
Rethinking Change – Series
Being and Seeing the System
By Peta Bayman Director Facilitating Results Pty Ltd
A large part of organisational life centres around culture. Organisations recognise the impact of culture on business results, so expend considerable resources enhancing, or repairing their culture. You would, therefore, expect there to be a commonly accepted definition and understanding of culture.
However, such definitions remain elusive. Indeed, one study described 15 different definitions of culture (1). Without a clear definition, how do we create a shared understanding of culture? In an organisational context, the word culture is borrowed from Anthropology, where the view is that all complex societies contain a number of coexisting, overlapping and competing subcultures. (1) Why would organisations be any different? Organisations often refer to their culture as being a monoculture, evidenced by common expressions like ‘the culture’ or ‘our culture’. This may partly explain why researchers have found so many definitions; depending on where you are in the organisation, you may well experience different cultures.
A Few Bad Apples
The only time organisations seem not to treat their culture as a monoculture, is when something goes wrong. A recent example occurred in Australia, when a consulting firm fell short of public expectations. They were found to have been advising the government on the design of taxation, while giving advice to their private clients about how to beneficially navigate these same matters.
The initial response from the organisation was along the lines of ‘there’re a few bad apples’, suggesting that these people don’t represent ‘our’ culture. They are an aberration. The further implication is that once they’ve been removed, the problem will be solved, and the culture restored to its previous, monolithic nature. In the case where there is obvious criminal behaviour or the overstepping of some explicit boundaries, this is a valid approach as while rare, these situations do arise.
If the organisation is intent on a solution based on rooting out bad apples, which creates other cascading problems from what is essentially an ‘othering’ approach, how does the organisation go about deciding who the bad apples are? Potentially, the person that now no longer fits the culture was until recently a top earner, was much lauded, regarded not only as highly effective, but also – and significantly – as a ‘leader of the culture’.
This approach can also create unintended, unspoken dilemmas for those inside the organisation. Organisations intent on recruiting people in their own ‘cultural’ image, where the job description actually contain descriptions like ‘must fit our culture’ risk building monocultures, in which everybody is more or less thinking and behaving in the same manner (2). Sometimes organisation try to defy such biases by deliberately recruiting for difference, but the existing system usually prevails during such employees’ tenures, the differences can become intolerable, and they are often moved on.
Ironically, all this monoculture building is done, while extensively investing in diversity and inclusion initiatives, which espouse the opposite of a monoculture for improved organisational performance.
Understanding Culture
In the case of the consulting organisation mentioned earlier – and this would apply to many other organisations facing a similar problem – once a light was shone further into the issue, more ‘bad apples’ are revealed. As the pendulum swings from the few to the many, it reaches a tipping point, after which the culture itself is blamed. The solution here is some sort of program of cultural change. This may sound as simple as an oil change, but they never seem to run as smoothly. Taking a monocultural approach is clearly problematic for organisations on numerous fronts.
Rather than continuing to try and square the circle, we could shift our perspective from talking about a culture to discussing a system, by which I mean “any set of relations within a boundary having rules developed over time” (3). When we look at the organisation systemically, it’s easier to fully apply the anthropological view by looking at the organisational system as a number of co-existing overlapping and competing subsystems.
The influence of systems is profound and has been described as being akin to gravity (3), which while remaining invisible is profoundly important for us. We are not constantly aware of systems and, like gravity, we tend to only feel its effects when we exceed its rules. When we increase our systems fluency, we become aware that we’re always in a system – or, indeed, multiple systems and subsystems. Only then can we begin to discern the impact of systems on our behaviour.
When issues arise in the organisation, taking a systemic approach could be to examine the conditions of the systems and the subsystems. By looking at the boundaries, the role relations, the friction between sub-systems, and the rules – some spoken, but many unspoken and unconscious – we can better understand how such systems function.
When we operate from a systems perspective, it moves the conversation out of the personal away from the appraisal of personal attributes, which are essentially subjective and driven by opinion, but which nonetheless are often used to determine who is a fit (or not) for a culture. In a systems view, there is no inherent conflict between the concept of multiple cultures, and diversity and inclusion.
Cases in Point – Systemic Influence
I’ll offer two examples of viewing systemic influences 1. an historical one and 2. a contemporary one, both relating to gender.
During the First World War, British women took up formal roles in farming and manufacturing that had mostly previously been held by men. This occurred because a different need arose in the system. To facilitate this change in behaviour, women’s dress needed to change. What was unacceptable for women previously, quickly became acceptable. Women did not change overnight; rather, they simply changed their roles (4). They remained, essentially the same people, and because the system needed them to play a new role, wearing trousers became acceptable – like many advances, there was later an attempt to try and roll this back. As women took up their roles differently, the system regarded them differently. Here, we see a clear example of a system influencing a role and a role influencing certain systems. The agreed norms – mostly unwritten and unspoken rules – of behaviour for women have been (and continue to be) passed down through systemic repeated and largely unquestioned patterns of behaviour. A systemic way of making sense of the role of women, or men – or indeed any role, gendered or otherwise – helps us shift out of personal value judgements to a more productive and useful perspective on roles in the system.
A modern gender case in point is Australian (5) schools, which are discovering that the uniforms they put girls into impacts how girls play, compared to boys and, therefore, how they develop. Based on observation of children at play it may have seemed fair (but incorrect) to hypothesise that girls are less adventurous than boys. When you take a systems perspective and observe the relations and the rules that have been developed over time, we can make further distinctions. Particularly in more traditional schools, the school uniform entails girls wearing dresses or skirts and boys wearing trousers or shorts. This rule is often derived from tradition, or sometimes described as culture.
When we consider the possibility that girls in skirts don’t want to hang upside down on play equipment, whereas boys in shorts may be more inclined to do so, it becomes clear that traditional ideas can disadvantage certain groups. The reason for this misapprehension is that we are looking at people and children through an unhelpful lens, where we feel compelled to subjectively describe girls in a certain way and boys in another way. When we apply a systemic lens, however, we can better perceive patterns of behaviour and the systemic influences on such behaviour.
The Power of Perspective Taking
Seeing the world differently invites new opportunities for growth. The challenge is how do we take new perspectives or ‘think outside the box’, when we are in the box? We could do with a grappling hook to help us haul ourselves out. Fortunately, Garvey-Berger and Johnston (6) offer us just this in the form of a deceptively simple verbal grappling hook for developing perspective taking. In solving our problems or meeting challenges, we routinely ask the same questions and invariably get variations of the same answers and results. The Three Habits of Mind are: 1) start by asking different questions to the ones we habitually ask; this leads to 2) the possibility of seeing multiple perspectives, which once seen allows us to 3) see more of the pattern and forces of the system. We can then cycle through 1) 2), and 3) until we have exhausted as many options as possible. New perspectives can be slippery and disappear back into the gloom, so undertaking this as a collective practice in organisations will assist imbedding this capability. New perspectives, like seedlings, need attention to be kept alive long enough to take hold.
In the case of the school uniforms, a response to the statement ‘Girls are naturally less adventurous than boys in play’ or this question in relation to a culture problem ‘How do we best deal with the bad apples in our culture?’ a different set of questions, could be ‘what are the systemic influences that are invisible here?’, ‘What other reasons could we attribute to what we observe?’, or even: ‘How could I be wrong?’ this practice will lead to different outcomes and enhance systems fluency.
Systems and Role
Thinking again about a major public organization that has failed to meet community standards. Interviews often reveal that individuals believed they were adhering to expected behaviours, as modelled by their peers and bosses. We frequently miss the powerful way our actions are shaped by the systems or subsystems to which we belong. To make progress, with greater and greater speed, we are trained to be blind to systems. Or to put it another way, we are acculturated to ‘be’ the system. To some extent, we are in a box. Our opportunity now is to look past decades of reinforcement and accepted practice relating to ‘organisational culture’ and see things differently, with the intention of being able to make real progress.
Summary
Understanding culture differently – namely as a complex system, with a number of coexisting, overlapping and competing subsystems – and recognising systemic influences on our behaviour enables us to identify certain underlying patterns more effectively. Engaging in a perspective-taking practice enhances our ability to recognise these patterns. Recognising the ‘gravity’ of entrenched patterns within the system is essential for initiating change. By becoming conscious of these systemic forces, we can make informed choices, fostering a dynamic organisational culture capable of continuous self-modification and better equipped to avoid future crises.
References
- Hudelson, Patricia M. Culture and quality: an anthropological perspective. International Journal for Quality in Health Care. 2004, Vol. 16, 5, pp. 345-346. Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève Médecine Communautaire Genève Switzerland.
- Bulgarella, Caterina. From Exceptionalism To Unrest: Why Google’s Culture Is Changing. Forbes.com. [Online] 19 February 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/caterinabulgarella/2020/02/19/from-exceptionalism-to-unrest-why-googles-culture-is-changing/?sh=2b5329013560.
- Borwick, irving. Organizational Role Analysis: managing strategic change in business settings Page 19. Coaching in Depth Edited by Susan Long, John Newton, Burkard Sievers. London : Routledge, 2006.
- Bayman, Peta. Role of Role – Rethinking Change series. Facilitating Results. [Online] 2024. https://facilitatingresults.com.au/the-role-of-role-in-effective-organisational-change/.
- Mergler, Amanda and Cariss, Simone. Girls Uniform Agenda. [Online] 2023. https://girlsuniformagenda.org/supporters.
- Garvey Berger, Jennifer, Johnston, Keith. Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders. Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2015. 272.