They shape the very way the group conceive of their purpose. For this reason it’s very hard to deliberately shift the ‘deep’ culture. Attempts to do so often evoke the characteristic cycle of resistance, anger, and poor morale, with enormous disruption to activities and loss of invaluable informal patterns of relationship and procedure.
Yet, all healthy cultures constantly evolve. An organisational structure evolves in response to changes in the environment, guided in part by its culture, but at the same time the culture itself adjusts to the changing demands of the structure and the environment. But when the rate of change demanded by the environment requires specific organisational
responses, it is no longer safe to rely on unmanaged ‘evolutionary’ cultural change. After all, evolution has left humans with appendixes, ear lobes and a propensity for bad backs!

For many organisations, managed successful cultural change is not an option – it’s a fundamental requirement. All the usual caveats of leadership, clarity of objectives, and commitment from the top go without saying, but how do you actually make it happen? Real cultural change is a dynamic process. It depends on a constant re-examination of the
effectiveness of the methods used and constant vigilance to detect the establishment of informal fiefdoms and unofficial perks arising from weak points in funding control, as these often provide the focus for people’s resistance to change.

A key factor influencing acceptance is the balance between rewards offered by new opportunities and penalties incurred by old behaviours. Large institutions are most vulnerable
to cultural ossification because the opportunities and penalties are rarely linked directly to individual behaviours, and the shared ‘higher’ values of the ‘deep’ culture always show strong self-preservation tendencies.

The problem is that, as Francis Bacon said years ago, “He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for time is the greatest innovator”. And the times have changed – unless an institution changes to match them it, de facto, has changed whether it meant to or not. Projects are now too signifi cant a part of most organisations’ investment to let them be. You are going to have to dust off the cultural change process and get it to work.

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