May 22, 2025 • 25 mins
David White, a cognitive anthropologist with 25 years of corporate experience, shares powerful insights about why organizational transformations fail and how understanding brain science can revolutionize our approach to culture change. His research reveals the complex relationship between our habitual work practices and the neural pathways that form our cultural thinking patterns.
• Culture consists of millions of schemas or tacit knowledge structures that reside in our brains
• Approximately 75% of business transformations fail to achieve their stated objectives
• What we do all day long indelibly shapes how we think - we are what we do
• Industrial companies develop risk-averse mindsets that extend beyond their core products
• The nature of our daily tasks creates "dominant logics" that influence all organizational thinking
• The paradox of culture: although culture lives in the brain, you change it through practices, not people
• Most organizations attempt culture change through training, values, or hiring but keep business practices the same
• Effective transformation requires rethinking fundamental business practices like planning and budgeting
• Leaders should develop pattern recognition skills to identify habitual thinking in their organizations
• Boomerang employees often have unique ability to recognize entrenched patterns and cultural models
For more insights, check out David's book "Disrupting Corporate Culture" which explores how cognitive science can transform organizational change efforts.
To stay connected and continue the conversation, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn.
And don't forget to check out our previous episodes for more tips and strategies to boost your workplace happiness. You can find them on your favorite podcast platform or on our website.
If you have any questions, comments, or topic suggestions for future episodes, please reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you!
Stay inspired, stay motivated, and stay happy at work!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome back for another episode of the Happy at
Work podcast with Laura Tessaand Michael.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Each week we have thoughtful conversations with
leaders, founders and authorsabout happiness at work.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
Tune in each Thursday for a new conversation.
Enjoy the show.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Welcome to the Happy at Work podcast.
We are so excited to have DavidWhite joining us today.
Welcome, David.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
Hello, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Absolutely.
Thanks for being with us.
What we love to do, and love tostart with, is just learn more
about you, so could you juststart by sharing with us a bit
about your career journey andhow you landed where you are now
?
Speaker 4 (01:17):
Sure, my tale is complex and sorted, but
basically I came into the worldthat I'm in by after 25 years or
so of working in the corporateworld.
I actually started my career asa headhunter in the recruiting
side and then eventually into HRand eventually into
organizational development andchange work, where I met you,
laura.
And most of that work early onin my career involved helping
(01:39):
organizations as an insideconsultant, insider, transform,
helping organizations withlarge-scale change of one kind
or another being part of the HRfunction.
Usually that was involved withhelping bring to life new ways
of helping evaluate and developpeople in an organization
(02:01):
through competency models andcareer paths and things like
that, and that's what I spentabout 25 years doing.
But all of that work wasusually in service of a larger
agenda that the organization hadaround culture change.
And after about 25 years ofdoing that in companies like
Lotus, which was the inventor ofthe spreadsheet, later acquired
by IBM, and working in a coupleof startups as the HR leader
(02:25):
there, and then eventuallyworking in a large consulting
firm, mercer, which is a big HRconsulting firm, and then
eventually Microsoft, I wasinvolved in a lot of culture
change and businesstransformation kinds of
initiatives, sometimes at theperiphery, sometimes in the
center, but through thatexperience I saw essentially
(02:46):
that none of these efforts atculture change or business
transformation really were thatsuccessful.
Most fell short of stated goals, despite great leaders, great
people, a lot of initiative.
You know all the, you know thebusiness mandate and that got me
very interested in about 2010,.
And that got me very interestedin about 2010, 2009, 2010,.
(03:07):
In going and studying thisproblem academically.
Why do organizations suffer orstruggle with change, especially
when it comes to major businesstransformation that inevitably
involves culture?
The statistics are not veryencouraging.
If you believe them.
About 75% of major businesstransformations fail.
(03:28):
They don't achieve theobjectives that they say they
are intending to achieve.
Whether it's a merger, digitaltransformation, turnaround, any
kind of major shift in businessis a struggle and I certainly
experienced that firsthand.
So I went back to school andgot a PhD as a cognitive
anthropologist, and anthropologyis the one field that has spent
(03:52):
about the past 125 yearsstudying culture thesis on the
so-called cultural mind and therelationship between
neuroscience and culture, andfor the last 10 years or so I've
(04:13):
been building a consultingpractice around shall we say,
that question or that problem.
There's a lot of reallyinteresting neuroscience work
and cognitive anthropology,cognitive psychology, cognitive
sociology, work on therelationship between culture and
the mind.
And the business world doesn'tknow much about it for a lot of
(04:35):
reasons, a lot of good reasons,and so my role, sort of my
little niche here in the lastfew years, last 10 years or so,
has been to help organizations,kind of help them approach
culture and change major changein a more sophisticated way,
using some of this new science.
And that's what I do.
Speaker 5 (04:57):
So, david, I have people I want to connect you
with or I want to connect to you.
I can't wait to talk aboutchange.
So much of what you just saidis really also part of the world
that I'm in right now.
But I know that you just wrotea book and, as someone who
worked in the corporateenvironment for 20 plus years
(05:20):
before kind of moving intoacademia, you wrote a book
called Disrupting CorporateCulture.
