Why it works at IDEO — and what allows the company to churn out excellence at a regular clip — are what Schein calls the "shared basic assumptions" that drive all of these seemingly odd choices. If you want to change culture, then you have to start there, by influencing the thought patterns that drive your employees to act.
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As Lou Gerstner says, “Changing the attitude and behavior of hundreds of thousands of people is very, very hard to accomplish. You can’t simply give a couple of speeches or write a new credo for the company and declare that the new culture has taken hold. You can’t mandate it, can’t engineer it.
“What you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But at some point you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.
Even though our basic assumptions often remain hidden from our conscious awareness, they nevertheless determine how we manage our careers. Too often we fail to question them, even if they are obsolete or wrong. Precisely because they are taken for granted, basic assumptions are very hard to change. When they remain implicit, we only make incremental change. We only move from one situation into another that is superficially different. The organization or even the industry and sector may change and the coworkers may be different, but in the end, we fall back into similar roles and relationships, reproducing the same work and life structure we had before. Why? Because our working identity has remained the same.
In most organizations, it's behaviors we want to change, and so the questions that matter are these:
• What's the problematic behavior?
• What are the shared basic assumptions driving that behavior?
• What can we do to change those assumptions?
Why it works at IDEO — and what allows the company to churn out excellence at a regular clip — are what Schein calls the "shared basic assumptions" that drive all of these seemingly odd choices. If you want to change culture, then you have to start there, by influencing the thought patterns that drive your employees to act.
In most organizations, it's behaviors we want to change, and so the questions that matter are these:
• What's the problematic behavior?
• What are the shared basic assumptions driving that behavior?
• What can we do to change those assumptions?