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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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For those less than familiar with the 70:20:10 model it is, in essence, a formalisation of what has long been recognised as one of the most effective ways to learn. It proposes that only 10% of an individual’s development time should be spent in the classroom undertaking formal education or training. 20% of development time should then be directed at structured learning events which are relevant to the workplace and not conducted in formal training environments; for example work-shops or coaching schemes. The vast majority of development, 70%, is to take place in the working environment through managed exposure to the full variety of experiences any role might be expected to encounter.

This is where the model mimics reality; as far back as medieval times the guilds of individual trades recognised the value of work-related experience to learning. The entire concept behind the apprenticeship and the journeyman was that you couldn’t reasonably learn your trade to a skilled level without five years of experience in practice. Indeed, to this day, some professions, notably medicine and the law, appear to implicitly recognise this as they continue to style their work as ‘practice’ – you never become the finished article because you are expected, and expect, to constantly develop. The current National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) scheme could be viewed as an attempt to replicate these time-honoured behaviours in a contemporary context. But herein lies the rub; many people appear dismissive of the NVQ as a cynical attempt to short-cut formal education or rigorous professional training.

If this sounds a bit like Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses “The University of Life, Faculty of Hard Knocks”, well, that might be because it is very close to that. What differentiates it however is how well structured and managed it is. Everyone is familiar with that old adage that fifteen years in the same job does not necessarily equal fifteen years of experience. It can simply be one year of experience repeated fifteen times. The trick with the 70:20:10 model is to avoid this potential pitfall. This is achieved through understanding the full range of experiences that a role occupant might reasonably encounter given their level of skill, ability and responsibility. This understanding can then be broadened out in a managed and safe way to guide development to a shape that suits both them and their employer.

The attractions are self-evident. With structured development based on what is happening to you and around you in your own work environment the learning is immediate (there is no delay whilst you try and equate classroom theory to practical application). It is also clearly relevant as the problems are real and your solutions either succeed or fail to varying degrees and, often, in short order. Peer support and advice is available from colleagues who share the same environment and constraints rather than through theoreticians. Perhaps most importantly the ‘pay-back’ on the development investment is more-or-less immediately apparent.

However the problem doesn’t lie with the concept or the framework; it is more with the behaviours and attitudes to those that operate and are affected by it. The two potential pit-falls are firstly the learners’ engagement with the process and their ownership of their own development. Secondly the degree of management focus on an individual’s development needs and their contribution to promoting and managing the development process in partnership with their direct reports is crucially important.

Without an explicit focus on their development it is easy to let the ‘day job’ dominate working life; in such situations development is piecemeal and at an organic rate of progress. At the same time it is hard for the developing worker to know what they need to learn because, by definition, they have not yet been exposed to it. Here is where effective management pays dividends; not only will they encourage and guide the learner’s efforts but management is ideally positioned to help identify the detailed learning needs having, as they do, an overview of both the role and the individual discharging it. They are also ideally placed to identify the necessary learning experiences and a safe environment in which they can be practiced.

This dependence on management, both by the learner and their manager, can prove one of the main stumbling blocks. With pressure to achieve whatever production or management targets the business sets it is easy to allow development to become the poor relation with insufficient focus on the individual’s needs or their contribution to the overall goal.

What appears to stand in the way of effective deployment of the 70:20:10 model is a lack of management comprehension, ability and appetite on behalf of both the learner and their manager. Yet, once harnessed we have witnessed its effects as transformational on not only individuals but also departments and even whole enterprises.

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Making change managers effective
Bernard explores the common problems he encounters when coaching client in effective change management.

How business architechture @AXA is a game changer
Geoff Grace from AXA has submitted an article on how the digital age is affecting how Business Architects understand today’s issues with big data.

You ask the questions
In this month’s questions and answers column, Nick Dobson answers what it means to be assigned the role of Accountable Executive.

Your comments and questions are welcome – or feel free to join the debate by commenting in the linked articles!

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Participants in one of the work shops were asked to position their view of how their PMO was performing on a four-axis radar plot. The North South axis was essentially concerned with whether the PMOs were predominantly supporting the corporate portfolio (the Northernmost point on the plot) or predominantly supporting the individual projects (the Southernmost point on the plot). Clearly a balanced view of their focus would place them in the middle of this axis.