So can you tell us a little bitabout the book?
Speaker 4 (05:28):
Sure, and actually that's my second book, because
the first book was an academicbook that probably no one will
ever read, but it was RethinkingCorporate Culture, which is
about cognitive science andculture.
The Disrupting CorporateCulture book was an attempt to
take sort of those ideas into abroader audience without writing
a bestseller.
I don't know how to write abestseller, but essentially the
(05:51):
idea is that it's really whatI've just been saying.
What the brain science has beenshowing, and also what the
cognitive science has beenshowing over the last 30 years
or so, is that culture is Asuper complex but B is
(06:12):
registered in the brain.
As, as you both know that wedon't use A lot of that
knowledge is so-called culturalknowledge, knowledge that we
share and it's very basic,everyday kinds of things like
(06:34):
how to order food in arestaurant, or how do you know
not to look at people in the eyein the elevator, or how do you
behave on a subway, or any kindof public sphere behavior or
activity or norm or thought, andthere's millions of these kinds
of knowledges in our brains andthe cognitive anthropologists
(06:57):
say that's culture.
That's the root of culture.
Everything else that weinterpret as culture norms,
values, attitudes, behaviorcomes from sort of these germ,
what the anthropologists wouldcall a schema or a cultural
model.
A cultural model is just a setof a set of a collection of
schemas, and these schemas arebasically images, sort of
(07:21):
gestalt-like or basic imagesabout the world, of how things
go in the world.
Some cognitive science callthem rules, sometimes we know
them as frames, but essentiallyit's tacit knowledge about how
things are or should be.
And again, there's millions ofexamples.
What I've learned is that thebusiness world doesn't think of
(07:43):
culture in that way, though, asyou both know, and the business
world tends to think of cultureas an independent variable that
can be more or less easilymanipulated.
You push an input here, and outcomes that you want your
employees to be morecollaborative, you train them on
collaboration, and that willchange the culture, and those
kind of outside-in approachesfor me never go very.
(08:04):
The way culture registers inindividual brains is far more
complex than that, and it's verydifficult to change people's
values.
It's very difficult to engineerbehavior at scale.
It's very difficult tonormatively engineer an
organization any largeorganization, I mean.
(08:26):
My little boutique consultancyof five or seven people, I might
be able to get away with it,but any company of scale, it's
very difficult to get away withit, but any company of scale,
it's very difficult to do thosethings.
And so when we startappreciating culture as this
collection of heterogeneous kindof tacit knowledge stuff, we
know that we don't know, we knowbut we use every day.
When we start thinking aboutculture that way, the places
(08:47):
where we can intervene inculture or cultures because the
notion of a single culture isalso kind of a kind of a myth in
any large company the placeswhere we can intervene, become a
lot more interesting, at leastto me, because we're starting to
sort of talk about the cultureat the atomic level or the
pre-conscious level, and thatthat gets super, that doesn't
(09:09):
make it easy level and that thatgets super, that's doesn't make
it easy.
I think one of the reasons whybusiness, the business world,
has been stuck in what I think,or the culture industry has been
stuck in a rut for about 50years, is because leaders want
simple answers and they want itfast and they don't.
You know, and this cognitive,anthropological approach to
culture is is not easy and wecan get into why, but it's
(09:33):
complex.
But we need to appreciate thecomplexity and once we start to
do that.
I think doors unlock, that wecan start to go into and see
things in a bit of a differentway.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
That's so good.
I know there's one particularpiece of this that I know you've
been doing a lot of work onwhich is the idea that the work
we do, the actual work we do,helps create the culture.
We're in right, and so you havethis we are what we do, kind of
phrase.
So tell me more, tell us moreabout that, and why is the work
(10:06):
we do so important tounderstanding culture?
Speaker 4 (10:11):
I think one of the great advances in brain science
over the last 30 years has beenthis idea that brains are
patterned by habit andexperience and we all know this.
I mean this is now becomingkind of a trope in society.
But in the organizationalcontext, what we do all day long
indelibly shapes how we think,and the Disrupting Corporate
(10:33):
Culture book is sort of anexploration of that question,
which is essentially, why doengineering companies look and
sound and feel like engineeringcompanies?
Or why do doctors act and talkand think like doctors, or
lawyers like lawyers, or socialworkers like social workers?
Well, it's because the natureof both the professionalization,
(10:53):
how these occupational groupshave been socialized and
professionalized over years, andalso the nature of what
cognitive science will call thetask environment, the stuff that
you're organized to try and doand the problems that you are
tasked with solving as acorporation at the very large
scale, shape how you think.
(11:15):
And particularly if there hasbeen success meaning you've
endeavored to in the Microsoftexample, you've endeavored to
create an operating system andit's proven wildly successful
over the years Well, thatpatterns the collective brain.
It really shapes neural brainchemistry, the solutions, the
(11:39):
routines, the techniques, theknowledge, what it takes to have
produced the operating system,entrains I'm using kind of
cognitive science language, butentrains the brain.
