge those two
worlds.
A lot of you know you're verygenerous in your introduction of
(13:03):
me, but the stuff that I'mbringing to the business
audience and to the businessworld isn't really new.
It's just not known to businesspeople.
But in about the middle of the1990s, the anthropology went
through what's known as thecognitive revolution, and many
anthropologists started to thinkabout culture in very different
(13:26):
ways from their predecessors,their earlier generations, and
they started to realize thatculture is in the mind.
In fact, I have a newslettercalled the cultural mind, and
that's how cognitiveanthropology was born.
As you said, it's therelationship, it's the study of
the relationship between thebrain and culture, and what the
(13:51):
anthropologists of the 1990swere writing about and studying
was was how culture really isknowledge at the end of the day.
Um, culture fundamentally is isstuff that we know, that we
don't know, we know but that weuse every single day, and that
has become now kind of the defacto cognitive anthropology
(14:12):
standard for what is culture?
Culture is knowledge, and whatkind of knowledge?
Specifically, tacit knowledge,implicit knowledge, taken for
granted knowledge, and when youstart to sort of boil it down to
think about culture in thoseterms and then you start to
think about organizational andcorporate cultures in these ways
, the world starts to lookdifferent, right?
(14:35):
So that's probably our startingpoint is you know culture is
knowledge?
What kind of knowledge?
It's stuff we take for grantedand the best examples?
There's millions of examples inour daily lives.
You know, how do you know not tolook at people in the eye when
you walk into an elevator?
Or how do you know how to orderfood in a restaurant?
(14:58):
Or how do you know how to youknow get on a subway?
When you are in a city with asubway?
How do you know how to you knownot walk down the middle of the
street.
I mean, these may seem soobvious and silly examples, but
none of these things were evertaught to you formally in school
.
(15:18):
But you know these things to betruths, like you know, like
waking up in the morning, and,and so that is what culture is.
It's a shared body of knowledgeof how to organize and make
sense of the world around us,and that is as true in a society
(15:40):
as it is true in a, in acompany.
Uh, and so you know, just onthat point alone, if you start
to appreciate that way ofthinking 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
(16:04):
to culture, but they're not whatI call the DNA of culture.
They're not, they're not thesource code.
And part of our challenges andpart of our problems in business
over the last 50, 60 years isthat we've been trying to make
change happen and maketransformation happen and coming
up against these, what I callthese cultural barriers, and
(16:27):
thinking that we've got toaddress and change the culture
by going after these things likeattitudes and behaviors and
values, when those aren't reallythe 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
(16:48):
cause.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
You're never getting at the pathology underneath and
sometimes in practice of work,we're hiring and engaging people
that have past knowledge andI'm just curious about that
(17:13):
let's lean into that a littlemore of how that can change a
culture, even when somebody hasgreat knowledge, especially when
you're introducing a world ofchanging organizational
structures and all these things.
So how does that play out?
Knowledge?
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Yeah.
So the first thing we have toget clear on is that when we say
knowledge, I'm not necessarilymeaning book knowledge or your
knowledge as an engineer, or youknow.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
But they could be the steps that I took to do the
thing that we've always donethings.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
It's, it's, when we say culture as knowledge, what
we really mean is shared, uhtaken for granted knowledge, and
that is more fundamental thanthan stuff.
You consciously know most ofthe stuff.
When, when I say culture isknowledge, most of the stuff
that we're talking about isassumed and taken for granted,
(18:12):
and it comes from sharedexperience.
And so what you're alluding tois what kind of shared
experience?
Well, it turns out back to thisquestion of how does culture
and the brain interact.
It turns out that meaningfulexperiences tend to form
(18:34):
long-lasting bonds in memory,long-lasting neuronal synaptic
connections in the brain,chemical connections in the
brain.
And so when we have meaningfulexperiences and we share those
experiences as a group, we tendto form a common base of
knowledge, of this culturalknowledge and let's give this a
(18:54):
name, because what I've the wordthat anthropologists use is
these are called cultural models.
They're shared mental modelsI've appropriated that term and
changed it a little bit forbusiness audiences and I call
that a dominant logic.
And what a dominant logic isbasically is a set of concepts
(19:19):
and ideas and mental models thatorganize uh or help make sense
of the world.
So, uh, I'm going to use theword dominant logic going
forward, but basically adominant logic is a cultural
model.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
A cultural model is a shared mental model and so
dominant logic um could be a away that we've experienced
success in the past on evengoing to market Correct.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
So, if you think about where to let's talk about
dominant logics and where theycome from, shared meaningful
experiences that a group shareswill tend to form shared
dominant logics.
So, yes, think of a startupcompany that solved a really,
really hard problem.
The experiences gained insolving that really hard problem
(20:09):
technical problem, marketproblem, customer problem will
tend to create shared knowledgeabout what success looks like
and what success entails andwhat's required to achieve
success, and that's becomes adominant logic for running the
business.
It makes perfect sense, right?
This worked.
We, we solve this problem as anorganization.
(20:32):
So many of the principles ormany of the rules of thumb, many
of the assumptions, many of thebeliefs about what went into
solving that problem, thenbecome codified in the business
and they become codified asbusiness practices.
So that leads to a second Oncewe understand that culture is
(20:52):
shared knowledge in this form ofthese dominant logics, the
second thing to understand isthat these dominant logics tend
to embed themselves in businesspractices.
And one of the great paradoxesof culture, one of the things,
again, cognitive anthropologistsunderstand very well but
business people have a hard timegetting their head around is
that while culture lives inpeople's heads, their collective
(21:15):
brains, where you see culture,and where culture manifests is
in these business practices.
And when I say a businesspractice, what I mean by that is
an actual process or routine bywhich you run your business.
So think of, like, how youbudget, or think about how you
(21:36):
define what a customer is andhow you go to market, or how you
go about building product orhow you go about setting up
services.
The how of that comes fromthese dominant logics, but also
the what and the why come fromthese dominant logics.
So the very ways in which yourun your business and structure
(21:56):
your business, the routines, thebusiness processes, are the
manifestations of these dominantlogics.
In other words, the culturelives in the practice.
Does that make sense?
Speaker 1 (22:10):
And so these are embedded in organizations CEOs,
leaders.
This is where it comes intothat.
Don't know that.
I don't know.
Type of information If culturelives in the mind and it
manifests through practice,these practices in business, how
(22:30):
do you diagnose it?
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Yeah, so that's a great question, and so there are
many ways to diagnose it.
That's a great question, and sothe there are many ways to
diagnose it.
Um, there's I'll give you sortof two answers on that there's
sort of the expert way you know,you can, you can hire an
anthropologist and who's trainedin these in the science, and
(22:54):
that you, you can sort ofexpertly diagnose culture.
And we do that through um verystructured, um empirically
proven means, through interviewsand then analyzing those
interviews, running surveys, andwe can, from listening to how
people talk about their businessand how people talk about
success and how people run andorganize their business, and
(23:16):
interviewing people on thatbasis and also surveying people
on that basis, we can extractout empirically what those
dominant logics are.
We can also do it throughobservations, like ethnographic
observations, being in thebusiness, but you don't need
actually a trainedanthropologist to do this.
It helps if you're trying toadd legitimacy to your change
(23:38):
program.
But more fundamentally, the wayyou look, the way you spot a
dominant logic, is to look atthe patterns.
And if you can take a step backfrom your business and do what
Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky,these researchers from Harvard,
(23:58):
write in this book, Leadershipon the Line.
If you can get onto the balconyor zoom out from your business
and start looking down at thedance floor, looking down at the
business and seeing how thebusiness is run daily, and start
to look for patterns in how thebusiness runs, you can spot
(24:22):
these dominant logics.
Dominant logics are justpervasive patterns.
So what's an example?
Think about, I have a client,several clients, in the
manufacturing, industrialmanufacturing sector.
Industrial manufacturing andmanufacturing in general is a
very obviously labor-intensiveprocess.
(24:42):
It's also a process, or it's anindustry, that requires a lot
of certainty.
It costs a lot of money toproduce a product usually, and
the costs of failure are quitehigh.
So one of the dominant logicsthat you tend to find in
industrial manufacturing is alogic around risk, or what I
call certainty, Meaning you wantto make sure that whatever you
(25:05):
invest in is going to work outthe way you want it to work out.
You're interested in certainty,and so one of the dominant
logics in an industrialmanufacturing business is
typically around certainty,which is basically another way
of saying you want to reducerisk down to its lowest possible
set of tolerances.
(25:26):
So everything that you do inyour business is about
mitigating risk Soundsreasonable, right?
I mean, this is why you knowthe old adage you don't ship
beta versions of refrigerators.
If you're an industrialmanufacturer of refrigerators,
you typically don't want to shipproduct that has a lot of
defects in it.
