I produced this webinar to talk to people
about the kind of work that we do at
Simon Associates Management Consultants
to help organizations change. And change
is something that people hate, the brain
hates it, the culture hates it and the
organization has a hard time
implementing even good ideas. So let me
take you through this and see if it
helps you understand how a little
anthropology could help you in fact
successfully change your organization.
Our job is to develop high-performing
organizations and we believe that they
really thrive by unleashing the talent,
passion, and potential of people at work.
This wonderful research that I can share
with you about how the nature of the
organization itself can bring out the
great ideas that people carry with them
and why that's so important because at
the end of the day, you only have staff
and they have all the opportunity to
help you grow in different ways. So, let's
see if we can do this, there we go. So in
this workshop, my job is to help you
understand first the pain and challenges
of change and why do we just hate to do
it. And the second thing, that the
building blocks needed to change people
and I say this very intentionally, it's
the way they see things because we buy
with the heart and how it feels, the eyes
and the heart are connected it's
experiential, and if in fact they can see
it in fresh ways they can think about it
and then do it. Ultimately this is about
their culture and culture isn't
something that's outside of them it's
the essence of who they are. I often get
calls from HR directors (bless their
hearts) and they call because they say
"Help I have a new CEO and he wants me to
change the culture." And so I ask, so
what's the problem?
And that HR person typically says, "I
don't really know what the culture is
today", and my answer to that is "well, what
would the new CEO like it to become?" and
she said "I'm not sure
but it isn't working now, so a new
culture is what we need to get it jump
started." Typically they'll say a little
bit of more innovative, more
results-oriented or hard-driving,
different from whatever it was or they
think it is, and so today's little talk
it's really about what else could we do
for them to make this very difficult
thing succeed because they don't really
know where they're going and how to get
there.
Many clients come to us because the
times they are changing and they realize
that they are and they know they have to
adapt their clients are changing.
There's consolidation in the business,
there's new technologies that are coming
on-board, all kinds of things that are
causing the need for adaptation. This
little chart on the right here maybe on
your left is from Thomas Friedman's book,
"Thank You for Being Late", which is a
wonderful read, but as you can see this
is not new, but the rate of change is a
big hockey stick and a human's ability
to adapt is much slower, it's not
something terrible or remember the
method for taking bread and slicing it
was developed thirty-five years before
they were actually using it. So, Wonder
Bread took 35 years to convert a loaf of
bread into sliced bread and then make it
successful. You know I don't care whether
it was post-it notes or it was Purell or
WD-40, a new idea isn't by itself a
success, until people begin to understand
how to use it, adapt to it and change. Our
proprietary process called a change map
process is a change management strategy,
and what we believe is that you need to
think backwards. What if we worked with
you could happen as your organization
faces change by analyzing the changes
you want to make, visualizing them, seeing
how the rest of your whole company is
affected, you can begin to get ready for
the changes and you can prepare your
teams and your talent in advance and
guide them through the transition. Think
of this as a play, they are all playing
Macbeth really well,
tomorrow you want them to play Hamlet, 
they don't have a script, there's no
rehearsal time, they don't know their
roles, but somehow you want them to
become skilled at being a whole new role
player, on a new stage, performing a new
play. It's not that easy and just the
idea they can all be like Robert Redford
and play many roles but they aren't sure
how you do that.
Actors spend a lot of time learning
their skills, how are you going to teach
your guys to change theirs? And this is
about the scariest place for people to
be. Scary because the most dangerous
place for humans is to betwixt in
between, they don't like ambiguity. And so
consequently when they're betwixt in
between they are most uncomfortable. Now,
why is change so challenging? When you
are changing something in somebody's way
of doing things, quite frankly it isn't a
task, it is the essence of who they are.
It's really embedded in their whole
interactions with others, humans are
cultural creatures and it really makes a
big difference. We don't see things as
they are, we see things as we are.