It's not the only way thatbrains get entrained, but
collectively, when you get intoan organization that is, you
know, focused on those sets oftasks or those kinds of problems
(12:00):
, people start to think in verysimilar ways.
Why?
Because that's what the taskdemands, it's the environment
affords.
There's a fascinatingrelationship between the
physical environment and thebrain and how brains use the
physical environment to think,through which to think, and
there's a lot more to say aboutthat.
But the simple answer is we arewhat we do to Laura's, to your
(12:22):
point, because the nature ofwhat we're trying to do all day
long as a business willindelibly shape how we think
about, how we make sense ofproblems, and that thinking gets
over-learned or shall I sayover-applied to other domains.
So example I work with a lot ofindustrial manufacturing type
(12:43):
companies and, by definition,making an industrial product
like a pump or an aircraftengine is an endeavor that is,
an is an endeavor that, bydefinition, will mitigates risk.
You do not want your engines oryour pumps and we'll leave
Boeing us out of it for a minutebut you don't want aircraft
(13:04):
engines to fail, right.
But so the the practice ofmaking an industrial product
really reliable and safe, andall of that goes into doing that
, all of the work on an assemblyline on a manufacturing plant,
all the engineering work, etcetera, patterns the brain,
especially if you do thathabitually over time, over years
(13:25):
, right.
And so engineering orindustrial companies,
manufacturing companies, have aorientation to risk.
That is, for example, verydifferent than, say, a software
company.
Every piece of software thatyou own and have and use right
now, I guarantee you has bugs init.
But most of my manufacturingclients would never dream of
shipping a product with knowndefects in it, and so that might
(13:51):
seem like a trivial example.
But that patterning, that way ofthinking, gets extended
culturally into all otherdomains.
So my manufacturing clients tendto be very, extremely risk
averse when it comes to hiring,when it comes to planning, when
it comes to approachingcustomers, when it comes to
budgeting.
So these patterns, or these whatI call dominant logics of the
(14:15):
organization, spread across theorganization into other domains
where it might not be soadvantageous to be so risk
averse, like we might want totake a chance on a person in
promoting them or in hiringsomebody from outside our
industry and even if or when weacquire a company and but we
(14:37):
start managing them.
You know we're in my industrialclients are are doing a lot in
the digital space, trying toacquire digital companies, but
they start managing them,managing them and running them
as if they were industrialcompanies.
And what happens in that moment?
Most of the founders leavebecause they don't want to have
(14:57):
you know, they don't want tohave to show an ROI of a new
product.
You know, over the next fiveyears, show monthly cash flows
for five years for a softwareproduct that's still on the
whiteboard.
I mean, it's that level ofdetail that it's just anathema.
So I have a quick question asit relates to.
Speaker 5 (15:19):
So you started out talking a lot about your
previous work, thinking aboutchange, and I'm having similar
conversations with companiesaround transformation, and I'm
talking to engineering basedcompanies that are very risk
averse, yet at the same time,they're dealing with AI coming
(15:39):
into their industry space.
They're dealing with newtechnologies.
Working with a company inEurope that actually has to
totally redefine their businessmodel because of the Green Deal
and the fact that they reallyhave to go from a volumes-based
chemical company going from avolumes-based to a values-based
business model, sales model.
(15:59):
So it's really around thatconcept of not necessarily
change management but changereadiness, and it's about
building a culture for change.
So what are your thoughts onkind of bringing these two
pieces together that you've justdescribed and understanding?
You know the layers of habitualthinking and you know the
(16:22):
internal scripts that peoplehave around.
This is the stimulus and thisis what I do automatically in
that situation and trying tointerrupt that script, but also
in the context of so muchemergent change is happening.
So how do you kind of approachthose situations with clients?
Speaker 4 (16:40):
Yeah, it's a great question and, tessa, you're a
marketing professional, you'rein this field, you understand
this.
But I believe the way weapproach that question is the
same.
It's the.
I believe the way we approachthat question is the same, based
on the same principles of whatI've just said.
And one of the great paradoxesof culture is that, although
culture lives in the brain, theway you access culture in order
(17:03):
to change it at scale is notthrough people but through
practices.
And this is for me, the more Iwork in the transformation space
, the more convicted I am onthis point, which is, you know,
it's very difficult to changepeople.
But if we start to change thepractices around the people, we
(17:23):
try to sort of intervene on theecosystem, then the way people
behave and start to think inthat ecosystem will, over time,
start to shift Right.
This is not an easy argument tomake with a CEO or a leadership
team.
When I say your businesspractices, your digital
industrial company that wants tobe a digital company and
(17:43):
embrace AI and start to movefaster, you just can't tell the
people that got to start movingfaster and embrace AI and you
can't put them through atraining program and you can't
write new values, and you can't.
You can do all those sort ofcultural things.
Hire people from the techindustry, and you can't you can
do all those sort of culturalthings, hire people from the
tech industry.
Those things are destined forfailure because your business
practices remain the same.
(18:03):
And so when?
So the?
For me, the great paradox andthe great opportunity is when
you start to rethink businesspractices, fundamentally.
