Today's book addresses the role of communication and cultural change efforts within organizations, especially during periods of transition, mergers, technological innovations, and globalization. Our guest includes a development of nature and function of organizational cultures. Discussion of the role of leadership and providing visions and framing organizational events, investigations of ethical issues, and careful examination of the importance of member involvement in change processes.
The book was initially developed as the electronic text for an online course in organizational culture and culture change as part of an executive master's program at Seton hall university. The success with that course led to the development of a book to aid students and professionals work with organizational cultural change.
i managed to find a copy of that book and i'm so glad i did and it's a pleasure to welcome the author of leading organizations through transition communication and cultural change stanley deets. Welcome to the show Thank you so much.
Stan i thought we'd get started first by explain the origin of the book because i gave a little bit of origin there but we're spending half an hour going down many rabbit holes, talking about all the swim lanes that you've swam in over the years but let's give a little bit of context of your journey first before we get into the book. . This book was written some time ago and partly it was a matter of of a lot of people talking about cultural change.
And a number of organizations talk about culture. And I would ask them, what do you mean by culture? And when they talked about cultural change, what do you mean by that? And there's two things that kept coming up in those conversations. One is they really thought of culture as a kind of thing that you have.
. and so the having of it meant that you could manipulate it, you could do it and so forth, and trying to convince them that, that culture really is something that you are, , it is a matter of the ways in which you actually go about working and doing things, is very important within these contexts. , and so first of all, , it was playing with that idea. And the second what I discovered was that Culture really was a word they were using when they had nothing else to explain what was happening.
And so it wasn't a very precise term. It was really the absence of any other explanation means we'll call that culture. , and so around this idea of trying to get clear to people that culture is something that you are, the ways in which you be in an organization, , and to try to get, clear on this, very idea here. That the culture really is something we can look at. It's not just a absent area. It's not a black box somewhere that you just glomp everything into.
Those two interests were really what led me to be working more and more with culture. The Seton Hall opportunity was simply a case of Fairly early on, some programs were starting to think about what online education for executive masters would look like, because executive masters didn't have time to come to classes and so forth. You had, and they were particularly looking at a number of people that were very successful in their jobs. But didn't have a master's degree in business.
And, there's a funny world out there that you can be the best engineer in the world, but not having a master's degree puts a ceiling. And so they bump into these things. And, and many of them, of course, were have families. There were a number of women who were trying to maintain a lot of other connections around things. And so, so Seton Hall was thinking about this in the sense of let's do something that people can do at 2am in the morning.
And, and, and really thought about this as a course for somebody to do in the wee hours of the morning in which we had all these chat rooms and the chat rooms themselves were extraordinarily interesting where I could enter into these kind of asynchronous discussions that people were taking place based in incredibly rich experiences. And, the people on the ground know what's happening in organizations.
The people at the top frequently have these more, relatively more abstract ideas, and they frequently finance people, but the people on the ground understand why we're reoccurring problems are occurring, right? Or why it is that this safety issue is not fixed. They understand the tensions in a different way. And so it was this real fascinating thing between trying to present material.
that was legitimate as a master's and to get involved in these kind of discussions and the book really grew out of that. The master's course is much more outlining and the book then became, okay, what are the questions they're raising? What are the things that they don't understand or that are difficult for people to understand at the level of where the work is done in the organization? These are not the people going to seminars by gurus to talk about culture.
These are people that are living culture in their workplace every single day. And so the book was really written for them. Let's think about a mid level professional that has sort of been topped out because, they don't have a Harvard business degree. And they're sitting there smart, able to do things in this kind of messy conflictual place that they exist in.
This would be a book to help them navigate their space and to engage in the kind of changes at the level which they might have some control. It's a great book and it stood the test of time as well, which is great. , it's still very, very relevant, if not more relevant today than it was when he wrote it because of all those issues that I mentioned in the introduction. But I thought we'd systematically go through the book. So Stan has kindly given up. Two episodes for us.
So we're going to do as much as we can chapter one to five today, and then chapter six to 10 the next day. Well, let's get started into managing hearts, minds, and souls of the employees with inside the organizations. One of the things you stay right at the start of the book is for the past few decades, this need has been loosely conceptualized.
As managing the corporate culture john clemens in nineteen eighty six trace the western world's concern with corporate culture to a funeral oration by Pericles right back in four thirty one bc i thought that'd be a great way to open the show. Yeah, earlier than that examples in China and every other place. Even yoga, I would argue is a beginning of an understanding of culture. And so we've for a long time understood that, that, when you try to control people, they will resist.
, and so what we were doing, and this happens in every household, right? When you raise a child. You are simultaneously trying to control and make them independent. So every household conversation to me is culture. Because ultimately what you want, in some sense, I'll jokingly refer to this, you ultimately want the child to do on their own what you otherwise would have to tell them to do. That's when you call them an adult. And that's an enculturation process.
That's not a bunch of rules and instructions because you can't be in all the complex places that a child will be. You can't be in the world they will grow up into, right?
And so what you're really doing, even as a parent, and this had to be known from the very first moments of civilization, That even as a parent, if this thing is going to work, you've got to have some way that the person internalizes something so that they do on their own what is good for the community, what is good for the family.
And so I think the ancient origin of culture, we can trace it to a particular kind of writing, but the concept of culture , is one of the most fundamental human problems. And that is, how do we create a situation where we can coordinate actions at a distance?
Without feeling we have to do surveillance and control in which the people have considerable capacity to customize their choices to the circumstances they're in, and still be guided by something that helps coordinate and work with the community. And so for me, , the concept of culture is one of the most fundamental things that we learned as we start living in it, even in the most tribal situations.
Absolutely and i was thinking about tribal situations real actually absolutely tribal i was reading a book called raising boys a guy called steve Biddulph it's a brilliant book and he also went on to write one about raising girls but he talked about when the child is around thirteen. That they usually go through this rite of passage where they go and stay out in the wild themselves. And then all the men of the community go and scare them and they get through that night.
And, and it's this kind of moment of, as you said, what will they do? How will they Stan up to that moment, et cetera. And it's one of the big challenges with. Having it too soft for children at the moment because they don't build that resilience yeah, it's an interesting trap, right? And that's the reason why we make morality here also a very important issue.
Because when we talk about these things like culture, we're not only just talking about how people behave and how they fit in the community. We're talking about what kind of human being we're creating. What is the agency and autonomy we're giving to them?
And I think the kind of liminal thing that, is done in so many of the tribal situations, where the person was betwixt and between and they get into this space where they actually learn to Stan up for themselves and to be a human being, is something that is very important, right? But it's also, you have to remember that those cultures are also, misogynistic. Those cultures were also very controlling in their ways of doing things that were tend to be very distrustful.
So that was a method of inculcating a particular kind of culture based in the becoming of a man that isn't necessarily, so I don't fault today in the sense that we are trying today to create a person who's resilient in a different way. And who has a different way of connecting to the community, which may be different than developing a strong agency.
In fact, it may be, in fact, developing a very strong cooperative orientation from the start, in which sending you to the woods and scaring you may not be the best way of getting it. my children. It was supposed to happen this weekend, Yeah, right.
It's an interesting trap between the notion of defending this sense of agency and the sense of strength and the personal Stamina to Stan up for yourself and of course to believe in your community and to be accepting of difference And these are very much the tensions of being human I'm going way off my notes here, but I even started on them, . It's a good sign. I was thinking about how later on, right.
So you start talking about if you're a leader trying to instill a certain type of culture with inside the organization, say for example, , you're trying to instill the acceptance of failures or certain types of failures are okay. If they're experimental, if they're not, life's on the line type of thing for you to be able to do that as a leader. You too have to have that resilience. The same as a parent you can't really espouse those values but not have them yourself, No, that's right.