If you're in the softwarebusiness, what do you do?
(25:47):
Every week you're releasingsoftware that has known bugs.
They're advising on that,actually, yeah, yeah.
And you're listing out herethat there are 250 known defects
in this particular release.
Right Now you think about thelogic of what it goes in to make
and ship a refrigerator versusthe logic of what it takes to go
and ship a piece of software.
(26:08):
And this is obvious, it's quitedifferent.
But the underlying root logics,the root assumptions, the root
beliefs, the root shared sort ofheuristics about how you do
that and how you do that well,are vastly different, Right?
So how?
(26:28):
How?
You to your question.
Long answer to your question howcan you spot a dominant logic?
Or how can you get at the rootof culture?
Is you start to spot thepatterns by which you run and
organize your business?
And so in an industrial companyyou might be looking at how do
we deal with risk, and not justin how we build refrigerators,
(26:52):
but also in how we hire people,how we set budgets, how we do
strategy, how we engagecustomers, how we think about
marketing right we do strategy,how we engage customers, how we
think about marketing right.
You'll find that a dominantlogic around risk in these kinds
of companies tends to be what Icall over-applied or
over-learned.
And you'll find that companiesyou know, industrial
(27:15):
manufacturers tend to have thisrisk logic applied in all sorts
of domains of their business,well beyond the manufacturer of
the actual product.
Yes, we want to not shiprefrigerators with a lot of
defects in them, but do we needto have our hiring practices
structured such that they areall about minimizing risk so we
(27:39):
will never take a chance onhiring on someone, For example,
we'll never promote anybody fromwithin because we don't think
they can do that.
We don't know if they can do thejob.
Or our planning, our strategicplanning processes are such that
they're so risk avoidant thatwe will never make a bet or take
a big bet on a strategy whichmight be essential for our
(28:02):
future growth and our futureresilience as an organization.
But we are hesitant to make bigbets.
So everything that we do isincremental, Everything that we
do is hedged right.
So you get the idea, this ideaof I'm just using this one
example of you know, a certaintyor risk mitigation, dominant
logic gets over, applied in allthese different parts of your
(28:23):
business.
And now suddenly we have, wecan start to see the mosaic, the
picture start to take shape.
A little bit about how onelogic can start to become a
(28:51):
barrier to change.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
So it makes sense.
Yeah, so well, let me give youa real example.
Does that make sense?
And when you're forecastingfinance programs 10 years out,
you have to what ifs and thethinking of the risk management
and seasons and all kinds ofthings to budget and predict
(29:12):
income over the next decade.
Let's say that leaking into.
When you're making a softwarechoice, yeah, very different,
like so overdeveloped in how wetake care of real estate,
physical real estate, physicalplant investment returns, things
like that in a softwaredecision, uh, where you gotta be
(29:37):
quick, move quickly and it maynot work right out of the gate.
You know all that stuff.
Is that an example of where anoverdeveloped dominant logic and
this is probably an industrylogic and that then becomes
company logic then becomes yeah,yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
That's a great example.
You know the other from whatI've gained from talking to you
and talking to others.
Question how do you spot adominant logic?
Well, you might think aboutwhere do we over apply, uh, this
(30:27):
investment or transactionallogic in our business when it's
not appropriate or lessappropriate to be so
transactional, like in somecases?
Maybe we want to have long-termrelationships with our partners
, our business partners, and notthink of business partners in
such a transactional.
You know who's got the bestprice, you know who can satisfy
(30:57):
myapply these logics in domainswhere over-application might
actually be detrimental to notnecessarily your business, but
your change or transformationstrategy, and that's where
culture becomes a barrier tochange.
(31:17):
That's exactly where culturerears its head, because the
business practices that havemade you so successful as a
business will always be the onesthat are preventing you from
change.
And this is one of the hardestthings about culture change and
about change and transformationin general, and why, for the
last 50 years, failure rates ofchange remain around 70%.
(31:39):
No matter how you define change.
Most up to almost threequarters of planned change does
not meet its objectives.
And one of the major reasonswhy is this reason, this culture
.
Reason we don't understandculture and culture inevitably
is the thing that is precludingwhere we want to get to Another
(31:59):
way of saying it, in a moreappreciative way of saying it,
and the way the anthropologistswould think of it is cultures
are ultimately also adaptive.
The reason why humans inventedculture or humans have culture,
is essentially for adaptivereasons.
We survive and adapt, and notonly survive and adapt but
actually thrive in our variouslocal environments because of
(32:24):
culture.
Think about and now I'm drawingfrom you know 200 years of
anthropology, but think abouthow islanders in polynesia
survived and thrived inenvironments far removed from
other societies and cultures.
You know they survived andthrived by appropriating the
(32:49):
tools and the ecologies and thenature and the environments and
the biology that was availableto them to survive and thrive in
their environments and makesocieties in these far-flung
islands that are thousands ofmiles from other civilizations
and yet develop these very umsophisticated um cultures and
societies, you know, without toomuch outside input yeah,
(33:17):
business owners wake upconcerned about profits.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Today, you know costs are going up and up, it's
harder and harder to retaintalent, attract it, identify it.
And you know there's changecoming to an industry, from
technical, from operational,from new emerging competitors I
mean you name it CEOs andleaders are their heads on a
(33:44):
swivel right now and this isvery interesting because you
said it to me the other daywhich is business leaders aren't
seeking this out, they're notstudying what you just shared.
And, ultimately, if talent isthe last real competitive
advantage for a business, thetrue differentiator between who
executes, who implements, whoprovides that experience, it
(34:08):
stands to say that we need tobring a little more gravity to
this body of work.
And that's the confusing part,because I think people want
stuff, they want change, theywant a great culture, they want
what has been sold to them,progress, um, and you know it's,
(34:31):
it's a lot of work.
And so back to your point ofthat balcony view, looking down
onto your business, looking atit.
You do that really well as anoutside person coming into an
organization.
What does that look like inthose conversations?
(34:56):
And I wrote down how you listento how people talk about their
success.
You listen to how people talkabout how they operate and run
their business, and that's partof your diagnosis of this
culture.
Correct, yes?
(35:18):
And if someone hasn't done thatstudy, I know at the tail end
of our series we'll talk aboutsustainability of all of this,
and I think that's ultimatelythe end game, is where you're
showing them how to do thisthemselves, even as they grow
more aware.
Talk me through that process,the interviewing, the discovery,
(35:43):
this diagnosis.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
That maybe isn't a quick, you know, survey or yeah,
well, the challenge here isyeah, I mean, there's an awful
lot in what you just said.
Um, the challenge here is and Ibring you back to kind of first
principles, here we're we'retalking about, um, knowledge
(36:09):
that we hold, that we don't knowwe hold.
One of the things we have toremember is that most of what we
have, no, most of knowledge,most of most of what's in our
brains, we only are consciouslyaware of a very small fraction
of it.
If we think about memory and wethink about the brain, most of
what's in our brains is notconsciously known, but it can be
(36:32):
evoked and triggered in context.
I can ask you a question and Ican bring forward a memory of
yours Patrick just by thequestion I asked, and I can
bring forward a memory of yoursPatrick just by the question I
asked.
So the reason I say that is toget at what a group of business
leaders you know, what are theirdominant logics or what's the
(36:54):
dominant logic of the business.
What I have to do as ananthropologist is get at the
assumptions and the beliefs andthe ideologies by which you run
your business.
But I can't often do that byjust asking you hey, patrick,
what are your dominant logics?
You're not.
You probably would struggle toanswer that question and you
wouldn't try to orchestrate itand you wouldn't necessarily
(37:15):
know, because you'd give me.
You'd give me stuff that wasconsciously in your brain, in
your head, versus the, the stuffthat you assume to be true, and
you just operate as if it istrue, which is really what a
dominant logic is.
So the way we get at that andthe way we train leaders to do
this for themselves, with theirteams, is to ask questions like
(37:38):
how do you define success?
And you can think about that.
And then I would ask youquestions like what makes for a
rock star in your company?
What do they do?
And then I would ask youquestions like what are the
biggest challenges that you faceas a business?
And then, how are you goingabout addressing those
challenges?
(38:00):
And if I ask you enough of thosekinds of questions and then
listen very closely to howyou're answering the questions,
I can actually extract out thecore dominant logics by which
you are making sense of thesevery big, complex, open-ended
questions, and that in and ofitself starts to paint the
(38:24):
picture of what are yourdominant logics.
And of course, you in this caseis the plural right, because we
individually hold millions ofthese kinds of schemas and
cultural models in our heads.
It's the ones that we sharethat are the ones that matter.
It's the ones that we sharethat are the ones that matter,
(38:51):
the ones that we share as abusiness that make up the
culture of the business RightMake sense.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Yeah, I'm just writing notes after notes.