Rethink the business practices,the ways in which you run your
business, and rethink them inways where you can inculcate new
schema or new what I calldominant logics, new cultural
(18:24):
models, new shared mental modelsthat are directionally aligned
towards the future, whateverthat is.
That's where you start to seetraction and start to see change
.
But it's a long process andit's very difficult to say to a
leadership team hey, you knowthe way you guys do budgeting.
You guys and gals do budgetingthat needs to be rethought.
(18:46):
Or you know your five-yearstrategic planning process that
you brought McKinsey in for and,you know, spent several million
dollars to try to do that needsto be rethought.
Or again, in my practice, myconsulting practice, I identify
six practice areas that eachneed could use intervening, to
(19:09):
use that word, ranging frompeople to product, to customer
planning, day-to-day management,and you can find ways to
intervene in these practices tothen start to shift the dominant
mental models or the dominantlogics over time.
But it's difficult because thesepractices are also the things
(19:29):
that generally have made thecompany successful and so it's
very difficult to say to you youneed to interrogate your own
practices, your own success, youneed to look into why you're
successful.
And then it's very difficult tosay to you you know, you need
to interrogate your ownpractices, your own success, you
need to look into why you'resuccessful and then let's think
about changing that.
That's a hard argument.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
It's just so much easier to say hey, employees, go
, do the things I want you to do, right.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
Isn't that just Go do that training Exactly?
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Go wear that swag, you know.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
I firmly believe that's why we have the failure
rates that we have in M&A and intransformation, and digital
Digital transformation is sohard for these, for my
industrial clients, and I think,I think it's proving to be true
that very few industrialcompanies that are succeeding in
the digital space arestruggling mightily, succeeding
in the digital space.
(20:17):
They're struggling mightily, oryou know, shall we say?
You know non-digital nativecompanies, companies sort of you
know that were born before youknow the mid-90s, struggling
mightily with this digital worldthere's so much Because they're
reluctant to change businesspractices.
And just to be clear when I saybusiness practice, I don't mean
(20:38):
behavior, I don't meanindividual behavior, I mean the
way you run your business, thehabits, routines and business
processes.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Yeah, yeah, completely.
That makes so much sense.
There's so much in what you'resaying we could just go on and
on, and I know our time isalmost up.
But last question for you,david, for those organizations
who just don't know where tostart with this work what are
some simple things they could dothat would still be meaningful,
(21:04):
like still would make adifference from your perspective
?
Speaker 4 (21:08):
Yeah, I knew you were going to ask that question and
it's hard.
The answer would be you knowthis would be just a start.
Right A toe in the water, yes,this would be just a start.
Right A toe in the water, yes,I would say there's two toes in
the water.
One is learn to become adept atspotting patterns in your
organization.
Pattern recognition by a leader, or really anybody in an
(21:33):
organization, done in a somewhatsystematic way can go a long
way.
Because what you're seeing whenyou start to spot those
patterns and this is hownewcomers are usually better at
this than those of us who'vebeen in an organization forever
but when you can start to spotthese habitual patterns in the
way the business runs, you'rekind of onto this dominant logic
(21:56):
cultural model.
You're now into that substrate,that tacit knowledge.
You're kind of onto thisdominant logic cultural model.
You're now into that substrate.
You know that tacit knowledge.
You're kind of into that spaceand that's your first window, or
your first portal into apossible intervention.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
That's awesome.
Speaker 4 (22:12):
The second thing I would say very quickly is when
you start to do that, you'regoing to meet major, major
resistance.
And so this is where and whereI spend most of my time is
helping leaders become much moreeffective, much more self-aware
and much more masterfulthemselves as change leaders.
(22:33):
Most of my work is in helpingorganizations teaching
organizations how to transformthemselves, rather than bringing
in armies of consultants, buthelping the leader become
self-aware and courageous enoughand also compassionate enough
to interrogate his or her ownlogics and the organization's
own logics, so they can start toshift.
Speaker 5 (22:58):
It's interesting what you said about patterns.
So I'm a boomerang employee.
I don't know if you've heardthat term, but I worked for my,
the company I work for now.
I worked for them 12 years agofor a few years, left for 10
years and now I'm back and Ifeel like I'm in this kind of
special place where I've seen alot of change, but I also see,
(23:18):
recognize the immediate patternsthat you know.
I saw 12 years ago that.
I'm like, oh my goodness, wehaven't changed this yet and
it's kind of an interestingposition and I know that there's
Boomerang employees inparticular, employees in
particular.
They're just an interesting.
It's an interesting topic toexplore at some point, because I
(23:39):
do think they have this kind ofthey left and then they came
back and they can be quick torecognize those old patterns.
But I don't know if you've everthought about that from that
perspective.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
It's a really unique perspective and probably makes
you a great anthropologist, agreat ethnographer of your
organization, right?
And the question is how can youkeep that, how can you preserve
that?
In our leadership programs wetalk about how do you stay at
the boundary, which is kind of agestalt term for how do you
stay at the contact boundarybetween inside and outside?
As an insider, very difficultto do, but it takes a lot of
(24:11):
curiosity and a lot ofself-awareness.
What's my stuff versus what'syour stuff?
