Adam Grant interviewed on Eat Sleep Work Repeat (Bruce Daisley) talking about culture change.
I think culture change is possibly the hardest thing for a leader to do
But if you start to ask ‘well tell me a story about something that happened here that wouldn’t elsewhere’. And you do that across a bunch of different organisations. You hear the same kinds of stories over and over again…
So the stories are the are answers to some basic questions like ‘is the big boss human?’ or ‘can the little person get to the top?’ And when when researchers went and did this across a bunch of companies they found on average only about seven questions that define cultures and you could answer to those questions yes or no.
And so you didn’t have that many variations. And then as you do that exercise or what you want to do is you want to go and ask people in different parts of an organisation ‘what is the story about the thing happening here that wouldn’t happen elsewhere?’ And then you look for the common themes, which start to tell you ‘OK is there anything that stands out or is distinctive about this culture?’ And once you identify those if you want to make a change I think probably the best thing you can do is what Chip and Dan Heath would call ‘finding the bright spots’. Which is to say the larger the organisation is the higher the odds that there’s something happening in one pocket of it that already reflects the culture you want to create. And so you’re less trying to change the culture and more trying to spread a subculture that’s already working the way you want it to. Your challenge is to go and discover where that lies and then how to spread their practices.
Adam Grant