It was really interesting andwhat you're interested in is how
they go about in naturalexpression, solving those
challenges, that in theexpression of those ideas, where
you're getting into the areasof the memory or reflections
(39:16):
that they may not even know.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
Entirely taken for granted.
What I'm after is what do youassume to be true?
What do you take entirely forgranted?
Um, and a lot of it is simplyyou know the technique of the
five wise.
Yeah, if the if, if you've beentrained in any kind of process
methodology and you know thetechnique of the five wise a lot
of what anthropologists do isan application of the five wise.
(39:44):
I keep, if, I keep asking youwhy, or why do or why do you
believe that to be true, or howdo you come to that position, or
what makes this person you know.
I ask you sort of why and whatquestions we can get down to
sort of core assumptions andcore beliefs.
It is a process, it is kind ofan iterative questioning process
(40:05):
and you know all the weanthropologists are all the.
You know what we're doing is.
We're trained on how to do thatand we're trained on how to
listen very closely for theanswers and look for patterns in
the answers, because, at theend of the day day, a dominant
logic is a pervasive pattern ofbelief that structures multiple
(40:27):
domains of your business, fromhow you hired, how you, how you
think about customers, to howyou do product, to how you set
strategy, to how you allocateresources, etc.
Etc.
Etc on down the line.
And that's the key.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
You know somebody that's wanting to diagnose
culture or they're they've gotthose events that I talked about
at the top of the hour, whichis 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 wheresomeone's actually intentionally
(41:08):
saying we need to diagnoseculture In your reflections and
body of work, what do youbelieve would be the indicators
in some of these conversationsthat you've had and that maybe
have been shared even amongstother companies, uh, when
(41:30):
someone might be resistingchange yeah, that's, that's very
, that's very straightforward.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
I mean, you, um, the, the indicators are the
transformation or the changethat we want to make is not
working.
Or you know, I often hear myclients tell me, uh, those
people are really resisting thischange.
Or you know we can't get thesales people to, um, do
(41:59):
consultative selling.
They have to sell.
You know they have to sell athing.
Or we can't get those marketersto think beyond.
You know what's in the brochure.
I can't get the engineers to.
You know, do you know to movefaster?
Or I can't get the financepeople.
You know, it's those people,it's, it's the.
(42:19):
You know, if I simply ask thequestion how is your train, how
is your transformation going,and what's, what's precluding it
, then quickly, you, you cancome to, you can come to this
question, this answer.
That's always the, always thelitmus test.
(42:46):
The other interesting thing thatwas embedded in your question,
patrick, is the interestingthing about culture is that
cultures are largely invisibleand they only become visible
when you try to change them.
Right, I mean, think about yourown personal life.
You know you want to, you wantto lose 20 pounds, or you want
(43:08):
to stop eating sugar, or youwant to go to the gym more right
.
And it's only when you want toactually start to make that
change happen that you start torealize how much you're
resisting yourself.
You know, I want to work outthree days a week but I can't
seem to get into the car and goto the gym.
I really want to work out and Ineed to work out, but you know,
I just I always find that, youknow, come three o'clock in the
afternoon, I've got 22 otherthings I need to do besides that
(43:30):
.
It's that resistance.
That is where the cultureresides, in the, in the, in the
reasons for and the nature ofthe resistance.
The same thing in organizationsOrganizations typically what
they tend to think about, whatleaders often think culture is,
(43:54):
you know, is the corporatevalues and sort of the corporate
ideology.
You know what we want to be asa business and how we want to
treat people and what we aspireto be, and these are all
wonderful things, but these areideologies.
These are what we aspire to beand these are all wonderful
things, but these are ideologies.
These are what we call espousedculture, what we want to be,
and one should never confusewhat we want with who we are and
(44:16):
what we are and why we are, andso 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 youwant to go to the gym and what
actually what you actually do?
Well, at three o'clock every day, every day, I I find other
things to do besides going tothe gym, or you know.
(44:39):
In this, in this effort tobecome more of a agile digital
business as an industrialcompany, I keep finding ways to
kill all initiative in mysoftware teams, despite my best
intentions, because I subject mysoftware developers to endless
(44:59):
amounts of code reviews andendless amounts of gate reviews
to have their products andprojects establish profitability
long before they're ready to beeven thought of.
In that way, that makes sense,right?
You know, it's like weunwittingly preclude efforts to
change because we impose logicor we impose rationales that
(45:23):
seem to make perfect sense butand are perfectly justifiable,
but they they inevitably kill orretard the desired change it's
hard.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
You've said before I wouldn't, and we'll get into
this in other segments aroundwhy it's so difficult.
And just even the fitnessanalogy is a great one, because
the benefits are wonderful.
I mean you get to keep, youknow, being healthy, I mean
right.
But on business, the benefitsto what you're talking about are
(46:02):
really special, and alsofinancial.
Yeah, right, we can do somemath for the listeners, but it's
also not easy, right.
So often people retreat whenthey start something.
I mean there may be evendominant logics in that, right.
(46:23):
What do you say to somebodythat's tried many things and
they, they just keep findingthemselves back in the same spot
.
You know, how do you even getthe encouragement to move
through this?
Because there, if there's achampion in an organization even
(46:48):
it could be the CEO or it couldbe the organizational leader
they may be the one person inthe organization that believes
in moving through things.
There's that resistance too.
People have past successes andpositional power and influence
(47:10):
like authority.
Yeah, lots of.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
Yeah, well, that's the key right there, because
it's the past success which hasgiven rise to the dominant logic
to begin with, which is whatthen keeps you from future
success.
And this is one of the greatparadoxes and complexities of
culture.
When I resist going to the gymat three in the afternoon, I've
(47:36):
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 ofterrific reasons why.
And all those reasons arelegitimate.
And you know the same withorganizations.
The reasons why we can't do Xare all very legitimate and all
rooted in successful previousexperiences.
(47:59):
The problem is to do the kindsof radical transformations or
major disruptive transformationsthat 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 tome it was a brilliant thing.
He said this is a change leaderat a utility said if you always
(48:20):
do what you've always done,that if you always do what
you've always done, you'llalways get what you've got.
And it's so simple and sopowerful because to really do
major transformation and thisleads me into the other point,
just parenthetically.
One of the other big challengesis that we tend to misdiagnose
(48:42):
or mischaracterize the nature ofthe change, that we're to
misdiagnose or mischaracterizethe nature of the change that
we're up against.
We, you know, we are actuallytrying to fundamentally
transform our business, but wetend to think of that as a
project plan, as a digitaltechnology implementation or as
an AI implementation, and it'sjust like bringing in a new
piece of software Just thetechnology will take care of the
change.
(49:02):
And that, you know.
We mischaracterized the natureof the problem, sort of our head
in the sand right now.
We think, you know, we thinkit's just an incremental change,
when it's a fundamentallyradical shift in how people need
to work.
Ai, as you well know, isfundamentally implicates
different ways of working.
The knowledge worker willforever be changed by AI, but
(49:27):
most of us think of AI as just atool.
Maybe you can rewrite thisparagraph for me a little bit
better.
Right?
Fundamentally mischaracterizingthe nature of the change before
us.
Why?
Because we're using theparadigm of tool to think about
AI, when we actually should bethinking about AI as
(49:49):
fundamentally restructuring thenature of work, right?
So this is a little bit offtopic here, but this is the
challenge.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
Well, at the top of the show, this is what people
are experiencing today.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
Yeah, yeah, and the same is true with change.
You know we fundamental, youknow rapid scaling, a common
problem of many smallercompanies right new in 16 months
.
Or you know acquiring abusiness or a turnaround, or you
know becoming, you knowfundamentally changing their
(50:31):
business model to a digitally, adigital business model from a
product centric business model.
I mean these are fundamentalredefinitions of you know.
They're what we callontological or existential,
definite redefinitions of whoyou are as a business.
But we tend to think of them asjust initiatives and project
(50:53):
plans.
And if we just put a goodproject plan together and
implement the technology and youknow, devote an office of
transformation, create an officeof transformation around it,
you know, and sort of treat itlike a complex project, we'll
get there when the whole natureof the, you know the paradigms
by which we even think about thenature of the change need to be
(51:14):
re-examined.
We reduce everything to aproject plan when we actually
should be asking the questionwhat business are we in?
And you know I use an exampleof a very significant example
today is happening in theutility industry, especially in
the water utility industry.
(51:35):
Climate change is fundamentallydisrupting life as we know it on
this planet.
I mean just the nature ofstorms.
You know the power of storms.
Amount of rain that falls in anhour is today in many parts of
the world.
You know, triple what it was 10years ago.
How much rain can fall in anhour in a monsoon, right, and
(52:00):
utilities can't keep up.
You know the flooding that ishappening in places like
Valencia in Spain or Sydney,australia, in these massive
storms is way beyond thecapacity of storm drains and
sewage systems and monitoringsystems.