What's just my own heuristichere, yeah, so David, this is so
cool.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
I mean I can just keep listening to what you're
saying.
It's so helpful and so thankyou so much.
We love to have you back.
Thank you so much, David, foryour time today and for all your
just amazing ideas.
Really grateful for you to joinus.
Speaker 4 (24:37):
Thank you, Laura.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Always wonderful to talk to you.
We hope you've enjoyed thisepisode.
If you'd like to hear futureepisodes, be sure to subscribe
to the Happy at Work podcast andleave us a review with your
thoughts.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Are you interested in speaking on a future episode or
want to collaborate with us?
Let us know.
You can send us an email atadmin at happyatworkpodcastcom
and lastly, follow us onLinkedIn or Twitter for even
more happiness.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
See you soon.
Welcome back for another episode of the Happy at
Work podcast with Laura Tessaand Michael.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Each week we have thoughtful conversations with
leaders, founders and authorsabout happiness at work.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
Tune in each Thursday for a new conversation.
Enjoy the show.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Welcome to the Happy at Work podcast.
We are so excited to have DavidWhite joining us today.
Welcome, David.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
Hello, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Absolutely.
Thanks for being with us.
What we love to do, and love tostart with, is just learn more
about you, so could you juststart by sharing with us a bit
about your career journey andhow you landed where you are now
?
Speaker 4 (01:17):
Sure, my tale is complex and sorted, but
basically I came into the worldthat I'm in by after 25 years or
so of working in the corporateworld.
I actually started my career asa headhunter in the recruiting
side and then eventually into HRand eventually into
organizational development andchange work, where I met you,
laura.
And most of that work early onin my career involved helping
(01:39):
organizations as an insideconsultant, insider, transform,
helping organizations withlarge-scale change of one kind
or another being part of the HRfunction.
Usually that was involved withhelping bring to life new ways
of helping evaluate and developpeople in an organization
(02:01):
through competency models andcareer paths and things like
that, and that's what I spentabout 25 years doing.
But all of that work wasusually in service of a larger
agenda that the organization hadaround culture change.
And after about 25 years ofdoing that in companies like
Lotus, which was the inventor ofthe spreadsheet, later acquired
by IBM, and working in a coupleof startups as the HR leader
(02:25):
there, and then eventuallyworking in a large consulting
firm, mercer, which is a big HRconsulting firm, and then
eventually Microsoft, I wasinvolved in a lot of culture
change and businesstransformation kinds of
initiatives, sometimes at theperiphery, sometimes in the
center, but through thatexperience I saw essentially
(02:46):
that none of these efforts atculture change or business
transformation really were thatsuccessful.
Most fell short of stated goals, despite great leaders, great
people, a lot of initiative.
You know all the, you know thebusiness mandate and that got me
very interested in about 2010,.
And that got me very interestedin about 2010, 2009, 2010,.
(03:07):
In going and studying thisproblem academically.
Why do organizations suffer orstruggle with change, especially
when it comes to major businesstransformation that inevitably
involves culture?
The statistics are not veryencouraging.
If you believe them.
About 75% of major businesstransformations fail.
(03:28):
They don't achieve theobjectives that they say they
are intending to achieve.
Whether it's a merger, digitaltransformation, turnaround, any
kind of major shift in businessis a struggle and I certainly
experienced that firsthand.
So I went back to school andgot a PhD as a cognitive
anthropologist, and anthropologyis the one field that has spent
(03:52):
about the past 125 yearsstudying culture thesis on the
so-called cultural mind and therelationship between
neuroscience and culture, andfor the last 10 years or so I've
(04:13):
been building a consultingpractice around shall we say,
that question or that problem.
There's a lot of reallyinteresting neuroscience work
and cognitive anthropology,cognitive psychology, cognitive
sociology, work on therelationship between culture and
the mind.
And the business world doesn'tknow much about it for a lot of
(04:35):
reasons, a lot of good reasons,and so my role, sort of my
little niche here in the lastfew years, last 10 years or so,
has been to help organizations,kind of help them approach
culture and change major changein a more sophisticated way,
using some of this new science.
And that's what I do.
Speaker 5 (04:57):
So, david, I have people I want to connect you
with or I want to connect to you.
I can't wait to talk aboutchange.
So much of what you just saidis really also part of the world
that I'm in right now.
But I know that you just wrotea book and, as someone who
worked in the corporateenvironment for 20 plus years
(05:20):
before kind of moving intoacademia, you wrote a book
called Disrupting CorporateCulture.
So can you tell us a little bitabout the book?
Speaker 4 (05:28):
Sure, and actually that's my second book, because
the first book was an academicbook that probably no one will
ever read, but it was RethinkingCorporate Culture, which is
about cognitive science andculture.
The Disrupting CorporateCulture book was an attempt to
take sort of those ideas into abroader audience without writing
a bestseller.
I don't know how to write abestseller, but essentially the
(05:51):
idea is that it's really whatI've just been saying.
What the brain science has beenshowing, and also what the
cognitive science has beenshowing over the last 30 years
or so, is that culture is Asuper complex but B is
(06:12):
registered in the brain.
