The company culture gap fallacy. (Life is what happens while you are busy closing the gap).

The company culture gap fallacy goes like this…

(1) There is a situation (or culture) today, or status quo, that has problems or needs improvement or needs to change.

(2) There is a desired change to a new and different place.  The discussion is where to go, what to change, what to achieve, and what that new situation/culture would look like.

(3) There is, or there will be, a process to get there (which has many names, ‘change’ or ‘transformation’ being the most used terms).

It makes perfect sense for our rational and logical, left side of the brain. ‘Closing the gap’ between what we have and the place we want to be, or should be, is the name of the game. We even have a management buzzword for it: gap analysis.

It makes sense.

• Clearly, for people sitting in (1) who sell tools, models and assessments, to analyse in detail what is wrong with the situation of today.
• Obviously, for people in (2) who need to map all the desired ‘outcomes’.
•  And certainly for people sitting in (3) who need to provide the gladiators of ‘transformation’ (or contract the gladiators out), its mechanics, ‘the project management’.

It is a perfectly logical, ‘destination model‘ with an attractive and sellable rationale. But there are 3 problems.

• The problem with (1) is that, although it makes sense to have a good picture of the situation, and go deeper and broader in understanding the context, people spend a disproportionate amount of time on this - because the accumulation of ‘data’ is always rewarding, it keeps people busy and gives a sense of ‘doing something’.

 The keyword is ‘disproportionate’. There is always a data finding threshold beyond which you don’t learn anything new. The more time you spend on analysis, the more the situation moves on.

Consultants have a habit of unconsciously (?) imagining that the world stops once they start working on 'the assessment'. Hey culture, stop, because we are going to start a culture change programme. Don’t mess with it now.  Don’t change yet.

• The problem with the destination (2) has multiple angles. The description of the desired new culture is important but, unfortunately, it’s probably impossible to have a descriptive painting of a landscape with all the bits and pieces, the trees, the houses and the people on the hill. Not to know ‘exactly’ were to go is considered a mortal sin in the traditional leadership territory. In fact, the stereotype of a good leader includes ‘to have a clear vision’, as people say.

Again, as in (1) a disproportionate amount of time is dedicated to the description.  But because of the ‘moving target’ (that culture is) the true description of movement can only be directional. The famous saying ‘If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there’ is always there in waiting, trying to be helpful. Sure, but it’s also a colossal management platitude.

• When (3) is triggered, the how, (unfortunately in many cases by calling in Big Consulting, selling you pre-fabricated conclusions to choose from) what is going to be put in place always seems suspiciously detached from the exercise done in (1). The ‘solution’ seems to have been in waiting. It then takes on a life of its own and usually comes with a name such as ‘agile’.

A small detail, since the ending of the analysis 6 months before, time had not stopped waiting for the warriors of (3) or implementors and the river of culture had not stopped. But Big Consulting is not very fond of Heraclitus (‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man’) and converts the river into a static pond with manageable borders.

When people take the famously called ‘gap analysis’ approach, closing the gap, or filling the gap, is the logical thing to aim for. Except that the gap is not static, it keeps moving (smaller, bigger, different, East and West…) But that is not the fault of the Big Consultants, surely, so better to work with the ‘known gap’ in the PowerPoints, even if it’s a bit old.

 In the past, and present, I have irritated people (mostly good people with good intentions, the others don’t even get irritated) by saying that, in culture change terms, what one has to do is largely independent from a detailed historical analysis.  

The surgeon in front of a broken femur would find it important to know about the circumstances of the car crash, but a detailed knowledge of the past history of car owners, the type of car and the road regulations, would not change the type of medical intervention needed.

 It may seem an inappropriate comparison, but I have been part of endless discussions with leaders in companies about what the previous CEO did, how the merger did not go well, or the unhelpful role of the Unions during the last crisis. The rational mind says, ‘I need to know all of this in order to move forward’. Granted, I’ll give you an afternoon to find out. Then we need to move on towards ‘the now and the next’ (a terminology we use in our Viral Change™ programmes).

The need for a super detailed account of the past as a precondition to move, is a complete red herring. I haven’t always come out with a great deal of popularity after this discussion.

 I will conveniently blame it on my background in Behavioural Sciences. In caricature, what gets reinforced now, increases in frequency. What is not, will fade. To reinforce collaborative behaviour and create it as a key feature of the culture, for example, we need to reinforce collaboration (recognise, acknowledge, make it visible, reward, exemplify, role model, spread the word and dozens of other things) now.

An historical account of why collaboration is weaker than it should be, even a dozen explanations of how we got to where we are today, will not change one bit what needs to be done (reinforced) now.

 There are many people who will have antibodies against this approach on the grounds of being, at the very least, oblivious to the past, let alone disrespectful and any other qualifiers. But, actually, this pragmatic and behavioural approach which allows you to ‘move’ (whose etymological roots includes the notion of ‘push away’, or get rid of the impediments, and for me ‘the past’ is one) is an incredibly healthy source of defining a shared future.

As Logan Roy, the fictional CEO of ‘Succession’ put it: ‘the past, oh the past! The problem with the past is that there is always so much of it’.

Actually, the risk that, in the process, one will ignore the past, is close to zero. But in moving forward mode (not in over-analysis mode) you rediscover the past. You refer to and embrace it without even thinking about it. But then you are on the move.

In over-analysis mode, you re-create and invent the past, you dwell on it, whilst the present bypasses you. It’s then a permanent catching up game. Speaking of gaps, some people live in a permanent, self-inflicted one.

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www.thechalfontproject.com

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I can be reached at leandro-herrero@thechalfontproject.com

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