Utilities are trying to dealwith this by just continuing to
sort of think that they can justadd technology or better
(52:24):
sensors to their, their pipenetworks, when fundamentally
they need to be asking whatbusiness are we in?
I mean, are we, are we stillable to do and run our business,
our utility business, in thesame way that we did 15 years
ago in the face of massivelydifferent climate?
Right, so it's a and so this isa.
(52:48):
You know that what.
What really needs to shift isthe dominant logic of what does
it mean to be a water utility inSydney, australia today, in the
?
You know, given how much raincan fall in one hour versus 20
years ago.
But you also can appreciatejust even that little scenario,
(53:08):
how difficult it might be to dothat Right.
Utilities are regulatedUtilities are.
You know.
They're many years, hundreds ofyears old in many cases and
they think in 10 year and 15year increments.
And to sort of ask the questionof a utility CEO, maybe you
need to really fundamentallyrethink what business you're in
is like speaking Swahili.
Speaker 1 (53:30):
Well, I start to think about people don't go to
court sometimes without anattorney, right, and here what
you just described is like youcome in as that attorney under
these practice shared model,like we've been doing it
ourselves, you know, and theoutcome isn't, isn't there, and
(53:53):
you know that you've, you'veseen it happen.
We are coming up towards theend of our time together.
This is an exciting series I'mgoing to remind our listeners.
Today we're talking aboutidentifying the barriers to
change, or diagnosing, I'm sorry, the culture.
(54:13):
And then next series, we'regoing to be talking about
identifying the barriers tochange.
We're going to be talking aboutcrafting a strategy as we talk
through this.
We're going to be talking aboutcrafting a strategy as we talk
through this and then overcomingthese pitfalls that most
companies will face.
How do you deal with those headon, productively, right, so you
(54:34):
don't leave people behind andyou 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 courtwithout an attorney.
Well, now you become, you areable to sustain some of these
(54:55):
things in the organization byhaving more body of knowledge
around it.
So you see the businessdifferently.
Ask those questions, and I'mgoing to summarize a few things
I thought were useful in justtoday's discussion around.
That is, getting to theassumptions.
Number one who do you know thatyou know would find value in an
(55:16):
episode like this?
Text it to them, share it.
Whatever you've got to do, letthem know about this.
I think it would be one ofthose gifts that I do as a call
to action.
You need to do that.
The second thing is write down,get to your assumptions.
(55:37):
I wrote down these questionsthat David mentioned in the
episode here how do you definesuccess?
Asking our teams this and whatdoes it look like?
What does winning look like?
What does that rock star looklike?
Letting them describe that?
And then you know, this iswhere I think in his response is
(56:02):
getting to the challenges.
So what are your biggestchallenges you face?
And then the follow-onquestions to that around how do
you go about solving thosechallenges?
Or how would you go about, youknow, like listening into those
things?
Those are some really greattakeaways from today's
(56:22):
discussion that I wrote down,and I loved this idea about it's
invisible until you start doingthe work.
I thought that was reallycompelling, david.
Before we wrap.
Are there any final thoughtsthat you want to leave our
listeners with?
I know we couldn't get to allof it in one episode and so I'm
(56:42):
breaking it up into these seriesfor the time that we share
together.
Really do appreciate you takingthe time and showing up for our
audience.
Any final thoughts you want toleave our listeners with?
Around diagnosing culture.
Speaker 2 (57:01):
Well, we've kind of veered a little bit away from
that Culture.
Well, we've kind of veered alittle bit away from that.
But I hope listeners havedeveloping an appreciation for
the complexity of culture.
Complexity is a four-letterword in business.
We all want it simple, we wantit fast, we want it cheap and we
want it now and just,unfortunately, culture is not
(57:21):
one of those topics that lendsitself to that way of thinking.
I hate to break it to you, butthat's one of the reasons why so
much money is wasted on culturechange.
And what I'm trying to do Ithink, if I could sort of
(57:49):
characterize my mission as ananthropologist is to help
business leaders come to a muchmore honest and fruitful and
effective appreciation for thecomplexities of culture.
And I think we started to touchon that today.
Speaker 1 (57:56):
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'veprioritized things and, and, and
, and in many ways built greatbusinesses.
I mean a lot of success.
Speaker 2 (58:11):
And it would be great and we would never even be
having this conversation ifthose great businesses weren't
trying to actually change.
And that's where the rubbermeets the proverbial road, yeah.
Speaker 1 (58:21):
Well, that's great, all right.
Well, we's great, all right.
Well, we'll wrap at that, andthen we'll see you in the next,
next series on this.
Thank you, david.
Speaker 2 (58:32):
Thank you.
Well, welcome back.
Welcome to the show Today.
What we're tackling here iswhat we believe to be one of the
toughest challenges in business, and we're talking today about
the barriers to change andcompany transformation.
Now, if you think about this,every company right now is going
(00:21):
through change, andtransformative change that maybe
you subscribed to, maybe youdidn't, and you may be thinking
you know you're acquiringanother company, you're going
through a merger and acquisition, maybe you're involved in a
turnaround, maybe you just careabout this stuff, right, you may
also be one of the CEOs that isexperiencing some kind of pain
(00:48):
in the organization.
Maybe you're thinking aboutthis as you want to deliver this
profitable growth for thecompany.
You want to be resilient, youwant to know that you can retain
the top talent, and some of youare thinking about technology,
future-proofing your business,all of these things that are
(01:10):
coming, but they impact changethe toughest thing about
organizational shifts andthere's a lot of uncertainty
around that as well.
So today I've got a guest, drDavid White, who has devoted his
career to diagnosing thecultural barriers that keep us
(01:33):
from making real change and notjust change, lasting change.
You may be able to hireconsultants, let them parachute
in and tell you things, but he'sdeveloping sustainable change
you can hold on to in yourbusiness.
We're going to pinpoint in thisseries the internal practices
(01:55):
that are standing in the way ofyour progress and through this
process, I want to extract fromhim his winning strategy to
overcoming these things.
And it's probably not whatyou're thinking these models
(02:16):
that companies can use to scaleare something that you have the
ability to execute today andalong this series, what we're
going to do is we're going to betalking about how sometimes
well-intentioned efforts, evensmart people, make silly, stupid
(02:38):
decisions about things rightDespite our intentions.
Even some of the smartestpeople, we fail in this process.
We're going to dive into thestudy of cognitive anthropology,
which, when you speak to DrDavid White, he'll tell you that
this is some of the answers,through this study, of why
(03:01):
businesses cling on to statusquo they keep where they are is
these practices in theirbusiness, and you're going to
hear from him on why mostorganizations, even consultants,
today, are just short on thefuse.
They want the quick fix andtruly the things that we're
talking about here are about thepractices, not just the people,
(03:25):
and why this change requiresnot just a new way of thinking,
but a new way of working, allright.
So if you're that leader andyou're determined, maybe you're
that business owner that you'vegot to hold on.
(03:45):
You're trying to make it happenand you want to bring
meaningful change ortransformation and you're
hitting roadblocks.
This is the conversation thatwill give you the insights and
the tools to make change stick.
And when we say change, guesswhat?
(04:07):
Nobody likes that.
Nobody wants to be changed.
It's never easy.
David's going to talk to usabout how we can do it
effectively and empower ourteams through that process.
Think of it like productivelymoving through change.
You have two choices.
You have rapid change.
(04:28):
You leave people behind.
It's a problem.
You have status quo and you'retrying to increment and you get
outpaced by competition.
That's even a bigger problem.
So let's bring David on andlet's get to this series.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
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 allvery well.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
I think I can just sort of go home now, right?
Well, I've had the opportunityto study a lot of your work and
to share the time, and I thinkthat's one of the things that we
want people to do is actually,it takes time to do some of
these things, and time andpractice.
I just want to say I appreciateyou doing this.
I know our audience andliterally America cares, the
(05:18):
world cares about this topic andI know that it's hard to
decipher what's right.
A lot of people have tried alot of things in the past and
some of these things have workedand some of them seem marketing
and I really love how you cutthrough that noise.
But before we get into thisconversation, I'd like to take a
(05:39):
moment to just set up a littlebit about who you are so the
audience can get some contextaround how you've shown up in
organizations.
We'll get into this topicaround these barriers to change
in company transformation, whythat impacts our organization.
(06:01):
Let me just share a littlebackground on David For those of
you that are listening.
I want you to grab something.
If you're driving, focus, doyour thing, but if you're at
work, shut the door.
Listen to this.
This is going to be the mostimportant podcast you listen to
(06:23):
in all of 2025.
Write things down, take notes,because David has been doing
change in business for over 30years and you know from my time
with him and he's shared thestories in the last.