As, as you both know that wedon't use A lot of that
knowledge is so-called culturalknowledge, knowledge that we
share and it's very basic,everyday kinds of things like
(06:34):
how to order food in arestaurant, or how do you know
not to look at people in the eyein the elevator, or how do you
behave on a subway, or any kindof public sphere behavior or
activity or norm or thought, andthere's millions of these kinds
of knowledges in our brains andthe cognitive anthropologists
(06:57):
say that's culture.
That's the root of culture.
Everything else that weinterpret as culture norms,
values, attitudes, behaviorcomes from sort of these germ,
what the anthropologists wouldcall a schema or a cultural
model.
A cultural model is just a setof a set of a collection of
schemas, and these schemas arebasically images, sort of
(07:21):
gestalt-like or basic imagesabout the world, of how things
go in the world.
Some cognitive science callthem rules, sometimes we know
them as frames, but essentiallyit's tacit knowledge about how
things are or should be.
And again, there's millions ofexamples.
What I've learned is that thebusiness world doesn't think of
(07:43):
culture in that way, though, asyou both know, and the business
world tends to think of cultureas an independent variable that
can be more or less easilymanipulated.
You push an input here, and outcomes that you want your
employees to be morecollaborative, you train them on
collaboration, and that willchange the culture, and those
kind of outside-in approachesfor me never go very.
(08:04):
The way culture registers inindividual brains is far more
complex than that, and it's verydifficult to change people's
values.
It's very difficult to engineerbehavior at scale.
It's very difficult tonormatively engineer an
organization any largeorganization, I mean.
(08:26):
My little boutique consultancyof five or seven people, I might
be able to get away with it,but any company of scale, it's
very difficult to get away withit, but any company of scale,
it's very difficult to do thosethings.
And so when we startappreciating culture as this
collection of heterogeneous kindof tacit knowledge stuff, we
know that we don't know, we knowbut we use every day.
When we start thinking aboutculture that way, the places
(08:47):
where we can intervene inculture or cultures because the
notion of a single culture isalso kind of a kind of a myth in
any large company the placeswhere we can intervene, become a
lot more interesting, at leastto me, because we're starting to
sort of talk about the cultureat the atomic level or the
pre-conscious level, and thatthat gets super, that doesn't
(09:09):
make it easy level and that thatgets super, that's doesn't make
it easy.
I think one of the reasons whybusiness, the business world,
has been stuck in what I think,or the culture industry has been
stuck in a rut for about 50years, is because leaders want
simple answers and they want itfast and they don't.
You know, and this cognitive,anthropological approach to
culture is is not easy and wecan get into why, but it's
(09:33):
complex.
But we need to appreciate thecomplexity and once we start to
do that.
I think doors unlock, that wecan start to go into and see
things in a bit of a differentway.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
That's so good.
I know there's one particularpiece of this that I know you've
been doing a lot of work onwhich is the idea that the work
we do, the actual work we do,helps create the culture.
We're in right, and so you havethis we are what we do, kind of
phrase.
So tell me more, tell us moreabout that, and why is the work
(10:06):
we do so important tounderstanding culture?
Speaker 4 (10:11):
I think one of the great advances in brain science
over the last 30 years has beenthis idea that brains are
patterned by habit andexperience and we all know this.
I mean this is now becomingkind of a trope in society.
But in the organizationalcontext, what we do all day long
indelibly shapes how we think,and the Disrupting Corporate
(10:33):
Culture book is sort of anexploration of that question,
which is essentially, why doengineering companies look and
sound and feel like engineeringcompanies?
Or why do doctors act and talkand think like doctors, or
lawyers like lawyers, or socialworkers like social workers?
Well, it's because the natureof both the professionalization,
(10:53):
how these occupational groupshave been socialized and
professionalized over years, andalso the nature of what
cognitive science will call thetask environment, the stuff that
you're organized to try and doand the problems that you are
tasked with solving as acorporation at the very large
scale, shape how you think.
(11:15):
And particularly if there hasbeen success meaning you've
endeavored to in the Microsoftexample, you've endeavored to
create an operating system andit's proven wildly successful
over the years Well, thatpatterns the collective brain.
It really shapes neural brainchemistry, the solutions, the
(11:39):
routines, the techniques, theknowledge, what it takes to have
produced the operating system,entrains I'm using kind of
cognitive science language, butentrains the brain.
It's not the only way thatbrains get entrained, but
collectively, when you get intoan organization that is, you
know, focused on those sets oftasks or those kinds of problems
(12:00):
, people start to think in verysimilar ways.
Why?
Because that's what the taskdemands, it's the environment
affords.
There's a fascinatingrelationship between the
physical environment and thebrain and how brains use the
physical environment to think,through which to think, and
there's a lot more to say aboutthat.
But the simple answer is we arewhat we do to Laura's, to your
(12:22):
point, because the nature ofwhat we're trying to do all day
long as a business willindelibly shape how we think
about, how we make sense ofproblems, and that thinking gets
over-learned or shall I sayover-applied to other domains.
So example I work with a lot ofindustrial manufacturing type
(12:43):
companies and, by definition,making an industrial product
like a pump or an aircraftengine is an endeavor that is,
an is an endeavor that, bydefinition, will mitigates risk.