I mean, you hear parents tell people, their children, I want you to be responsible and make choices, but they're not at all willing to accept the fact that the person did in fact make a choice because it wasn't the choice they would have made. It had consequences that they, so yeah, I think it is always a reciprocal relationship here. And it, and, and I think we often, because we don't think systemically, frequently miss the reciprocity.
In these relationships that to expect resilience is to be resilient or you will never be able to endure the other person's experimental ways that they have to achieve it. i promise to order the promise will get to the book one last thing was, because i'm speaking to the guru of communication here and i'm gonna share links to some of the videos of stan years back where he talks about other.
Critical theories of communication but one of the big things and i want to make sure we get this in early because people drop off in in the show i see that in the youtube statistics by the way and on spotify. There's a lot more to keep them there, right? What are the things done is i want to mention this when whenever i have an argument say with my wife.
I'm the kids around i will tell the kids afterwards i go it's normal for people to have an argument it's actually healthy because bottling it up and rushing out frustrated and take it out on the dishes or something like that is not a healthy relationship and i want to say that because that is something that is.
So alien to our culture we tend to avoid this and it's something that's critical for innovation to have those positive arguments where you listen to the other side of the party, where we should be teaching this to children how to communicate one of the things I've done in companies, and I never had the guts to do this to my kids, but, , part of the notion of conflict is one thing to tell people that it's normal and, we're going to do these things, but turn the question once in a while.
And that is to turn to the people that watch the argument and say, how did we do? I mean, the simple question of, we can engage in a conversation about the quality of our arguments, in some sense situates the importance of argument, the naturalness of argument, better than telling people. that this is what we do. And if you can imagine the children's face by actually being able to do a critique session on their parents capacity to argue, it would be, I think, incredibly valuable for both sides.
Because parents don't necessarily hear what the kids are hearing. When they argue and open up, the notion of conflict itself is a normal thing that we can talk about and we can do it better and worse. And I can talk about why it is. We should choose times and places where we argue rather than just have it happen when it happens.
these are incredibly interesting conversations that can be had in the workplace that are often not had, because it's not just that the conflict now means it's awkward and we don't know what to do. But it's also frequently just put aside. Oh, they had a bad day, or they, and we don't get the learning from it. Because every conflict has a learning. And it's one of the most important learnings almost always has been that I've seen, is that the conflict we're having is not the conflict we have.
, and once you start talking about how did we do, you get closer and closer to the idea. We weren't really fighting about what we needed to fight about. , and let's get that on the table because that is critical to organizational success. brilliant brilliant well now that's my weekend sorted i've cancelled the scaring my child i'm gonna have an argument and let them watch stanley. I won't record it and play it as an episode of the show. You comment on their arguments all the time, right?
You keep telling them, fight, you shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do, and I think this is one of the important lessons of organization is to open up the notion of the engagement of ourselves with each other. So manage it isn't a know all. I mean, for me, the most important cultural change that takes place is when an employee understands that they're part of trying to determine how we should operate here. Because that really enhances their commitment. It enhances the quality of their work.
It enhances the quality of information that gets transmitted within the organization. Every aspect about organizational life is improved by the notion that we're willing to have conversations about what did you see. And how might we have done that better? Brilliant feedback is a gift and i often think about that like it's feedback not getting feedback is so frustrating because. It's like the equivalent of putting on lipstick without a mirror so you need a third party that's Staning there that.
Isn't overly invested but is invested somewhat and i think that's one of the gifts of having a facilitator Stan as well it's so useful It's important not only that they're there to be able to provide feedback and conversation, but we know that we will have a different argument with an observer than we do without them. It's, even the literature on kids watching television know that they watch the show differently when their parent is in the room.
Then when they're not because we are very sensitive to, the presence of somebody now shifts the ways in which we understand and the way we interpret actions that are taking place because we hear it simultaneously through our ears and their ears, wow. Laughing at jokes, a nude scene.