In the first two decades of hiscareer, he's led large-scale
(06:46):
initiatives for companies likeMicrosoft, lotus, ibm I mean
just to name a few.
There's plenty of amazingcompanies that, just regardless
of the amount of talented teams,he had access to the massive
budgets, he had access to, eventhe leadership strong leadership
(07:08):
in these organizations.
He'll tell you that he neversaw transformation fully succeed
and that experience got himasking a crucial question, and
that question is why do so manyefforts that go into driving
(07:28):
change?
Why do they fail?
So he goes back to school,earns a doctorate in cognitive
anthropology.
This is the study of how brainsand cultural environments, how
they interact, brains andcultural environments, how they
interact, and over seven yearsof research and spending time
(07:49):
with these amazing clients, he'sproduced two books and
developed what I believe andmany others believe that are
much smarter than me agroundbreaking theory on why
most organizationaltransformations fall short, and
what he discovered is thatthere's actually a wealth of
(08:11):
knowledge in the fields of thiscognitive science and
anthropology, about why changeis so different.
Now, anthropologists, they careabout bigger world things Maybe
not business and quarterlyreturns and the things you're
thinking about and yet thebusiness world isn't studying
this stuff and they're not eventapping into it because they're
(08:34):
not listening to it, they don'thave access to it and they want
short-term fixes.
And, yeah, they just want tofix it fast.
And today, david is spendingtime with organizations that
apply this science and he'sshowing leaders why he's here
(08:56):
with us today, not just why bigchange fails, but how we can use
these proven methods that he'snot only discovered, but to make
this transformation stickwithin your organization.
Now, if you're ready to dig intothis what I call the real
cultural change and why it's sochallenging then grab that pin,
(09:22):
open up your notes.
Whatever you're taking notes on, get engaged in this
conversation.
You're going to want to makesure you save it, share it with
someone that you think needs tohear it, but I'm going to have
David reveal what he trulybelieves drives sustainable
transformation.
So let me set this up on whatwe're going to do.
We're going to talk about moreof a series.
(09:44):
We may not have time to get toit all, but we're going to talk
about diagnosing culture.
We're going to help themidentify the barriers to change,
crafting this strategy in thebusiness, looking at the
pitfalls, overcoming those andthen, after all of that,
(10:05):
sustaining this transformation.
So, david, long contextualintro and setup, but I think it
deserves the gravity of the workthat you've studied and worked
on.
So, second, welcome in.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Appreciate that.
Thank you yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
So you talk, and let's just focus now on this
diagnosing culture.
You know there's a lot ofopinions 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 throughwhen you're going in and
(10:48):
diagnosing a company's culture?
How do you think through that?
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah, thank you, patrick, for the intro.
Let's just begin with the wordculture.
You ask 10 people what culturemeans, you'll get 10 different
answers.
And the funny thing is inbusiness it's.
The funny thing is in inbusiness it's not that much
different than an anthropology,you know, uh, famous
(11:13):
anthropologists in the 1950sidentified over a hundred
different definitions of culture, um such that anthropologists
for a period of time in the inthe middle of the 20th century,
thought that the whole conceptof culture should just be
abandoned.
Like culture as a concept, as aconstruct, is just not worth,
you know, because we can'tidentify it, we can't measure it
(11:35):
, we can't define it, it's notworth the time and effort to do
so.
So, luckily, I think that wehave backed off anthropologists
have backed off that that sortof prevailing view in the 1970s,
because I think culture is avery important construct.
Culture is real.
(11:55):
Any business leader in youraudience will know that's true.
But getting clear on what itmeans and what it is and what
it's not is very, very important.
So the very first step in in ina trans, in a transformation,
is really understanding.
What is it that we're workingwith here?
What are we, what are wedealing with when it comes to
(12:18):
culture, the thing that I've asyou said in your intro.
I've been working ontransformation, organizational
transformation for 30 years 30plus years and not seen many
work, and the reason why I cameto the conclusion was because of
this amorphous thing calledculture, and through my
(12:42):
discoveries in graduate schooland in course of getting a PhD,
I realized that, as you said,the way the anthropologists talk
about culture and the waybusiness people talk about
culture is very, very different,and so what I've devoted myself
over the last 15 years to doingis trying to bridge those two
worlds.
A lot of you know you're verygenerous in your introduction of
(13:03):
me, but the stuff that I'mbringing to the business
audience and to the businessworld isn't really new.
It's just not known to businesspeople.
But in about the middle of the1990s, the anthropology went
through what's known as thecognitive revolution, and many
anthropologists started to thinkabout culture in very different
(13:26):
ways from their predecessors,their earlier generations, and
they started to realize thatculture is in the mind.
In fact, I have a newslettercalled the cultural mind, and
that's how cognitiveanthropology was born.
As you said, it's therelationship, it's the study of
the relationship between thebrain and culture, and what the
(13:51):
anthropologists of the 1990swere writing about and studying
was was how culture really isknowledge at the end of the day.
Um, culture fundamentally is isstuff that we know, that we
don't know, we know but that weuse every single day, and that
has become now kind of the defacto cognitive anthropology
(14:12):
standard for what is culture?
Culture is knowledge, and whatkind of knowledge?
Specifically, tacit knowledge,implicit knowledge, taken for
granted knowledge, and when youstart to sort of boil it down to
think about culture in thoseterms and then you start to
think about organizational andcorporate cultures in these ways
, the world starts to lookdifferent, right?
(14:35):
So that's probably our startingpoint is you know culture is
knowledge?
What kind of knowledge?
It's stuff we take for grantedand the best examples?
There's millions of examples inour daily lives.
You know, how do you know not tolook at people in the eye when
you walk into an elevator?
Or how do you know how to orderfood in a restaurant?
(14:58):
Or how do you know how to youknow get on a subway?
When you are in a city with asubway?
How do you know how to you knownot walk down the middle of the
street.
I mean, these may seem soobvious and silly examples, but
none of these things were evertaught to you formally in school
.
(15:18):
But you know these things to betruths, like you know, like
waking up in the morning, and,and so that is what culture is.
It's a shared body of knowledgeof how to organize and make
sense of the world around us,and that is as true in a society
(15:40):
as it is true in a, in acompany.
Uh, and so you know, just onthat point alone, if you start
to appreciate that way ofthinking 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
(16:04):
to culture, but they're not whatI call the DNA of culture.
They're not, they're not thesource code.
And part of our challenges andpart of our problems in business
over the last 50, 60 years isthat we've been trying to make
change happen and maketransformation happen and coming
up against these, what I callthese cultural barriers, and
(16:27):
thinking that we've got toaddress and change the culture
by going after these things likeattitudes and behaviors and
values, when those aren't reallythe 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
(16:48):
cause.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
You're never getting at the pathology underneath and
sometimes in practice of work,we're hiring and engaging people
that have past knowledge andI'm just curious about that
(17:13):
let's lean into that a littlemore of how that can change a
culture, even when somebody hasgreat knowledge, especially when
you're introducing a world ofchanging organizational
structures and all these things.
So how does that play out?
Knowledge?
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Yeah.
So the first thing we have toget clear on is that when we say
knowledge, I'm not necessarilymeaning book knowledge or your
knowledge as an engineer, or youknow.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
But they could be the steps that I took to do the
thing that we've always donethings.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
It's, it's, when we say culture as knowledge, what
we really mean is shared, uhtaken for granted knowledge, and
that is more fundamental thanthan stuff.
You consciously know most ofthe stuff.
When, when I say culture isknowledge, most of the stuff
that we're talking about isassumed and taken for granted,
(18:12):
and it comes from sharedexperience.
And so what you're alluding tois what kind of shared
experience?
Well, it turns out back to thisquestion of how does culture
and the brain interact.
It turns out that meaningfulexperiences tend to form
(18:34):
long-lasting bonds in memory,long-lasting neuronal synaptic
connections in the brain,chemical connections in the
brain.
And so when we have meaningfulexperiences and we share those
experiences as a group, we tendto form a common base of
knowledge, of this culturalknowledge and let's give this a
(18:54):
name, because what I've the wordthat anthropologists use is
these are called cultural models.
They're shared mental modelsI've appropriated that term and
changed it a little bit forbusiness audiences and I call
that a dominant logic.
And what a dominant logic isbasically is a set of concepts
(19:19):
and ideas and mental models thatorganize uh or help make sense
of the world.
So, uh, I'm going to use theword dominant logic going
forward, but basically adominant logic is a cultural
model.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
A cultural model is a shared mental model and so
dominant logic um could be a away that we've experienced
success in the past on evengoing to market Correct.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
So, if you think about where to let's talk about
dominant logics and where theycome from, shared meaningful
experiences that a group shareswill tend to form shared
dominant logics.
So, yes, think of a startupcompany that solved a really,
really hard problem.
The experiences gained insolving that really hard problem
(20:09):
technical problem, marketproblem, customer problem will
tend to create shared knowledgeabout what success looks like
and what success entails andwhat's required to achieve
success, and that's becomes adominant logic for running the
business.
It makes perfect sense, right?
This worked.
We, we solve this problem as anorganization.
(20:32):
So many of the principles ormany of the rules of thumb, many
of the assumptions, many of thebeliefs about what went into
solving that problem, thenbecome codified in the business
and they become codified asbusiness practices.
So that leads to a second Oncewe understand that culture is
(20:52):
shared knowledge in this form ofthese dominant logics, the
second thing to understand isthat these dominant logics tend
to embed themselves in businesspractices.
And one of the great paradoxesof culture, one of the things,
again, cognitive anthropologistsunderstand very well but
business people have a hard timegetting their head around is
that while culture lives inpeople's heads, their collective
(21:15):
brains, where you see culture,and where culture manifests is
in these business practices.
And when I say a businesspractice, what I mean by that is
an actual process or routine bywhich you run your business.
So think of, like, how youbudget, or think about how you
(21:36):
define what a customer is andhow you go to market, or how you
go about building product orhow you go about setting up
services.
The how of that comes fromthese dominant logics, but also
the what and the why come fromthese dominant logics.
So the very ways in which yourun your business and structure
(21:56):
your business, the routines, thebusiness processes, are the
manifestations of these dominantlogics.
In other words, the culturelives in the practice.
Does that make sense?
Speaker 1 (22:10):
And so these are embedded in organizations CEOs,
leaders.
This is where it comes intothat.
Don't know that.
I don't know.
Type of information If culturelives in the mind and it
manifests through practice,these practices in business, how
(22:30):
do you diagnose it?
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Yeah, so that's a great question, and so there are
many ways to diagnose it.
That's a great question, and sothe there are many ways to
diagnose it.
Um, there's I'll give you sortof two answers on that there's
sort of the expert way you know,you can, you can hire an
anthropologist and who's trainedin these in the science, and
(22:54):
that you, you can sort ofexpertly diagnose culture.
And we do that through um verystructured, um empirically
proven means, through interviewsand then analyzing those
interviews, running surveys, andwe can, from listening to how
people talk about their businessand how people talk about
success and how people run andorganize their business, and
(23:16):
interviewing people on thatbasis and also surveying people
on that basis, we can extractout empirically what those
dominant logics are.
We can also do it throughobservations, like ethnographic
observations, being in thebusiness, but you don't need
actually a trainedanthropologist to do this.
It helps if you're trying toadd legitimacy to your change
(23:38):
program.
But more fundamentally, the wayyou look, the way you spot a
dominant logic, is to look atthe patterns.
And if you can take a step backfrom your business and do what
Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky,these researchers from Harvard,
(23:58):
write in this book, Leadershipon the Line.
If you can get onto the balconyor zoom out from your business
and start looking down at thedance floor, looking down at the
business and seeing how thebusiness is run daily, and start
to look for patterns in how thebusiness runs, you can spot
(24:22):
these dominant logics.
Dominant logics are justpervasive patterns.
So what's an example?
Think about, I have a client,several clients, in the
manufacturing, industrialmanufacturing sector.
Industrial manufacturing andmanufacturing in general is a
very obviously labor-intensiveprocess.
(24:42):
It's also a process, or it's anindustry, that requires a lot
of certainty.
It costs a lot of money toproduce a product usually, and
the costs of failure are quitehigh.
So one of the dominant logicsthat you tend to find in
industrial manufacturing is alogic around risk, or what I
call certainty, Meaning you wantto make sure that whatever you
(25:05):
invest in is going to work outthe way you want it to work out.
You're interested in certainty,and so one of the dominant
logics in an industrialmanufacturing business is
typically around certainty,which is basically another way
of saying you want to reducerisk down to its lowest possible
set of tolerances.
(25:26):
So everything that you do inyour business is about
mitigating risk Soundsreasonable, right?
I mean, this is why you knowthe old adage you don't ship
beta versions of refrigerators.
If you're an industrialmanufacturer of refrigerators,
you typically don't want to shipproduct that has a lot of
defects in it.
If you're in the softwarebusiness, what do you do?
(25:47):
Every week you're releasingsoftware that has known bugs.
They're advising on that,actually, yeah, yeah.
And you're listing out herethat there are 250 known defects
in this particular release.
Right Now you think about thelogic of what it goes in to make
and ship a refrigerator versusthe logic of what it takes to go
and ship a piece of software.
(26:08):
And this is obvious, it's quitedifferent.
But the underlying root logics,the root assumptions, the root
beliefs, the root shared sort ofheuristics about how you do
that and how you do that well,are vastly different, Right?
So how?
(26:28):
How?
You to your question.
Long answer to your question howcan you spot a dominant logic?
Or how can you get at the rootof culture?
Is you start to spot thepatterns by which you run and
organize your business?
And so in an industrial companyyou might be looking at how do
we deal with risk, and not justin how we build refrigerators,
(26:52):
but also in how we hire people,how we set budgets, how we do
strategy, how we engagecustomers, how we think about
marketing right we do strategy,how we engage customers, how we
think about marketing right.
You'll find that a dominantlogic around risk in these kinds
of companies tends to be what Icall over-applied or
over-learned.
And you'll find that companiesyou know, industrial
(27:15):
manufacturers tend to have thisrisk logic applied in all sorts
of domains of their business,well beyond the manufacturer of
the actual product.
Yes, we want to not shiprefrigerators with a lot of
defects in them, but do we needto have our hiring practices
structured such that they areall about minimizing risk so we
(27:39):
will never take a chance onhiring on someone, For example,
we'll never promote anybody fromwithin because we don't think
they can do that.
We don't know if they can do thejob.
Or our planning, our strategicplanning processes are such that
they're so risk avoidant thatwe will never make a bet or take
a big bet on a strategy whichmight be essential for our
(28:02):
future growth and our futureresilience as an organization.
But we are hesitant to make bigbets.
So everything that we do isincremental, Everything that we
do is hedged right.
So you get the idea, this ideaof I'm just using this one
example of you know, a certaintyor risk mitigation, dominant
logic gets over, applied in allthese different parts of your
(28:23):
business.
And now suddenly we have, wecan start to see the mosaic, the
picture start to take shape.
A little bit about how onelogic can start to become a
(28:51):
barrier to change.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
So it makes sense.
Yeah, so well, let me give youa real example.
Does that make sense?
And when you're forecastingfinance programs 10 years out,
you have to what ifs and thethinking of the risk management
and seasons and all kinds ofthings to budget and predict
(29:12):
income over the next decade.
Let's say that leaking into.
When you're making a softwarechoice, yeah, very different,
like so overdeveloped in how wetake care of real estate,
physical real estate, physicalplant investment returns, things
like that in a softwaredecision, uh, where you gotta be
(29:37):
quick, move quickly and it maynot work right out of the gate.
You know all that stuff.
Is that an example of where anoverdeveloped dominant logic and
this is probably an industrylogic and that then becomes
company logic then becomes yeah,yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
That's a great example.
You know the other from whatI've gained from talking to you
and talking to others.
Question how do you spot adominant logic?
Well, you might think aboutwhere do we over apply, uh, this
(30:27):
investment or transactionallogic in our business when it's
not appropriate or lessappropriate to be so
transactional, like in somecases?
Maybe we want to have long-termrelationships with our partners
, our business partners, and notthink of business partners in
such a transactional.
You know who's got the bestprice, you know who can satisfy
(30:57):
myapply these logics in domainswhere over-application might
actually be detrimental to notnecessarily your business, but
your change or transformationstrategy, and that's where
culture becomes a barrier tochange.
(31:17):
That's exactly where culturerears its head, because the
business practices that havemade you so successful as a
business will always be the onesthat are preventing you from
change.
And this is one of the hardestthings about culture change and
about change and transformationin general, and why, for the
last 50 years, failure rates ofchange remain around 70%.
(31:39):
No matter how you define change.
Most up to almost threequarters of planned change does
not meet its objectives.
And one of the major reasonswhy is this reason, this culture
.
Reason we don't understandculture and culture inevitably
is the thing that is precludingwhere we want to get to Another
(31:59):
way of saying it, in a moreappreciative way of saying it,
and the way the anthropologistswould think of it is cultures
are ultimately also adaptive.
The reason why humans inventedculture or humans have culture,
is essentially for adaptivereasons.
We survive and adapt, and notonly survive and adapt but
actually thrive in our variouslocal environments because of
(32:24):
culture.
Think about and now I'm drawingfrom you know 200 years of
anthropology, but think abouthow islanders in polynesia
survived and thrived inenvironments far removed from
other societies and cultures.
