Why culture kills a strategic plan before it even has a chance to start

For many years I understood that the highest form of developing an organization’s future were the elements broadly described as strategic planning. These elements, all of which propel transformation, capture future value, and further your ability to live into your vision for the future, are essential…and they can be killed (and eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner) by your organization’s culture.

We must first understand our organization’s culture before we can comprehensively plan and develop meaningful activities that reach for new heights.

I’ll use a very practical story to express this point.

A few years ago, we began working with a company called Brownsville (not its real name) who was experiencing challenges in developing a successor generation of leaders to provide guidance to the company as the founder was stepping down from forty years at the helm.

Our work began with the founder (helping him map out his transition) and then extended to the new president (and his succession plan), and eventually to the entire leadership team. As we began mapping out strategies and tactics to be deployed, we immediately bumped into the organization’s culture.

Culture wasn’t the language that was used. The language that was used, “let’s check with Joe.” (Not the founder’s real name.) Joe is an incredible entrepreneur and an extremely social leader. Joe had a magnetic knack of engaging you in an idea, helping you see the future created through the implementation of that idea, and inspiring you to join the cause in carrying out the idea.

“Checking with Joe” meant a lot of things. Including:

•    making sure you had the idea correctly formed in your head
•    that you were aligned with your role and implementation within the larger enterprise
•    that resources were being deployed correctly

To use our structure of culture language, an underlying assumption was that “Joe would know what to do, all you had to do was ask him.” As the organization grew and despite his best intentions, Joe’s magnetic personality created the space for many (if not all) decisions to go through him. Perhaps, this was helpful during the founding years, but as the company expanded across the country, Brownsville's culture was already established with Joe at the center.

Underlying assumptions, artifacts, and espoused values all form the basis of how we describe as the structure of an organization’s culture. Shown in the picture below, the structure of culture is deep down in the lower levels of the beach, a part of the bedrock of an organization’s culture.

Structure of an organization's Culture is deeply embedded

The strategies and tactics that were being deployed in the Client’s strategic planning process, were not going to be able to go anywhere, unless we first began to understand the structure and practice of Brownsville’s culture.

As we began to adapt our process to support Brownsville’s leaders to articulate the structure and practice of culture, something interesting happened. People started to open up a little, they began asking more probing questions as to what they desired the culture of Brownsville to be, and perhaps most importantly their ownership of the culture.

This type of culture scenario planning can be extremely helpful to leaders because it creates the opportunity for more systemic and longer-term transformation to take place.

As the leaders of Brownsville began to become more vulnerable with each other, they realized the agency they had in helping form a new culture. They could see the benefits of the current culture and how it served them well in the past…and they could now see how a new culture must also emerge in order for their transition and succession plan to be successful and take hold.

Another reminder of how culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Today’s post comes from a LinkedIn Newsletter feed written by Peter Schein and me called Culture Change Leadership. If you’d like to subscribe please link here to receive it in your feed every other week. 

Mind how you go,

Lon

Lon L. Swartzentruber

Design Group International

Co-CEO & Senior Design Partner 

Along with a notebook and my favorite fountain pen, what’s in my backpack?

Teaming, by Amy Edmondson

I Stand With The Soul of America, by Sir Addison Witt

Rereading The Essentials of Theory U, by C. Otto Scharmer

If you’d like to go deeper in your leadership style, please schedule a call. I’d be honored to listen and learn more about your journey as a leader and where you’d like to go next.