The initiative is announced with a name. There are sessions, a set of values, laminated cards, a survey at the beginning and another at the end. Eighteen months later the survey has improved slightly and nothing about the organization has changed.
This outcome is so consistent that it is worth treating as structural rather than as a series of poorly executed attempts.
The category error
A programme treats culture as a message to be transmitted. Culture is a body of precedent, assembled from observed behaviour and observed consequences.
Precedent cannot be changed by communication. It can only be changed by new instances that contradict the old ones, and each of those has to occur in the ordinary operation of the organization at a moment when the contradiction costs something.
Which means a programme is aimed at the wrong object entirely. It is not badly executed communication; it is well-executed communication applied to something that does not respond to communication.
Five predictable failures
Assigned to a function. A department can run sessions. It cannot alter what happens when a deadline slips or who gets promoted, and those are the mechanism. Culture assigned to anybody other than the people who administer consequences has been assigned to somebody without the instrument.
Values chosen by consensus. A group asked to agree on values will converge on terms nobody can object to, which means terms with no operative content. Integrity, excellence, respect. Nothing follows from any of them, which is why they were agreeable.
Too many. No leadership can enforce twelve commitments consistently. Enforcement becomes selective and teaches that the real rule is discretion.
Announced before anything changed. The launch establishes a claim the organization can immediately test against the first difficult decision. When the decision goes the old way, the programme has supplied fresh evidence that official language means nothing.
Measured by sentiment. The survey improves because a programme is running and people are being asked about values, which is pleasant. The measured improvement is a response to the measurement.
The cost of a failed one
Worse than neutral, and this is the part that is usually missed.
A failed culture programme adds an entry to the organization’s record of initiatives that were announced and quietly abandoned. It teaches that leadership talks about things it does not do, which is itself a cultural fact and a durable one.
It also spends the vocabulary. An organization that has been through two of these cannot use the word culture seriously for years, because it has been established as the label for a thing that happens and then stops.
What moves it instead
Four levers, all of which operate through consequences rather than communication, and none of which is a programme.
Who gets promoted, and what is said about why. The strongest available signal, and the one leaders are most reluctant to use deliberately.
What is enforced when enforcement costs something. One instance of a standard applied to somebody it was expensive to apply it to.
Who supervises. Culture is administered locally. Changing who holds those positions changes the culture more reliably than anything said to the people in them.
What the leader visibly does. Particularly on the occasions where their position would have permitted an exemption.
None of these has a launch. All of them are slow, and their effect appears in retrospect rather than on a schedule.
One thing, unannounced
The version that works looks unlike a programme in every respect.
Choose the single behaviour that matters most, stated concretely. Not a value — a behaviour, such as problems get raised within a week of being noticed. Do not announce it as an initiative.
Then enforce it, visibly, on the first occasion it is violated by somebody it is awkward to enforce against. Say the reasoning each time, applied to the specific case. Keep doing it for eighteen months past the point where you have become bored of the subject.
The organization will notice within about a quarter, and what it notices will be a change in what actually happens rather than a claim about what is valued. That distinction is the whole of this entry.
Where a programme can help
One narrow case, worth naming so this is not read as a blanket dismissal.
Where the behaviour has already changed, and the organization needs shared language for something it is already doing, a communication effort can consolidate it. That is the reverse of the usual sequence: the programme follows the change rather than attempting to produce it.
Used that way it is not a culture programme. It is a description, and descriptions are credible in a way announcements are not.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD