Traditionally change has been viewed through a strategic lens, as in the legendary case at Intel, when Gordon Moore and Andy Grove made the fateful decision to move out of memory chips and bet the company on microprocessors. Leaders were advised to form a strategic vision, build a coalition, then communicate and institute the change.
Yet today, there’s rarely time for all that. We are going through an era of unprecedented disruption. When tariffs are leveled, a pandemic hits or a new technology changes the game entirely, behaviors throughout the organization need to shift quickly—sometimes within days or even hours—and those changes need to be adopted at scale.
That’s exactly what confronted the leadership of Alberta’s Ministry of Communication and Public Engagement. The pandemic made it clear that resources needed to be centralized for rapid deployment in a crisis, but operations had become proudly decentralized over the years. Change couldn’t simply be mandated. It needed to be embedded into the fabric of the culture.
Step 1: Identifying Behaviors
Historically, the Ministry had been decentralized, with key personnel embedded in each client ministry, such as Justice, Public Safety and Education. The idea was that each client ministry could be best served by communications professionals dedicated to its unique mission and needs.
For a long time, that model made sense. But during the pandemic, it became clear that the approach was no longer tenable. Today, the rapid advancement of technology, political and social instability, and the increasingly volatile social media environment require organizations to surge resources quickly to where they can be most impactful. In these disruptive times, leaders don’t always get to choose their priorities. Events often choose them.
In my discussions with the leadership team, it became clear that the history of decentralization had created a fiercely independent culture. Executives prided themselves on delivering for their clients and fought to get the resources to serve them well. Some had dedicated resources completely under their control. Centralizing valuable resources would involve asking executives to give that up in favor of a central authority they felt little kinship with.
Perhaps not surprisingly, many resisted. Not openly, necessarily, but through subtle workarounds. Many had the institutional knowledge and political savvy to navigate the system, and some put those skills to use. They may not have been trying to sabotage the centralization effort, but their unwillingness to contribute to its success was having that effect.
Meanwhile, those who bought into the new ways of working were becoming frustrated when colleagues undermined the effort. Tensions began to build. Calls to return to the old system grew louder, and it was beginning to look as if the centralization effort, deemed by leadership to be mission-critical, was running off the rails.
Step 2: Uncovering Norms
The traditional playbook for dealing with this type of situation is to design incentives to encourage compliance and punish resistance, perhaps even firing a few transgressors to make an example of them. But there is a large body of evidence showing that incentives often aren’t effective and sometimes even backfire. A heavy-handed approach could have caused even more disruption and empowered the resistors.
So we led the leadership team through a very different approach. During a day-long strategy session, they worked to analyze the underlying cultural triggers that were driving the problem and that analysis yielded answers that nobody anticipated. What the team had assumed was insubordinate behavior was actually dedicated professionals trying to do their best.
Over the years, communications professionals within the ministry had been encouraged to adopt a “client first” perspective, and their evaluations were heavily influenced by how their performance was perceived by their client ministries. If you wanted to get ahead, you fought for resources so that you could serve your client ministry better than anyone else.
The strategy might have changed, but those norms remained. So people continued to try to do their jobs as they always had, even if that meant working around the new strategy to get the resources they felt their clients needed and deserved. However well-intentioned, the desire to live up to those norms was dooming the new strategy to failure.
Step 3: Redesigning Rituals
Rituals are the recurring practices that encode norms into the culture. It soon became clear that despite efforts to implement the new strategy, many of the organization’s existing rituals still reinforced the old model. Staff evaluations, for example, were still heavily weighted to feedback from their client ministry.
That insight led leadership to redesign key rituals so they would reinforce the new norms rather than the old ones. One of the most important new rituals was the creation of “executive ops” meetings, which brought centralized teams and client-facing teams together to collaborate, troubleshoot problems and coordinate resources.
That, in turn, enabled the team to reimagine the emergency response communications ritual. In the past, crises were largely managed by one client team, which limited resources, led to burnout and generated high overtime costs. The new ritual was rooted in those “executive ops” meetings, which could deploy more resources, faster, cheaper, more efficiently and with dramatically improved outcomes.
The new approach was put to the test during a recent teachers strike. The situation required strategies targeting multiple constituencies, including parents, students, the general public and the teachers themselves. Leaders needed to work closely with analysts, social media teams, production people and other specialists, not only to devise and execute strategies, but to rapidly respond to events as they unfolded at breakneck speed.
This would have been nearly impossible in the old decentralized culture. But under the new regime, the increased level of collaboration and the ability to scale resources quickly proved enormously effective and helped bring the crisis to a positive conclusion.
Culture is how an enterprise honors its mission
In his book Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance, Lou Gerstner wrote, “Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value… What does the culture reward and punish – individual achievement or team play, risk taking or consensus building?”
Every organization, whether consciously or not, develops norms and rituals that shape behaviors. In a positive organizational culture, norms and rituals support behaviors that honor the mission of the enterprise. Negative cultures undermine that mission. To change an organization, you need to change its culture.
The problem is that culture is made up of things that you can’t see, while behaviors are more obvious. That’s why managers usually focus on incentives to change them, because there is a clear causal relationship. You do these things that we want and you get a carrot, but do other things that we don’t want, and you get the stick.
Yet incentives are often problematic. People want to feel they are living up to the standards of the groups they belong to and being the kind of person they aspire to be. The communications professionals in Alberta weren’t trying to undermine the new strategy. They were trying to be the kind of professionals the organization had spent years teaching them to be. Asking people to stop being who they think they are is unlikely to be successful.
That’s why if you want to change behavior, you need to redesign the rituals that encode the norms that drive it. Culture changes when people find new ways to honor the mission they already believe in.