"One of the biggest challenges in cultural change is dealing with its complexity...
The layered nature of culture makes it difficult to link cause and effect. Only in hindsight can we assess the situation and come up with an explanation. How accurate that explanation is remains to be seen.
This creates three challenges in cultural change:
Cultural problems are discovered too late
Cultural problems are misdiagnosed
Cultural problems are addressed incorrectly
This is evident in many examples of organizations where undesirable behavior has been allowed to persist for long periods, sometimes with disastrous consequences. In almost all of these cases, actions were taken too late based on dubious conclusions and solutions. You cannot fully address cultural problems with a flawed approach. To understand this complexity (as much as is truly possible), it is better to use a multi-model approach.
By examining reality from different perspectives and evaluating these insights together in terms of their explanatory value, you can achieve a deeper understanding of culture. For example, take the model below. This comes from a branch of social sciences known as critical realism.
Here, we see that culture can be understood on observable, non-observable, and underlying levels in relation to each other. Take, for example, the act of not addressing undesirable behavior.
This behavior can be observed (observable and experienced).
Next, you can investigate whether it is related to a lack of psychological safety in team interactions (non-observable).
That lack of safety can be explained by factors such as team size, hierarchy, and composition (underlying mechanisms).
This allows you to create a much richer picture of a situation and think about interventions on different levels. However, this requires awareness of the assumptions you make about how these levels interact. It is therefore useful to work with explicit assumptions (or hypotheses).
This way, the diagnosis of a layered cultural problem becomes much more thorough!
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