You know they survived andthrived by appropriating the
(32:49):
tools and the ecologies and thenature and the environments and
the biology that was availableto them to survive and thrive in
their environments and makesocieties in these far-flung
islands that are thousands ofmiles from other civilizations
and yet develop these very umsophisticated um cultures and
societies, you know, without toomuch outside input yeah,
(33:17):
business owners wake upconcerned about profits.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Today, you know costs are going up and up, it's
harder and harder to retaintalent, attract it, identify it.
And you know there's changecoming to an industry, from
technical, from operational,from new emerging competitors I
mean you name it CEOs andleaders are their heads on a
(33:44):
swivel right now and this isvery interesting because you
said it to me the other daywhich is business leaders aren't
seeking this out, they're notstudying what you just shared.
And, ultimately, if talent isthe last real competitive
advantage for a business, thetrue differentiator between who
executes, who implements, whoprovides that experience, it
(34:08):
stands to say that we need tobring a little more gravity to
this body of work.
And that's the confusing part,because I think people want
stuff, they want change, theywant a great culture, they want
what has been sold to them,progress, um, and you know it's,
(34:31):
it's a lot of work.
And so back to your point ofthat balcony view, looking down
onto your business, looking atit.
You do that really well as anoutside person coming into an
organization.
What does that look like inthose conversations?
(34:56):
And I wrote down how you listento how people talk about their
success.
You listen to how people talkabout how they operate and run
their business, and that's partof your diagnosis of this
culture.
Correct, yes?
(35:18):
And if someone hasn't done thatstudy, I know at the tail end
of our series we'll talk aboutsustainability of all of this,
and I think that's ultimatelythe end game, is where you're
showing them how to do thisthemselves, even as they grow
more aware.
Talk me through that process,the interviewing, the discovery,
(35:43):
this diagnosis.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
That maybe isn't a quick, you know, survey or yeah,
well, the challenge here isyeah, I mean, there's an awful
lot in what you just said.
Um, the challenge here is and Ibring you back to kind of first
principles, here we're we'retalking about, um, knowledge
(36:09):
that we hold, that we don't knowwe hold.
One of the things we have toremember is that most of what we
have, no, most of knowledge,most of most of what's in our
brains, we only are consciouslyaware of a very small fraction
of it.
If we think about memory and wethink about the brain, most of
what's in our brains is notconsciously known, but it can be
(36:32):
evoked and triggered in context.
I can ask you a question and Ican bring forward a memory of
yours Patrick just by thequestion I asked, and I can
bring forward a memory of yoursPatrick just by the question I
asked.
So the reason I say that is toget at what a group of business
leaders you know, what are theirdominant logics or what's the
(36:54):
dominant logic of the business.
What I have to do as ananthropologist is get at the
assumptions and the beliefs andthe ideologies by which you run
your business.
But I can't often do that byjust asking you hey, patrick,
what are your dominant logics?
You're not.
You probably would struggle toanswer that question and you
wouldn't try to orchestrate itand you wouldn't necessarily
(37:15):
know, because you'd give me.
You'd give me stuff that wasconsciously in your brain, in
your head, versus the, the stuffthat you assume to be true, and
you just operate as if it istrue, which is really what a
dominant logic is.
So the way we get at that andthe way we train leaders to do
this for themselves, with theirteams, is to ask questions like
(37:38):
how do you define success?
And you can think about that.
And then I would ask youquestions like what makes for a
rock star in your company?
What do they do?
And then I would ask youquestions like what are the
biggest challenges that you faceas a business?
And then, how are you goingabout addressing those
challenges?
(38:00):
And if I ask you enough of thosekinds of questions and then
listen very closely to howyou're answering the questions,
I can actually extract out thecore dominant logics by which
you are making sense of thesevery big, complex, open-ended
questions, and that in and ofitself starts to paint the
(38:24):
picture of what are yourdominant logics.
And of course, you in this caseis the plural right, because we
individually hold millions ofthese kinds of schemas and
cultural models in our heads.
It's the ones that we sharethat are the ones that matter.
It's the ones that we sharethat are the ones that matter,
(38:51):
the ones that we share as abusiness that make up the
culture of the business RightMake sense.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Yeah, I'm just writing notes after notes.
It was really interesting andwhat you're interested in is how
they go about in naturalexpression, solving those
challenges, that in theexpression of those ideas, where
you're getting into the areasof the memory or reflections
(39:16):
that they may not even know.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
Entirely taken for granted.
What I'm after is what do youassume to be true?
What do you take entirely forgranted?
Um, and a lot of it is simplyyou know the technique of the
five wise.
Yeah, if the if, if you've beentrained in any kind of process
methodology and you know thetechnique of the five wise a lot
of what anthropologists do isan application of the five wise.
(39:44):
I keep, if, I keep asking youwhy, or why do or why do you
believe that to be true, or howdo you come to that position, or
what makes this person you know.
I ask you sort of why and whatquestions we can get down to
sort of core assumptions andcore beliefs.
It is a process, it is kind ofan iterative questioning process
(40:05):
and you know all the weanthropologists are all the.
You know what we're doing is.
We're trained on how to do thatand we're trained on how to
listen very closely for theanswers and look for patterns in
the answers, because, at theend of the day day, a dominant
logic is a pervasive pattern ofbelief that structures multiple
(40:27):
domains of your business, fromhow you hired, how you, how you
think about customers, to howyou do product, to how you set
strategy, to how you allocateresources, etc.
Etc.
Etc on down the line.
And that's the key.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
You know somebody that's wanting to diagnose
culture or they're they've gotthose events that I talked about
at the top of the hour, whichis 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 wheresomeone's actually intentionally
(41:08):
saying we need to diagnoseculture In your reflections and
body of work, what do youbelieve would be the indicators
in some of these conversationsthat you've had and that maybe
have been shared even amongstother companies, uh, when
(41:30):
someone might be resistingchange yeah, that's, that's very
, that's very straightforward.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
I mean, you, um, the, the indicators are the
transformation or the changethat we want to make is not
working.
Or you know, I often hear myclients tell me, uh, those
people are really resisting thischange.
Or you know we can't get thesales people to, um, do
(41:59):
consultative selling.
They have to sell.
You know they have to sell athing.
Or we can't get those marketersto think beyond.
You know what's in the brochure.
I can't get the engineers to.
You know, do you know to movefaster?
Or I can't get the financepeople.
You know, it's those people,it's, it's the.
(42:19):
You know, if I simply ask thequestion how is your train, how
is your transformation going,and what's, what's precluding it
, then quickly, you, you cancome to, you can come to this
question, this answer.
That's always the, always thelitmus test.
(42:46):
The other interesting thing thatwas embedded in your question,
patrick, is the interestingthing about culture is that
cultures are largely invisibleand they only become visible
when you try to change them.
Right, I mean, think about yourown personal life.
You know you want to, you wantto lose 20 pounds, or you want
(43:08):
to stop eating sugar, or youwant to go to the gym more right
.
And it's only when you want toactually start to make that
change happen that you start torealize how much you're
resisting yourself.
You know, I want to work outthree days a week but I can't
seem to get into the car and goto the gym.
I really want to work out and Ineed to work out, but you know,
I just I always find that, youknow, come three o'clock in the
afternoon, I've got 22 otherthings I need to do besides that
(43:30):
.
It's that resistance.
That is where the cultureresides, in the, in the, in the
reasons for and the nature ofthe resistance.
The same thing in organizationsOrganizations typically what
they tend to think about, whatleaders often think culture is,
(43:54):
you know, is the corporatevalues and sort of the corporate
ideology.
You know what we want to be asa business and how we want to
treat people and what we aspireto be, and these are all
wonderful things, but these areideologies.
These are what we aspire to beand these are all wonderful
things, but these are ideologies.
These are what we call espousedculture, what we want to be,
and one should never confusewhat we want with who we are and
(44:16):
what we are and why we are, andso 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 youwant to go to the gym and what
actually what you actually do?
Well, at three o'clock every day, every day, I I find other
things to do besides going tothe gym, or you know.
(44:39):
In this, in this effort tobecome more of a agile digital
business as an industrialcompany, I keep finding ways to
kill all initiative in mysoftware teams, despite my best
intentions, because I subject mysoftware developers to endless
(44:59):
amounts of code reviews andendless amounts of gate reviews
to have their products andprojects establish profitability
long before they're ready to beeven thought of.
In that way, that makes sense,right?
You know, it's like weunwittingly preclude efforts to
change because we impose logicor we impose rationales that
(45:23):
seem to make perfect sense butand are perfectly justifiable,
but they they inevitably kill orretard the desired change it's
hard.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
You've said before I wouldn't, and we'll get into
this in other segments aroundwhy it's so difficult.
And just even the fitnessanalogy is a great one, because
the benefits are wonderful.
I mean you get to keep, youknow, being healthy, I mean
right.
