Cultural Architecture
Culture is what we do; the spirit in the machine; the secular, business equivalent to a soul. It’s pivotal to every company’s success.
And yet, our usual playbook for delivering meaningful cultural change-- to scaling our grand ambitions across larger and larger organizations-- has thus far been… meh: heavy on comms about values, lots of alignment exercises, and pointed articulations of north stars and principles-- which… to be honest... are like catnip to executives.
These connective exercises *are* valuable as starter conversations but they could use some help in translating our cultural ambitions into sustained, sustainable action.
While I’m convinced that thoughtful comms-- framed in carefully crafted language-- do inspire employees, where we could all use more help is in the daily details of that future-state operating discipline. Why? Because comms tend to leave the daily operating details to the readers-- to managers and front-line employees who, without exception, already have full time jobs and more pointedly, entrenched habits that prove themselves effective every day.
And as we all know, existing habits eat cultural comms for breakfast.
Most of the comms I’ve experienced (mine included) have a funny way of tickling people’s confirmation bias-- the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories. Culture-focused comms especially trigger the comfortable interpretation of new corporate values as a confirmation of one's existing beliefs or practices.
The lesson there: details make or break transformations. Not the details left to employees to figure out. But the details that should have never been left to them. The details that change our daily operating discipline. The details that help remove the behavioral triggers that reinforce old habits every day. The details that help address the structural issues that cause those triggers.
Those details don’t change hearts and minds. That might be too grand an ambition.
They change something more powerful-- our habits.
Giving the Discipline a Name
The word architecture-- in the corporate context-- is about intentionality and systems thinking. It’s about seeing the whole and deliberately rationalizing and simplifying the complexity that builds up over time. It’s the governed, organizational answer to unintentional drift-- the dust that inevitably gathers on legacy decisions.
Think about architecture at its best: application portfolio rationalization or front-to-back process redesign.
That’s what culture needs.
“Cultural Architecture” is a great word pairing because culture change at scale needs intentionality, structure, replicability-- an operating discipline-- so that it can effectively drive tangible behavior change with a real sense of urgency.
And those last three words are important because there’s a new age quality to our expectations around behavior change. We expect employees to adopt a company’s cultural ambitions at whatever pace is comfortable to them.
After all, we’re modern white-collar adults. We’re not factory workers, nor do we aspire to be.
But... maybe.... we should.
Can Business Culture be “Manufactured?”
I know, the word is so... late 18th century. Factories. Coal power. Urchins with a Cockney accent. “Please sir, I want so’ mo’.”
As a techie-at-heart, the only way to make it even remotely sexy is to steampunk it. Or to add dancing robots. Or reimagine it on an asteroid.
Eh. Even on an asteroid, my imagination still puts soot on the little astronaut’s face.
We have such contempt for the language of the industrial age. So much that we willingly fall into the squishy, ineffective language of our as-yet-unnamed new age… where everything is organic. My least favorite word in the business lexicon. Zero signals of structure or discipline; of intentionality or replicability.
We need a new language so the industrial-age baby doesn’t get thrown out with the irradiated bathwater. Because that baby will help us better manage change in large, complex organizations. She’ll help us to consistently scale culture at the speed of modern business.
Soooo… in the spirit of the Noah Principle, let’s make this tangible.
Using a Factory Model to Create a Resilient Culture: A Case Study
My shop is at the tail end of a large-scale, overwhelmingly-successful culture-changing campaign to address end-of-life hardware and software across a massive technology portfolio.
The table was set with the usual comms, comms, and more comms. There wasn’t a single town hall or group meeting over the course of the two-year time span that didn’t stress how important resiliency was to the company. We published thought pieces, sent out well-crafted newsletters, and did our version of all the morning shows.
But our leadership knew that that was only a starting point. To be successful, we needed a thorough, repeatable, scalable — and most critically — daily-actionable process. And to everyone’s horror, we called that process our factory model.
The factory in question laid out a 6-step process that every affected team needed to undergo in order to achieve full resiliency:
Assessment-- The initial analysis phase to understand deficiencies in need of remediation. The expected output: an inventory of application dependencies and, for each, when hardware and software would reach end of life (EOL).
Disposition-- Based on information collected during assessment, the plan of action to remediate EOL risk. Options included rehosting, refactoring, revising, rebuilding, or retiring the application.