Remember when we're born, we don't know
much about anything and as we grow up
every time we look in the mirror, we see
beautiful, we see big and strong
we're not small and weak. And once we
begin to develop that mind map of our
reality, we sort everything else to
conform to it. We want to be with other
people like us, we think that we are
beautiful and we want others who look
like us to join us. We also are creatures
of habbits, well we think we have a lot
of choice, often we have the paradox of
choice - it's too many choices the most
efficient way for us to get through the
day is a well honed habit, and so while
we think that we are making up the day,
if you look at your own day and the tasks
you do in a week, they're pretty repetitive. I bet you even
spend the same amount of money in the
supermarket every week, we buy the same
products and we're most comfortable not
having to think about things, in part
because your brain hates to change. I
often tell people that you hire us
and then you hate us, because the whole
essence of what we're trying to do is
help you see things with fresh eyes and
your brain is working hard to shut us
down. We also join others like us, remember we
look in the mirror and we see ourselves
in a particular way, we go to find others
who look and sound and feel like us so
we sound the same, we fly in the same
kind of herds and we begin to think in
the same way. That comfort of the herd we
often talk about is our culture, so when
you begin to think about changing the
culture, you're changing the essence of
who we are and many companies now are
trying to diversify their staff. Well
what you might look at is at lunchtime,
does that diversity sit together or do
they find their own little cliques of
people who are like them and turn into
little mini ghettos within the company
itself? I say that gently because people
are birds of a feather and they flock
with others who they share common values,
beliefs and personal identities. Now this
culture is the way you think, act and
interact. It's extremely important that
you begin to understand that when you're
going to try and change something, you're
changing the way you think, you act and
you interact. Successful firms, research
will show you, have cultures that reduce
uncertainties, people come in every day,
the habits take over and people know
what the social order is. They know what
to expect, they know what their boss will say, what
their customers need, what their jobs are.
It creates great continuity, it's core
values and norms, it's what makes us
human. It's a collective identity and a
commitment to those things that we
believe are valued by this organization.
It has a vision for the future, it
energizes forward movement. But the wrong
culture can take you down the wrong path.
And cultures hate change. The values,
beliefs and behaviors are the way we do things here. They're sacred,
they're not casual and have the
continuity and the consistency that you
love and you have a clear sense of
agreed-upon values. So culture
will eat up all the kinds of things you want to change but, the right
culture can foster adaptability and
innovation. It can provide a clear set of
principles to follow when designing new
strategies to deal with new situations
but, you have to have an innovative
culture to do that. Innovative companies
build a culture of idea generation,
methods for testing prototypes, for
approaching to engage
around new methods. It's very interesting
because when you try and ask people to
come up with new ideas and turn them
into innovations, they may have the ideas
but they may not have any way of
turning them into innovations. We worked
with one major automobile
manufacturer of parts for cars and they had missed the aluminum rise in car
manufacturing, they made it out of steel
and they had a very hard time beginning
to see how to bring innovation into a 50
year old company that was very
successful at doing something that
wasn't going to be needed anymore. So
they put the head of engineering into
the head of innovation and he fried he
was just the wrong person
there are discoverers and delivers and
the cultures they work in are very
different so this great engineer who was
great at delivering things was the wrong
person to try and create an
innovative culture now we always hear
about different departments having
different subcultures this is not crazy
because it happens. Marketing is
different than sales, is different than
manufacturing, is different than finance
and accounting; that's all well and good
as long as there's something that's
shared across the whole organization
because it's the glue. And so, when you
think about archetypes, like IKEA is an
every man's culture. Jeep is an
explorer's culture. Haagen Dazs is a warm
friendly and caregiving culture. I mean,
cultures emerge and have scoring
around it, and they are socially
constructed attributes of an
organization. So once you begin to build
your story it becomes a way we think
feel and behave.
Most of the time we go about our daily
life unaware of what our culture is.