The East – West axis was formed by a view as to whether their primary function was to support and report to management (the Westernmost point) or primarily to develop and support delivery and good practice amongst the change community/practitioners (Easternmost point). Again a balanced view would have tended towards the centre.

Once the participants had positioned their PMO’s current behaviours they were invited to project the direction and distance in which they felt their PMO ought to develop over the next twelve to twenty-four months. Four informative and telling observations arose from this:

1. The vast majority of plots lay in the Western hemisphere
2. The North/South divide was practically evenly distributed
3. All but one or two organisations envisioned, or at least desired, a significant shift from their current position
4. No one professed to have conducted a similar piece of analysis on their PMO’s position and strategy prior to this exercise.

Western hemisphere bias. Of the seventeen participating organisations only two positioned themselves in the Eastern hemisphere. So, it seems, about 90% of PMOs regard their function as essentially supporting management rather than driving up delivery performance. Given that supporting management decisions is a risk-avoidance, rather than value-adding, perspective the majority of PMOs would be unable to demonstrate any ROI on the investment in them. Yes, they’d be able to justify themselves in terms of risk avoided for the organisation but they don’t inherently see their role as ‘adding value’. Whilst they occupy this space they’ll always be a ‘grudge’ spend (just like insurance – on which you spend the least you can) for management.

North South distribution. The degree of spread along this axis was quite remarkable (9 in the North, 8 in the South) with a fairly even distribution across the whole axis (i.e. a good spread of extremists at both ends and ‘fence-sitters’ in the middle). The obvious suggestion being that, given we’ve determined a Western hemisphere bias, there is a more or less equal emphasis on the organisation sponsoring PMO’s to safeguard the portfolio (a corporate level control function) or safeguard the individual projects (a project level administrative function). A good supplementary question might be who sponsors and therefore owns the PMOs? If it is a project function then you might anticipate the Southern bias whereas if it is a senior management function the opposite, a Northern bias, might be expected. The suspicion is that the governance and financing of the PMO will almost certainly play a critical part in its North/South bias. This may, of course, not be bad or wrong as long as it is a conscious choice rather than an ‘accident of breeding’!

Directions of travel. Given the current location of the various PMOs, the desired direction indicated an overwhelming stampede in an Eastward direction; clearly indicating an overall desire for PMOs to be about adding value rather than being a risk-avoidance grudge-spend. More interestingly was the extent of development; the length of the arrow indicated the desired extent of movement and in nearly all instances indicated a seismic change. Whilst it is not surprising that there is high ambition and a great appetite for change one suspects that the views were not moderated (given their dramatic nature) by an over-lay of reality; what can really be achieved within an organisation within a year or two?
The final interesting observation emerging from the direction of travel was that those occupying the Northern hemisphere had ambitions to move South whilst the opposite was largely true for those already inhabiting the Southern hemisphere. This diagonal cross-over (the South West dwellers moving to the North East whilst the North West dwellers moved South East) was striking. It clearly mirrors an ambition to provide not only a value adding services but also a balanced range of services for both the organisation and also the individual projects. That, or the grass is seen as greener on the other side!

Value of strategic analysis. One is inevitably moved to question why, when all the PMO people present found this an eye-opening and insightful exercise, don’t we seem to spend more time on taking a strategic view of where we are and where we’d like to get to? Where should we point the ‘finger of blame’, if indeed blame is to be apportioned? Are we collectively responsible for being too busy instigating the tactics to focus on the strategic direction? Does the ambition of the sponsor determine a path from which the PMO finds it hard to vary? Do initial behaviours become ingrained and thereafter the focus is on their refinement rather than moving towards a strategic ambition (evolution not revolution)? Or perhaps strategic analysis and direction setting is the stuff of text books and consultants and doesn’t apply to ‘real’ businesses? Of course it could be any one, any combination or none of these factors; the interesting insight remains. Spending a very modest amount of time (less than forty minutes) deploying a very simple tool leads to some profound insights that enable strategic challenges to be surfaced and ultimately pursued. Why then don’t we do more of this?
Please speak to us if you wish to explore strategic analysis or implementation planning any further – 01980 283600 or Richard Bateman rbateman@citi.co.uk.

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