You do not want your engines oryour pumps and we'll leave
Boeing us out of it for a minutebut you don't want aircraft
(13:04):
engines to fail, right.
But so the the practice ofmaking an industrial product
really reliable and safe, andall of that goes into doing that
, all of the work on an assemblyline on a manufacturing plant,
all the engineering work, etcetera, patterns the brain,
especially if you do thathabitually over time, over years
(13:25):
, right.
And so engineering orindustrial companies,
manufacturing companies, have aorientation to risk.
That is, for example, verydifferent than, say, a software
company.
Every piece of software thatyou own and have and use right
now, I guarantee you has bugs init.
But most of my manufacturingclients would never dream of
shipping a product with knowndefects in it, and so that might
(13:51):
seem like a trivial example.
But that patterning, that way ofthinking, gets extended
culturally into all otherdomains.
So my manufacturing clients tendto be very, extremely risk
averse when it comes to hiring,when it comes to planning, when
it comes to approachingcustomers, when it comes to
budgeting.
So these patterns, or these whatI call dominant logics of the
(14:15):
organization, spread across theorganization into other domains
where it might not be soadvantageous to be so risk
averse, like we might want totake a chance on a person in
promoting them or in hiringsomebody from outside our
industry and even if or when weacquire a company and but we
(14:37):
start managing them.
You know we're in my industrialclients are are doing a lot in
the digital space, trying toacquire digital companies, but
they start managing them,managing them and running them
as if they were industrialcompanies.
And what happens in that moment?
Most of the founders leavebecause they don't want to have
(14:57):
you know, they don't want tohave to show an ROI of a new
product.
You know, over the next fiveyears, show monthly cash flows
for five years for a softwareproduct that's still on the
whiteboard.
I mean, it's that level ofdetail that it's just anathema.
So I have a quick question asit relates to.
Speaker 5 (15:19):
So you started out talking a lot about your
previous work, thinking aboutchange, and I'm having similar
conversations with companiesaround transformation, and I'm
talking to engineering basedcompanies that are very risk
averse, yet at the same time,they're dealing with AI coming
(15:39):
into their industry space.
They're dealing with newtechnologies.
Working with a company inEurope that actually has to
totally redefine their businessmodel because of the Green Deal
and the fact that they reallyhave to go from a volumes-based
chemical company going from avolumes-based to a values-based
business model, sales model.
(15:59):
So it's really around thatconcept of not necessarily
change management but changereadiness, and it's about
building a culture for change.
So what are your thoughts onkind of bringing these two
pieces together that you've justdescribed and understanding?
You know the layers of habitualthinking and you know the
(16:22):
internal scripts that peoplehave around.
This is the stimulus and thisis what I do automatically in
that situation and trying tointerrupt that script, but also
in the context of so muchemergent change is happening.
So how do you kind of approachthose situations with clients?
Speaker 4 (16:40):
Yeah, it's a great question and, tessa, you're a
marketing professional, you'rein this field, you understand
this.
But I believe the way weapproach that question is the
same.
It's the.
I believe the way we approachthat question is the same, based
on the same principles of whatI've just said.
And one of the great paradoxesof culture is that, although
culture lives in the brain, theway you access culture in order
(17:03):
to change it at scale is notthrough people but through
practices.
And this is for me, the more Iwork in the transformation space
, the more convicted I am onthis point, which is, you know,
it's very difficult to changepeople.
But if we start to change thepractices around the people, we
(17:23):
try to sort of intervene on theecosystem, then the way people
behave and start to think inthat ecosystem will, over time,
start to shift Right.
This is not an easy argument tomake with a CEO or a leadership
team.
When I say your businesspractices, your digital
industrial company that wants tobe a digital company and
(17:43):
embrace AI and start to movefaster, you just can't tell the
people that got to start movingfaster and embrace AI and you
can't put them through atraining program and you can't
write new values, and you can't.
You can do all those sort ofcultural things.
Hire people from the techindustry, and you can't you can
do all those sort of culturalthings, hire people from the
tech industry.
Those things are destined forfailure because your business
practices remain the same.
(18:03):
And so when?
So the?
For me, the great paradox andthe great opportunity is when
you start to rethink businesspractices, fundamentally.
Rethink the business practices,the ways in which you run your
business, and rethink them inways where you can inculcate new
schema or new what I calldominant logics, new cultural
(18:24):
models, new shared mental modelsthat are directionally aligned
towards the future, whateverthat is.
That's where you start to seetraction and start to see change
.
But it's a long process andit's very difficult to say to a
leadership team hey, you knowthe way you guys do budgeting.
You guys and gals do budgetingthat needs to be rethought.
(18:46):
Or you know your five-yearstrategic planning process that
you brought McKinsey in for and,you know, spent several million
dollars to try to do that needsto be rethought.
Or again, in my practice, myconsulting practice, I identify
six practice areas that eachneed could use intervening, to
(19:09):
use that word, ranging frompeople to product, to customer
planning, day-to-day management,and you can find ways to
intervene in these practices tothen start to shift the dominant
mental models or the dominantlogics over time.