That's why when those HR folks called
and I asked what is your culture now they're
not quite sure what that word means,
sometimes I'll make up a story about it
but by and large until it's challenged
like that CEO challenging it or they go
and experience a new one which is so
helpful
that's why bringing people from other
cultures is often very useful as long as
they just don't adopt the one they've
entered, cultures made overt and
explicit through a framework a model and
that framework or model is what I want
to talk about. One last thought here how
people give meaning to daily life is the
essential role of culture. Now it enables
different people to share common values
and beliefs out of which come these
repetitive behaviors habits and clear
expectations I did some work for
Starbucks and they were trying to change
the culture but they called in the
numbers every morning and the idea of
having innovative macchiatos was not
very appealing so there was a disconnect
between what they aspired to and what
they were going to be able to do. For you,
the question is "is your organization of
today the right one for tomorrow?" So,
quickly let me tell you about the OCAI:
the organizational cultural assessment
instrument and how we diagnose and
change a culture. The method was
developed at the University of Michigan
by Dr. Kim Cameron and Dr. Robert Quinn
they found tremendous research and well
over 10,000 companies have used that
methodology but they found there were
four dominant types of culture for
organizations. I'll take you through this
left to right starting with a
hierarchical controlling culture and
I'll talk to you about the specifics in
a moment, but just think about the post
office or a bank. The opposite of that is
an Adhocracy that's a very creative
culture. My entrepreneurial companies are
very creative, ad hoc, lots of empowerment. The Clans are very collaborative. My
family firms had 49 family
members working there and collaboration
was what they all aspired to. They really
got lots done, unlike their market
competitors who are so outwardly focused
and really looking at what the
competition is doing and how to make
their market share grow and how to deal
with the customers aggressively. Now this
is a very important model because you'll
find often that the competitors the
market driven companies like my
commodities trader were so good at
making money they couldn't collaborate much
at all and those firms that were great
at collaborating often didn't get
anything done, I've had those as well, and
the entrepreneurs often needed rules
from the hierarchical type A that
managed them where they never got any
results.There is no perfect culture but
there are blends and balances for your
company at the right time. Now the OCAI-Online.com is where you can go take this
survey that I'm going to talk about
because what came out of the work from
Dr. Cameron and Dr. Quinn was a model
that you can take a survey about, and out
of the survey will come a graph that will
show you what your culture is today and
what you would prefer it to be. I urge
you it's free for just one of you, so
take the OCAI-Online.com and see what
it is that you're all about. This is what
you'll see when the chart is produced
you'll see what your profile is now
you'll have a hundred points to divide
up among six different categories and
then what you would prefer it to be. In
this particular case, as you can see they
want the Clan to stay pretty much the
same, but they wanted much more
innovation, empowerment, enrichment vision, and they wanted controls and hierarchy.
Those are significant differences. A
little more marked, we want still results,
but clearly a top-down organization was
ready for a change. I'm going to let you
see these briefly and go through them so
you can hear what the differences are
but keep in mind that when you start
getting into this we'll go into it much
more deeply for you. An adhocracy is creative, focuses on
the external competition, innovation,
they're flexible, entrepreneurs, very much
encourages individual initiative, freedom,
empowerment, creative problem-solving,
working with one company now that wants to improve their creative
problem-solving and empowerment. The glue is commitment to experimentation and
innovation. How much is often the
question. They want to be on the leading
edge, not the bleeding edge, but they sure
do want a little bit more innovation
happening and they want to gain unique
new products or services. It encourages
individual initiative and freedom
dynamic entrepreneurial place to work.
We're working with one company and they
realize that they have so drowned out
the creativity that they've got lots of
rules and processes but no original
thinking. They are controlling
hierarchical and process driven, the
rules rule, there's a lot of internal
maintenance for needs for stability and
control. Excellent coordinators, organizers,
efficient. When I did this for the family
firms, the only family firms that were
really hierarchical and controlling were
banks, and I said "Oh that's cool, I'm
great at getting organized." Secure
employment, predictability, very
formalized structured place to work,
not unlike those banks, dependable
delivery I even had a cement manufacture
in Mexico who really reflected this,
didn't want to stay this way. Very
dependable delivery, smooth scheduling,
low cost, inwardly focused; so inwardly
focus and disciplined this particular
cement company wasn't getting the
results they needed and couldn't hire
any young people who wanted to work in a
controlling hierarchy. This is about
improving quality and cutting costs out
of production a lean company. Market
competitiveness, you have to think of
this as my commodities traders, but it
may be a company that you're in as well,
externally focused, results driven, hard
drivers, producers, competitors,
tough and demanding, they really are
goal-oriented. They focus on customer
focused competition results,
emphasis is on winning, they want market
share penetration, they want to be the
top of the rest, it's very very based on
reputation and success. Nothing wrong
with it, but sometimes you need to do it
collaboratively. Now collaboration is
really useful unless it becomes the only
thing you do. We had one, a transportation
engineering firm, and one of their
offices were all into collaboration. They
really cared about people, they just
forgot to get anything done. So it's
interesting when you get to the extreme what happens. But here you have fathers
and mentors internally focused, but
flexible, this is involvement, engagement,
lots of teamwork, very high commitment
and solidarity, sensitive to customers,
and a concern for people places a
premium on teamwork participation in
consensus. Let me give you an
illustration of how this might work: so
an accounting firm. Imagine your clients
and their taxes.
