Organisational Culture Change and Business Architecture

Organisational culture is the behavior of humans within an organization and the meaning that people attach to those behaviours. Culture includes the organization's vision, values, norms, systems, symbols, language, assumptions, beliefs, and habits. It is also the pattern of such collective behaviours and assumptions that are taught to new organizational members as a way of perceiving, and even thinking and feeling. Organisational culture affects the way people and groups interact with each other, with clients, and with stakeholders. Ravasi and Schultz (2006) stated that organizational culture is a set of shared mental assumptions that guide interpretation and action in organizations by defining appropriate behaviour for various situations. Although a company may have its "own unique culture", in larger organizations there are sometimes conflicting cultures that co-exist owing to the characteristics of different management teams. Organisational culture may affect employees' identification with an organization. 

(The above definition is taken from Wikipedia. Emphasis is mine.)

 Organisation culture provides an effective ‘rallying force’ in the formative years of an organisation, when the size is small. As organisations grow in size (and complexity, geography, business lines), the organisation culture provides a ‘binding force’ to the group. However, there comes a certain stage (organisation size, spread, complexity) when the rallying/binding force is no longer effective. As organisation grows, it gets increasingly difficult for its constituents (especially for those who have joined the organisation post its formative stage) to associate with its culture. In turn, they find closer affinity to a culture which is exists within his immediate periphery. The larger an organisation, the greater is the dissimilarity between its constituents who are grouped into divisions, teams, departments etc. What happens to the original culture?

 At a certain size, the organisation culture starts getting “eroded”. This may be due to:

1.  The size of organization becomes too big for an individual employee to maintain his personal identity;
2. Too many products, divisions, processes to find a meaningful association with all; 
3. The larger an organisation; the more formal is the communication, and hence, the leadership (perpetrators of the culture) appears more distant. 

 How do employees react in this situation?

1. People need an ideological construct (read culture) to relate to. Once the BIG culture seems abstract, all-encompassing an ‘not-so-relevant’, they form their own ‘little culture’ within the DOMINANT culture 
2. The constituents of the little culture are more closely related to each other (i.e., by performing the same role, being in the same area etc) and hence, find greater affinity and identity in their ‘little culture’ than with the Dominant culture. 
3. Very soon, multiple little cultures become stronger enough to threaten the dominant culture. Organisations react by reinforcing the Dominant culture (or a variant of it), which is not always successful. 

 Here is the problem: First, virtually no one clearly defines what they mean by “culture,” and when they do they usually get it wrong. Second, organisation cultures develop impromptu in the initial years and hence an attempt to change it, in the later years proves an onerous task.

How does culture change? A powerful person at the top, or a large enough group from anywhere in the organization, decides the old ways are not working, figures out a change vision, starts acting differently, and enlists others to act differently. If the new actions produce better results, if the results are communicated and celebrated, and if they are not killed off by the old culture fighting its rear-guard action, new norms will form and new shared values will grow.

The key to changing an organisational culture is alignment of the ‘new’ culture with the little cultures in the organisation. As little cultures have grown, their constituents have more powerful allegiance to the little culture (which is more immediate and visible) than a wider Dominant Culture. A new Dominant culture would not uproot the existing little cultures. Rather any attempt to uproot it has often proved to be counter-productive. Quite often, HR is tasked with culture issues and they are left to change culture, with little or no support from across the organisation. Culture is an organisation-wide issue and a culture change works when most (if not all) constituents voluntarily agree to the new construct. The new construct cannot be perceived (or sold) as an alternative to their immediate (little) culture. Rather, it should be perceived as an extension to the little culture. Implementing bits of culture over a period of time has proved to be successful.

What does NOT work in changing a culture? Some group decides what the new culture should be. It turns a list of values over to the communications or HR departments with the order that they tell people what the new culture is. They cascade the message down the hierarchy, and little to nothing changes.

Where does Business Architecture fit in Organisation Culture change? As change agents, and working closely within ‘little cultures’, Business Architects are best placed to identify the key binding constructs within individual little cultures. It is important that these key constructs (ideas, processes, identity) is not disturbed in the initial stages. More important than the binding forces, are the ‘divisive factors’ – those that make a little culture seem ‘different’ from other such cultures. Once these ‘divisive factors’ are identified and reconstructed in a way that they no longer seem ‘divisive’, it is easier to break down the barriers and create a wider (newer) organisational culture.

For example, in the case of insurance industry, the claims departments (little culture) consider themselves unique and pivotal to the survival of the company, as they are solely responsible for preservation of capital by weeding out fictitious and fraudulent claims. In this construct, the marketing and sales functions seem to work against them. Using the construct (fraud detection process), and by identifying how claims fraud detection processes build upon the earlier ‘selection’ of customers done by marketing; and in turn, how marketing is dependent upon claims’ inputs to improve their selection of customers, the divisive forces can be diminished. The eventual aim of the new culture would be to allow the employees to associate with an organisation which is there to protect genuine losses incurred by a customer.

Business architects can work very closely with the HR team to identify, articulate and provide examples using the constructs of little culture, identify the ‘divisive’ constructs and re-architect a new culture which is aligned to the little cultures. The new organisational culture – articulated using little culture constructs – are easily palatable to the constituents. 

A good starting point can be the building of common frameworks across little cultures. For example, developing an organisation wide process framework which shows a same set of activities being performed across different groups (little cultures) – for different purposes, but geared towards the same aim. To resurrect the earlier example from Insurance, the Anti Money Laundering (AML) checks, credit checks done by sales and the fraud detection steps in operations or claims can be depicted using a set of common steps (albeit with small difference in activities), using the same set of reference data (as in an organisational database for known fraud cases). This would potentially encourage the two little cultures to co-operate and share ideas. 

In summary, I feel Business Architecture can play a definitive role in architecting an organisational culture (which may be based on a new target operating model) by using existing tools of his trade. I would welcome the views of my readers on this.