But on business, the benefitsto what you're talking about are
(46:02):
really special, and alsofinancial.
Yeah, right, we can do somemath for the listeners, but it's
also not easy, right.
So often people retreat whenthey start something.
I mean there may be evendominant logics in that, right.
(46:23):
What do you say to somebodythat's tried many things and
they, they just keep findingthemselves back in the same spot
.
You know, how do you even getthe encouragement to move
through this?
Because there, if there's achampion in an organization even
(46:48):
it could be the CEO or it couldbe the organizational leader
they may be the one person inthe organization that believes
in moving through things.
There's that resistance too.
People have past successes andpositional power and influence
(47:10):
like authority.
Yeah, lots of.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
Yeah, well, that's the key right there, because
it's the past success which hasgiven rise to the dominant logic
to begin with, which is whatthen keeps you from future
success.
And this is one of the greatparadoxes and complexities of
culture.
When I resist going to the gymat three in the afternoon, I've
(47:36):
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 ofterrific reasons why.
And all those reasons arelegitimate.
And you know the same withorganizations.
The reasons why we can't do Xare all very legitimate and all
rooted in successful previousexperiences.
(47:59):
The problem is to do the kindsof radical transformations or
major disruptive transformationsthat 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 tome it was a brilliant thing.
He said this is a change leaderat a utility said if you always
(48:20):
do what you've always done,that if you always do what
you've always done, you'llalways get what you've got.
And it's so simple and sopowerful because to really do
major transformation and thisleads me into the other point,
just parenthetically.
One of the other big challengesis that we tend to misdiagnose
(48:42):
or mischaracterize the nature ofthe change, that we're to
misdiagnose or mischaracterizethe nature of the change that
we're up against.
We, you know, we are actuallytrying to fundamentally
transform our business, but wetend to think of that as a
project plan, as a digitaltechnology implementation or as
an AI implementation, and it'sjust like bringing in a new
piece of software Just thetechnology will take care of the
change.
(49:02):
And that, you know.
We mischaracterized the natureof the problem, sort of our head
in the sand right now.
We think, you know, we thinkit's just an incremental change,
when it's a fundamentallyradical shift in how people need
to work.
Ai, as you well know, isfundamentally implicates
different ways of working.
The knowledge worker willforever be changed by AI, but
(49:27):
most of us think of AI as just atool.
Maybe you can rewrite thisparagraph for me a little bit
better.
Right?
Fundamentally mischaracterizingthe nature of the change before
us.
Why?
Because we're using theparadigm of tool to think about
AI, when we actually should bethinking about AI as
(49:49):
fundamentally restructuring thenature of work, right?
So this is a little bit offtopic here, but this is the
challenge.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
Well, at the top of the show, this is what people
are experiencing today.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
Yeah, yeah, and the same is true with change.
You know we fundamental, youknow rapid scaling, a common
problem of many smallercompanies right new in 16 months
.
Or you know acquiring abusiness or a turnaround, or you
know becoming, you knowfundamentally changing their
(50:31):
business model to a digitally, adigital business model from a
product centric business model.
I mean these are fundamentalredefinitions of you know.
They're what we callontological or existential,
definite redefinitions of whoyou are as a business.
But we tend to think of them asjust initiatives and project
(50:53):
plans.
And if we just put a goodproject plan together and
implement the technology and youknow, devote an office of
transformation, create an officeof transformation around it,
you know, and sort of treat itlike a complex project, we'll
get there when the whole natureof the, you know the paradigms
by which we even think about thenature of the change need to be
(51:14):
re-examined.
We reduce everything to aproject plan when we actually
should be asking the questionwhat business are we in?
And you know I use an exampleof a very significant example
today is happening in theutility industry, especially in
the water utility industry.
(51:35):
Climate change is fundamentallydisrupting life as we know it on
this planet.
I mean just the nature ofstorms.
You know the power of storms.
Amount of rain that falls in anhour is today in many parts of
the world.
You know, triple what it was 10years ago.
How much rain can fall in anhour in a monsoon, right, and
(52:00):
utilities can't keep up.
You know the flooding that ishappening in places like
Valencia in Spain or Sydney,australia, in these massive
storms is way beyond thecapacity of storm drains and
sewage systems and monitoringsystems.
Utilities are trying to dealwith this by just continuing to
sort of think that they can justadd technology or better
(52:24):
sensors to their, their pipenetworks, when fundamentally
they need to be asking whatbusiness are we in?
I mean, are we, are we stillable to do and run our business,
our utility business, in thesame way that we did 15 years
ago in the face of massivelydifferent climate?
Right, so it's a and so this isa.
(52:48):
You know that what.
What really needs to shift isthe dominant logic of what does
it mean to be a water utility inSydney, australia today, in the
?
You know, given how much raincan fall in one hour versus 20
years ago.
But you also can appreciatejust even that little scenario,
(53:08):
how difficult it might be to dothat Right.
Utilities are regulatedUtilities are.
You know.
They're many years, hundreds ofyears old in many cases and
they think in 10 year and 15year increments.
And to sort of ask the questionof a utility CEO, maybe you
need to really fundamentallyrethink what business you're in
is like speaking Swahili.
Speaker 1 (53:30):
Well, I start to think about people don't go to
court sometimes without anattorney, right, and here what
you just described is like youcome in as that attorney under
these practice shared model,like we've been doing it
ourselves, you know, and theoutcome isn't, isn't there, and
(53:53):
you know that you've, you'veseen it happen.
We are coming up towards theend of our time together.
This is an exciting series I'mgoing to remind our listeners.
Today we're talking aboutidentifying the barriers to
change, or diagnosing, I'm sorry, the culture.
(54:13):
And then next series, we'regoing to be talking about
identifying the barriers tochange.
We're going to be talking aboutcrafting a strategy as we talk
through this.
We're going to be talking aboutcrafting a strategy as we talk
through this and then overcomingthese pitfalls that most
companies will face.
How do you deal with those headon, productively, right, so you
(54:34):
don't leave people behind andyou 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 courtwithout an attorney.
Well, now you become, you areable to sustain some of these
(54:55):
things in the organization byhaving more body of knowledge
around it.
So you see the businessdifferently.
Ask those questions, and I'mgoing to summarize a few things
I thought were useful in justtoday's discussion around.
That is, getting to theassumptions.
Number one who do you know thatyou know would find value in an
(55:16):
episode like this?
Text it to them, share it.
Whatever you've got to do, letthem know about this.
I think it would be one ofthose gifts that I do as a call
to action.
You need to do that.
The second thing is write down,get to your assumptions.
(55:37):
I wrote down these questionsthat David mentioned in the
episode here how do you definesuccess?
Asking our teams this and whatdoes it look like?
What does winning look like?
What does that rock star looklike?
Letting them describe that?
And then you know, this iswhere I think in his response is
(56:02):
getting to the challenges.
So what are your biggestchallenges you face?
And then the follow-onquestions to that around how do
you go about solving thosechallenges?
Or how would you go about, youknow, like listening into those
things?
Those are some really greattakeaways from today's
(56:22):
discussion that I wrote down,and I loved this idea about it's
invisible until you start doingthe work.
I thought that was reallycompelling, david.
Before we wrap.
Are there any final thoughtsthat you want to leave our
listeners with?
I know we couldn't get to allof it in one episode and so I'm
(56:42):
breaking it up into these seriesfor the time that we share
together.
Really do appreciate you takingthe time and showing up for our
audience.
Any final thoughts you want toleave our listeners with?
Around diagnosing culture.
Speaker 2 (57:01):
Well, we've kind of veered a little bit away from
that Culture.
Well, we've kind of veered alittle bit away from that.
But I hope listeners havedeveloping an appreciation for
the complexity of culture.
Complexity is a four-letterword in business.
We all want it simple, we wantit fast, we want it cheap and we
want it now and just,unfortunately, culture is not
(57:21):
one of those topics that lendsitself to that way of thinking.
I hate to break it to you, butthat's one of the reasons why so
much money is wasted on culturechange.
And what I'm trying to do Ithink, if I could sort of
(57:49):
characterize my mission as ananthropologist is to help
business leaders come to a muchmore honest and fruitful and
effective appreciation for thecomplexities of culture.
And I think we started to touchon that today.
Speaker 1 (57:56):
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'veprioritized things and, and, and
, and in many ways built greatbusinesses.
I mean a lot of success.
Speaker 2 (58:11):
And it would be great and we would never even be
having this conversation ifthose great businesses weren't
trying to actually change.
And that's where the rubbermeets the proverbial road, yeah.
Speaker 1 (58:21):
Well, that's great, all right.
Well, we's great, all right.
Well, we'll wrap at that, andthen we'll see you in the next,
next series on this.
Thank you, david.
Speaker 2 (58:32):
Thank you.
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