and their accountant. Now they're both
looking at what Watson is doing to H&R
Block uncovering every deduction
available using Watson artificial
intelligence, machine learning, it's able
to understand all 74,000 pages of the
tax code, thousands of yearly tax law changes
locks in deep insights from 600 million
data points the data is going to help
you get a really good tax return, very
low cost, highly precise, very easy to
deliver, you get your check
as you walk out the door. On top of that,
they're looking at compliance automation
software, the answer to rising compliance
costs. We were down in North Carolina at
an accounting firm that specialized in
compliance, but some of the big four are
already coming up with automated
solutions to compliance management. Their clients are looking to move to the cloud
but they're not quite sure if it's
secure or how to do it but QuickBooks is
going to insist on it. Now the question,
whether it's billing.com or it's
Quickbooks online, but there are really
important changes coming to how you're
going to run your financials and your -
often your controller is getting older
and not the one who necessarily wants to
do this. The clients are changing as well,
owners were growing older. 67% of
America's businesses are owned by
boomers. There's going to be huge
consolidations as they cash out or they
hand it off to their Gen X's or
their Gen Y's, there are lots of young
entrepreneurs starting up, many of whom
were women. The well-established firms
were breaking apart the staff, or their
clients were growing older and not very
adaptive to the new things that were
coming, and the next generation was often
taking over and wanted to be with others
just like them. Then you had the Gen Y's,
these are new young accountants who are
coming into the business very ambitious
but also had different styles and grown
up digital, did work differently
and then we had the great Gig economy. A
third of American workers engaged in
freelancing. By 2020, 4 in 10, 91 million
Americans are going to be engaged in quick
gigs. This is going to be a very
different place for hiring people, for
just-in-time, work and for the kind of
people for who you are gonna hire. Now the
question became can we retire as
partners. Managers loved working remotely,
but did their staff benefit from it? The
rules of before felt awkward but maybe
that was what was needed, what kind of
culture should this organization get?
It's time for change. A new company
culture, what did that mean? Remember the
four types? Well we had many of their key
leadership take the OSAI and we began
to see some major changes. So I'll give
you the top line here. As you can see on
the left one of the partners wanted to
be more innovative and results-oriented.
A little less collaborative and
controlling, a little bit more outwardly
focused. Another person actually wanted
to become more structured. A third
one on the right was one of the partners
who really wanted to abandon all those
rules and create self-starters. Here, there was somebody who managed a real
new division who wanted much more
collaboration, teamwork, and innovation
and then one of the other partners
wanted a balance but still moving toward
that Adhocracy in the market. The
question became, what kind of culture did
they really want? And that future leader
saw something very powerful that was
more innovative and empowering but how
are the staff going to actually do it?
What do we do when we learn all of this?
What does this mean for changing your
company? Well we're going through a time
of transformation. The major
transformation taking place in business,
remember we went from mechanization,
water power and steam power, and then we
went to mass production and Henry Ford
creating the assembly line,
adding electricity and processes and
steamrolling ways of getting it done,
then we had the computer in automation
and now we have cyber physical
systems. All kinds of things coming:
blockchain, artificial intelligence,
mechanization, robots; and each type of
culture has helped us adapt, but the
question becomes now what does that mean
for a company going forward today? what
is this all going to do for you? Trust me
that this is not about thinking harder
or sitting in your office.