But it's difficult because thesepractices are also the things
(19:29):
that generally have made thecompany successful and so it's
very difficult to say to you youneed to interrogate your own
practices, your own success, youneed to look into why you're
successful.
And then it's very difficult tosay to you you know, you need
to interrogate your ownpractices, your own success, you
need to look into why you'resuccessful and then let's think
about changing that.
That's a hard argument.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
It's just so much easier to say hey, employees, go
, do the things I want you to do, right.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
Isn't that just Go do that training Exactly?
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Go wear that swag, you know.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
I firmly believe that's why we have the failure
rates that we have in M&A and intransformation, and digital
Digital transformation is sohard for these, for my
industrial clients, and I think,I think it's proving to be true
that very few industrialcompanies that are succeeding in
the digital space arestruggling mightily, succeeding
in the digital space.
(20:17):
They're struggling mightily, oryou know, shall we say?
You know non-digital nativecompanies, companies sort of you
know that were born before youknow the mid-90s, struggling
mightily with this digital worldthere's so much Because they're
reluctant to change businesspractices.
And just to be clear when I saybusiness practice, I don't mean
(20:38):
behavior, I don't meanindividual behavior, I mean the
way you run your business, thehabits, routines and business
processes.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Yeah, yeah, completely.
That makes so much sense.
There's so much in what you'resaying we could just go on and
on, and I know our time isalmost up.
But last question for you,david, for those organizations
who just don't know where tostart with this work what are
some simple things they could dothat would still be meaningful,
(21:04):
like still would make adifference from your perspective
?
Speaker 4 (21:08):
Yeah, I knew you were going to ask that question and
it's hard.
The answer would be you knowthis would be just a start.
Right A toe in the water, yes,this would be just a start.
Right A toe in the water, yes,I would say there's two toes in
the water.
One is learn to become adept atspotting patterns in your
organization.
Pattern recognition by a leader, or really anybody in an
(21:33):
organization, done in a somewhatsystematic way can go a long
way.
Because what you're seeing whenyou start to spot those
patterns and this is hownewcomers are usually better at
this than those of us who'vebeen in an organization forever
but when you can start to spotthese habitual patterns in the
way the business runs, you'rekind of onto this dominant logic
(21:56):
cultural model.
You're now into that substrate,that tacit knowledge.
You're kind of onto thisdominant logic cultural model.
You're now into that substrate.
You know that tacit knowledge.
You're kind of into that spaceand that's your first window, or
your first portal into apossible intervention.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
That's awesome.
Speaker 4 (22:12):
The second thing I would say very quickly is when
you start to do that, you'regoing to meet major, major
resistance.
And so this is where and whereI spend most of my time is
helping leaders become much moreeffective, much more self-aware
and much more masterfulthemselves as change leaders.
(22:33):
Most of my work is in helpingorganizations teaching
organizations how to transformthemselves, rather than bringing
in armies of consultants, buthelping the leader become
self-aware and courageous enoughand also compassionate enough
to interrogate his or her ownlogics and the organization's
own logics, so they can start toshift.
Speaker 5 (22:58):
It's interesting what you said about patterns.
So I'm a boomerang employee.
I don't know if you've heardthat term, but I worked for my,
the company I work for now.
I worked for them 12 years agofor a few years, left for 10
years and now I'm back and Ifeel like I'm in this kind of
special place where I've seen alot of change, but I also see,
(23:18):
recognize the immediate patternsthat you know.
I saw 12 years ago that.
I'm like, oh my goodness, wehaven't changed this yet and
it's kind of an interestingposition and I know that there's
Boomerang employees inparticular, employees in
particular.
They're just an interesting.
It's an interesting topic toexplore at some point, because I
(23:39):
do think they have this kind ofthey left and then they came
back and they can be quick torecognize those old patterns.
But I don't know if you've everthought about that from that
perspective.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
It's a really unique perspective and probably makes
you a great anthropologist, agreat ethnographer of your
organization, right?
And the question is how can youkeep that, how can you preserve
that?
In our leadership programs wetalk about how do you stay at
the boundary, which is kind of agestalt term for how do you
stay at the contact boundarybetween inside and outside?
As an insider, very difficultto do, but it takes a lot of
(24:11):
curiosity and a lot ofself-awareness.
What's my stuff versus what'syour stuff?
What's just my own heuristichere, yeah, so David, this is so
cool.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
I mean I can just keep listening to what you're
saying.
It's so helpful and so thankyou so much.
We love to have you back.
Thank you so much, David, foryour time today and for all your
just amazing ideas.
Really grateful for you to joinus.
Speaker 4 (24:37):
Thank you, Laura.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Always wonderful to talk to you.
We hope you've enjoyed thisepisode.
If you'd like to hear futureepisodes, be sure to subscribe
to the Happy at Work podcast andleave us a review with your
thoughts.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Are you interested in speaking on a future episode or
want to collaborate with us?
Let us know.
You can send us an email atadmin at happyatworkpodcastcom
and lastly, follow us onLinkedIn or Twitter for even
more happiness.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
See you soon.
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