There have been times where I work with a client on a culture design project for six months, helping them analyze their existing culture, identifying a small number of areas where they feel change would have the biggest impact, and then working with them to develop a concrete list of action items that would move their culture in that direction. Sometimes they have as many as 50 discrete action items lined up (we call them “culture plays”), and then the senior team actually approves five to ten of them for implementation. Then what happens?
Nothing.
They start second-guessing. They wonder if those plays are the right ones, or if they will work as well as they planned. They start asking people for more feedback to improve the plays. There’s nothing wrong with getting feedback, of course, but they are falling into the oldest culture change trap in the book: failing to take action.
Culture is a practicing art. You learn how to do it mostly by actually doing it, rather than thinking about it. Yes, you have to do the work of analysis, but the general rule should be, “once you have a minimum viable action item identified, take action.”
I talked to a CEO today who wants more collaboration, and he was worried that his office design was getting in the way. He has a small staff and everyone has their own office. He felt like there weren’t enough collaborative conversations and was thinking about a complete office redesign, getting rid of offices and setting up shared work spaces.. But he was also worried that moving people out of offices would cause disruption and frustration, so he chose to do nothing.
My feedback: make the change smaller. Don’t redesign your whole office—identify a few people who are interested in a different office design, and then run an experiment. Take a couple of offices and make them into more of an open design where people can share space and work together. Then after a few months have them report out to the staff on the results—did it impact productivity, or create distractions, or improve collaboration?
If you constantly boil down your culture change efforts to the minimum viable action, you’ll always make more progress than working to perfect everything before you launch it. Progress over perfection. This is a core message of our new book, Culture Change Made Easy.