The real voyage of discovery consists
not in seeking new landscapes but in
having new eyes. I cannot urge you enough
to get out of your office and go see
what's going on with your own customers,
spend time in their own offices, go out
and watch non-customers doing things, see what you can learn even from hanging out
at a baseball game or being a coach for
a little league team. This is the time of
the great accelerator. That blue graph
was the way things were before. Things
emerged, they had a majority, you had a
late majority, and the laggards.
Blockbuster is one of my favorites. They
could have owned Netflix. They didn't see
them as anything other than a nuisance.
Right? You have maybe a Blackberry.
They had no idea what Apple was going to
create. Why? The red is the world today,
it's coming fast.
we used to call it a
fad, you emerge, you surge, and then
you're purged, and then another one comes
along. This is not time to sit still.
And the whole office that you're in and
all the people who are working with you are
probably looking more like the left,
which is Zappos versus the one on the
right which is the way it used to be. Now
with that in mind if you want to take
your talented staff and create a
different type of organization, you're
gonna have to do something. I love this
little cartoon what if we don't change
at all, something magical just happens.
Expect them to throw up four hurdles. A
cognitive hurdle, a motivational hurdle, a
resource hurdle, and a political hurdle.
What could happen? People just throw up
the hurdles. They will tell you I will
change my mind and my behaviors if I see
my leaders colleagues and staff behaving
differently and they mirror each other. I
will change my mind and my behaviors if
I understand what's being asked of me,
and it makes sense. People seek
congruence between what they believe and
why they have to change.
Why matters a lot I will change my mind
and my behaviors if you develop my
talent and skills and teach me new
ways to do things. And I will change my
mind and my behaviors if I see you changing the organization structures, the way we
do things, the rewards and recognition
and the way we celebrate achievements.
You need to change for me to believe I
should as well. This comes out of Vital
Smarts, an award-winning process well
documented and really well researched
about exactly this stuff. There are two
 areas here: motivation and
ability. So how do you change? You need a
process. On the first line, it's personal
how do you motivate them by making the
undesirable desirable, and then how do
you give them the skills so they have
the ability to change? Social, how do you
harness peer pressure so people see each
other doing this and begin to mimic them?
And then how do you create the social
support? The mentors, the coaches, and the
training that they can continue to work
on
and believe that they're doing better
and better. How do you align rewards and
assure accountability, which should not
be underestimated, and then how do you
change the environment and celebrate
what's going on? So let me go into this
in some depth and then I'll wrap this
for you. How do you make the undesirable
desirable? This is not about finding new
people, but at times you're gonna have to.
This is about changing how people see,
fee,l and think about things before they
do it. And it all starts with a new
story that can be shared and lived.
Remember our brains create stories. The
one they have for today and the habits
that drive their day aren't the ones you
want them to have tomorrow. So you have to
visualize a new. Making the
undesirable desirable, you better draw a
big picture of it. Visualize it. I often
ask a client what would you like to see
happen in six months or a year? Visualize
it. Create a big picture, physically, but
begin to see this as something that's
actually going to happen. What will you
have? Will you have an Innovation Lab?
Will you have an idea bank? How will you
begin to build innovation skills so your
people can take an idea and convert it
into an execution. What does this mean
for action? And then develop their skills.
Relevant skills. This isn't sending them
off to a class. This is this is getting a
system in place where people can learn
from each other and people can coach and
mentor them so they can begin to be
accountable for change. Why's. Explain
everything over and over again. When
people know why the change is necessary
they stop resisting. Explaining why shows
them that you care and you have esteem
for them. And then help them get ready
for change.
Get them anticipating it. Begin to have
small preparation for it. Creating
readiness may be essential because that
way they are positive about anticipating
it instead of being resistant to it.
Small winds are so helpful, it builds
skills it's like rehearsal time.
Some things are easy to change. Find them,
change them, and celebrate how well they
did to change them. It's very much practice
time. Then, don't forget you need
accountability you want the entire team
that works together to begin to have
timeframes for changes that they're
going to make sure are complete, design
the follow-up and the reporting,
don't let change be some day, it will
never happen. If in fact you have a date
time by which you'll do something 65 to
70 percent of them will get done. If you
hope, it will never happen
then you need to over communicate
visually this is about pictures people
see and understand better than what they
hear. Words are fine but they process
them in their current brain map, so they
need something new. Share as much as you can regularly and as broadly as possible.
