Being Arthur

What is Culture?

Before getting to the heart of this subject of culture and transformation I think it’s important to first define culture.

There are multiple ways to look at culture. Generally, culture encompasses language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and the arts. There are also terms such as Western culture which could be defined as European cultures, as well as those that have been influenced by European cultures through for example colonisation such as the United States and Australia.

There is Eastern culture that generally refers to the norms of countries in the Far East. This includes Asian countries such as China, Japan, Vietnam, North and South Korea, and the Indian subcontinent.

There is also a culture known as organisational culture. Organisational culture can be defined as a system of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs which govern how people behave within organisations. These shared values can influence and even dictate how people dress, how they act, and how they perform their jobs.

But no matter what culture you are part of, one thing is certain – Culture can be influenced and changed. My belief is that while change is inevitable, the past should be respected and preserved

The focus of this post is more about organisational culture.

What is the Link between Culture Change and Transformation?

My PhD and this blog is focused on digital transformation. I believe if you going to transform a part of an organisation, a process, or use technology to enhance the way services are delivered, the culture of those developing the services, and those that will use the services will need to be influenced in some way if the transformation is to be successful.

How is culture influenced?

We all are part of a culture. It influences how we see things. It influences what we believe. Culture influences what we do at home, what we do at work, what we learn, what we teach others.

I became interested in culture when I was involved in developing strategies, plans and policies for initiatives that use technology to transform business processes. For instance, how we place orders to buy goods and services, how we were able to eliminate written signatures on contracts and other official documents. The funny thing about it is today these ways of doing things online is normal. We have a generation that has never seen any other way of buying selling and interacting with financial institutions – except online. There was a time that no one believed that they would be financial institutions that would be exist only online and would provide outstanding levels of service.

A major factor in the success of going online is the effort to change perceptions. These perceptions included going online safely, conveniently, and the ability to save time and money. That required significant culture change.

I remember when…

From an organizational perspective I remember presenting to senior executives that by the elimination of stamps, the envelope, the paper or document that was put in the envelope, it would reduce the workload of administration staff that organization to be more efficient and save significant amount of money overtime.

At the time, the executives would look at me strange. I argued that elimination of stamps, the envelope, the paper would initially save a few cents. Those few cents would add up as we implemented the change across the team, the business units, the organization, the sector. Over the years unknown millions upon millions have been saved.

The solution eventually evolved into significant projects to help residents change their address online when they moved from one location to another, pay their bills, submit bids for contracts online.

Technology was not the biggest challenge, changing culture was…

The resistance was a Significant hurdle to overcome. initially it was the geeks in the IT department versus the ties in the business areas. I look up on those days as significant learning experiences. Success was based on the new services being delivered on time, at the cost proposed, and the quality specified. However, I noticed working with these projects involved a lot of uncertainty. It was more difficult to determine the time, cost, and quality…because everything was new, how to transform caused a lot of uncertainty from executives, to those involved in delivering the processes, to knowing exactly what the customer wanted.

We had to change expectations, we had to change the way projects created and delivered. This required culture change.

We had to change the way people thought we had a change Individuals teams organizations in some ways how to community thought. I had a factor this into strategic and operational plans. Specifically I found that the way that we market it and promoted the new services became more important. I became aware that we needed to provide training in different ways to increase awareness about how to use these new services. I understood that we had to speak the language of the customer, better understand the customer and we’re closer to the customer that we had before. In hindsight this all sounds simple.

High failure rate related to change management

However, in my studies I found that up to 70% of transformation projects that are based on information technology still fail. I believe a key reason for this high rate of failure are issues associated to cultural change are not adequately considered and progressed.

To reduce this high rate of failure, cultural change must be led by senior management. The chief executive and executive team need to understand the disruptive nature of the change. They need to be aware there are some uncertainties and they will have to work them through.

Reducing the risk

Without activities to change culture the likelihood of the transformational initiative being successful is significantly reduced. In my opinion, a failure to consider changing culture is a risk. To reduce this risk recognition is needed resistance will need to be understood and strategies to mitigate this risk explored and adopted. Mitigation strategies may include training, promotion, cross disciplinary teams, collaborative development with users, and incremental approach to implementing the new solutions.

Rome was not built in a day. Neither was Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook or YouTube. These organisations and the services they support and provide continue to evolve. Part of the evolution is dealing with AI and machine learning. Today to reduce resistance to AI there’s a significant exercise to change culture related to AI, machine learning and automation.

You know the argument. Will your job be taken over by a AI or a robot? Culture change activities are being progressed to change how we think about the Terminator, opps I mean AI. This culture change is to make AI more friendly, more useful and less threatening.