Design-- Based on decisions made during the disposition phase, the plan of attack to reach the new resilient state.
Build-- Execution of the design.
Test-- Testing of the solution prior to production migration.
Deploy-- Go live for the new solution.
Think massive scalability but applied to culture. The factory required that every app owner commit to dates to complete each of those 6 steps, with two requirements:
1) The program had a hard deadline by which all work needed to be wrapped up.
2) Every technology organization needed to meet a bell curve distribution for its resiliency activity to avoid the December 31st procrastinator’s syndrome.
Our commitments were pledged in a central system, viewable by all. This allowed for some autonomy but kept teams accountable. Each of the 6 steps required not just a date commitment but also a comprehensive laundry list of activities, artifacts, and tollgates.
Having defined milestones, deliverables, and targets was the only way this was going to translate from cultural ambition to operating discipline, from what we say to what we do-- while respecting our principles of making it all repeatable, scalable, and transparent.
--
As I said, we’re in the final days of the program now and the amazing thing is that we didn’t just execute an enormously large and complex body of work. We did it planfully. We changed the work that we do every day-- our actual culture-- to embrace a resiliency mindset.
Dust might gather in the years to come but that’s expected. It’ll get the daily cleaning of an operational discipline that will outlive the folks who first lived it. Resiliency-- as an artifact of culture-- will live and breathe in evergreen application design and vigilance.
A few deliberate, meaningful culture hacks not only got us where we needed to go, they changed our belief system.
That approach is serving-- and will continue to serve-- as the blueprint for our other cultural ambitions. We’re now applying the same model to transform tens of thousands of manually-heavy operational processes into a rationalized inventory of streamlined workflows. We’re applying the model to everything from improving learning to transforming onboarding.
And at the heart of it all-- two powerful ideas brought together deliberately: cultural architecture.
Final Thoughts
Who does the work of getting culture adopted?
This isn't a trick question. I’m not looking for a clever answer like “our employees themselves” or “every manager who relentlessly reinforces our values.”
In my experience, it's usually smart, experienced professionals in HR, corp comm, marketing or business administration (i.e., the office of the COO or CAO). They organize all the usual activities around culture adoption.
And while there’s definitely a training and skills-development dimension to cultural transformation at scale, comms-- as a strategy-- are only as effective as their ability to turn theory and ambition into habit.
You can remind me relentlessly what my target behavior is-- under what conditions I hit the big red risk button-- but unless I’m pressing it with regularity, it's not what I do. It’s not culture. It’s cultural ambition.
We hand those ambitions to our learning professionals-- who might be brilliant storytellers but don’t have dominion over what employees do every day.
They are not exactly “the top” pushing down or “the bottom” pushing it up. They’re coming at it from the side-- asking managers to help make the comms real.
And in my experience, social change doesn’t happen from the side.
--
The case here isn’t about whether we need mission statements or values exercises.
We do.
It’s not arguing that we need less comms or fewer uncomfortable conversations.
It's really suggesting that the most uncomfortable conversation that we’re failing to have is that we have a lot to learn from humbler blue collar professions.
We too are a factory. We just need to manufacture some humility.
LinkedIn Tease:
I've been toying with the ideas in this piece for a while now but I've been hesitant to write anything down because I feared that I wouldn't do them justice. I finally gave in this past weekend and I'm happy to say that all my fears were confirmed.
The main idea? Two words.
[Ahem.]
Cultural architecture.
[I’d drop the mic but I’ve found that it damages the mic.]
Before you read the piece (on why it’s a good idea), here’s why it’s lacking: it combines two floofy words to get a larger, floofier floof.
Floof one: Culture. Is it me or do we never hear about what culture eats for lunch? Because strategy can’t be that filling.
Floof two: Architecture… which as a concept is about as meta as the business world will tolerate, and even then, begrudgingly so. The discipline itself is valuable-- the way a pre-meeting is valuable-- the way a good conversation about conversations is valuable. You know, in theory.
If excellence had a center of excellence, it would be Architecture. Again in theory.
The point here is that conceptually “cultural architecture”-- as a word pairing-- as a contribution to business thinking-- is the opposite of say… “chocolate cocaine.” It lacks conviction.
But I still think there’s something there.
Feel free to tear the piece to shreds. Maybe that’ll reveal to me how to improve the idea (or the storytelling around it).