Over determine success. If there's
no information, remember, people will make
up a story. Now make up one where they're
the hero, you're the problem, and they can
tell you why it's not working. I don't
know why but they prefer to undermine
you then help you to succeed. You need
the right measures, make sure you don't
just stick to the old measures, you're
going to have to think about what the
new measures are to succeed, define the
gathering of data and a time frame for
assessing results. Often if you're going
to be a more collaborative innovative
organization how will you know it's
happening? How will you measure it? Every
time somebody really isn't competitive
by themselves without engaging some
others will you mark that in some way?
You know it's a little like Weight
Watchers, you gotta count and take it and
you have to begin to count and then take
your weight at the end of the week. Now
you're going to hold a funeral. Sometimes
it's important to stop something that
people reflect on as being important and
this becomes real important. Respect it,
celebrate the past, but also make the
transition to the future.
The right symbols really matter this
becomes very important. Now let's talk
about symbols. Remember, humans are
symbolic creatures. This is very
important for them to have meaning and
when you're thinking about changing your
culture you ought to think about
changing the meaning of those things
that you're going to celebrate, things
that are important that signify the new
culture, think carefully about what will
we create to recognize the small wins,
the big wins, the new culture. What is it
that's going to be more innovative or
collaborative that you're going to turn
into a ritual of some kind. Humans love
their rituals their stories and the
symbolism. It isn't inconsequential it's
essential. Now what's equally important
is that this is not a gig, so think about
this. People find comfort in their
culture it's safe. They don't like
ambiguity betwixt and between.
They love it even when they're
frustrated by the way it works. You'll
hear it all the time "I really don't like
the way it works but that's the way we
do it here" and their brains hate to
change so do their habits it requires
energy they want you to go a way that's
not fun. But if you can create a change
map strategy you may find that it is fun
and then it's enough fun so that you
have a process to actually do it. So to
take you through the process briefly as
we conclude, starting with the first part
is to visualize the future you're gonna
have to create an image, a story, think of
it as a movie set where you gonna play
all kinds of new acting roles to put it
all together but it's real important
that you think about making the
undesirable desirable you want to be
more innovative or results-oriented or
more collaborative or you want to really
create better processes to take the
efficiency out. What do you want to see
happen, how will you know it is happening?
Explain why over and over again, don't
think that saying it once at a staff
meeting is sufficient. It's necessary for
people to hear the story over and over
as if your marketing and advertising to
them. Plan small wins to learn and test
the results because the sooner they can
see it actually working, for example
let's talk about being more
collaborative. We want to have a whole
different way of making decisions. Really
solving complex problems by engaging
people from different departments. Not in
silos but across the different
departments and we even want to begin to
have customers collaborate with us on
the solutions so they buy into it and in
fact they help us design it better. You
better have something work like that and
then see how it happens. Maybe you can
coach facilitate and trade along the way
but think about all the steps to begin
to motivate and develop the abilities of
the people who you want to do this. Peer
pressure,
this is about what others are doing,
they're gonna watch. Figure out who the
influential people are and engage them
as leaders in the process. If not they
will be very happy to undermine it for
you underneath they will make sure they
sabotage it because they will pretend
that they're in control and you're not
actually they won't pretend they will be.
And you need to overcome that.
Over communicate celebrate hold a
funeral, to say goodbye to past practices,
and you know balance this. Show respect.
You've been doing this for a long time
we respect the way we've done it but we
do
goodbye and starting something new that
we endorse and the metrics matter we're
all data junkies. If you don't have good
metrics and they will figure out ways to
really show that you're not doing a good
job and if you have good metrics it's
gonna be hard to argue with it. I want to
thank you for the opportunity to sharing
with you what we do and how we do it. When it comes to changing organizations
there are other tools that we'll bring
along. Innovation games for example are
great fun but they and they allow us to
help build lots of innovative ideas we
often take people out to go culturally
exploring spend a day in the life of a
customer but those are for other
webinars that we'll share with you. For
today though this is more than enough
for you to start to think about how
perhaps we could help you and what that
might mean in the process. Thanks again
for paying attention and giving us your
thoughts. Bye-bye now.