When you were a child, I remember watching Dallas as a child with my parents and not knowing to look, should I look or should I not Yeah, because you're already processing partly by their relationship with you as well as your relationship to it. And I think understanding that is very important, and part of it is also why we, when you're running, you like to run with somebody else because you will run differently with a partner than you do alone.
And so I think, getting that social part of an organization. That it's okay to watch our fight. We don't have to do it in private. Stan? I think we're going to need more than two episodes, man. Oh, I'm sorry. Just to shut up. I mean, I love it, man. I'd go all day. Okay, I'm going to go back to the origins because there was a shift in how us companies in particular.
Start to show up and i wanted to touch on that for audience to bring them up to speed cuz this i find this fascinating and maybe i'm just a nerd, what you said in the book in the late nineteen seventies managers in the us so increasing economic difficulties in their companies largely arising from what they thought was japanese competition. Even superficial analyses revealed that cultural features were a major reason why Japanese workers were more productive and their products of higher quality.
At that time, the stronger clan like corporations and corporate cultures of Japan provided product innovations and worker dedication unmatched by US companies. American managers rushed to learn the Japanese way. And companies in the U S with strong cultures were suddenly highlighted. There was a shift and then academics and people started to write about this. Consultants started to focus on this more and more. So there was a huge shift back in the seventies.
the late 70s coming into the early 80s, I think 1981 had three or four books done on corporate culture. It's just, bang, right? And yeah, it was a moment. And I believe that normally that's what takes place. We have these kind of sea changes, paradigmatic changes around a crisis, and I think the U. S. business for a lot of different reasons. It can be centered in the auto industry because there is most obvious. But you also remember in the late 70s, we had incredibly high interest rates.
We had a stagnation of the economy. We had lots of things taking place and a lot of these had nothing to do with what people were blaming it on. There was suddenly the availability of extra money because of credit cards, more than government spending. But no one ever talks about that, that the money supply expands rapidly when you give people a month delay in paying it, these incredible things are taking place. Place here that we didn't talk about.
And there was also, of course, coming outta the seventies, an incredible critique of the kind of management culture that was taking place. Suddenly a lot of more diversity was taking place. It was a change population. I think about, the managers at that time where managers coming outta World War II and the US won World War II from the Stanpoint of the us and they did so because they had a superior organizational scheme. We elected a general president.
You have to think about how strongly at that moment, we thought about, organizations coming out of the military model of command and control. , so many things happened in the United States out of the war. For example, intelligence testing really wasn't done until the war. But when you recruit a million people, how do you decide who the officers are going to be when you've got two weeks to do it?
We developed all these personalities, you think about the tremendous impact in the America because of the economy and so on and so forth, industrial strength, everything was a post war phenomenon.
By 1979, We're a long ways from the war and the, we are suddenly realizing the industries that worked on command and control, that worked on the kind of model that presumably won the war, which, it's debatable where that model had ended, just winning the war because we found that model really fails in a lot of other wars. But that model was beginning to die.
It was a model coming out of a period of time dealing with an incredible industrial expansion and a world that no one else had the industrial capacity United States had because most of the world was bombed out. And so all of a sudden, all these other companies, and no surprise that Japanese would, and the Germans, , tremendous advantage, right? When you're suddenly building everything anew.
United States had all the industrial capacity, but they had all the new technologies and all the new ways of working because they built it after the war. And so it's no surprise. There's so many factors, it's easy to give a nice clean story about what happened, but there were so many factors coming into play at a moment. It's no surprise.
That when we came into the 80s, all of a sudden management was looking at itself and looking at the inefficiencies of bureaucracy, looking at all the problems of bureaucracy. Culture was as much a critique of bureaucracy as it was an advancement of a new idea. It was an understanding that this model is too big and too heavy and too overburdened. Not unlike the army that suddenly leaves the war and has too many generals, right? You're in this kind of a new situation.
And so the Japanese were the easy one to pick on because in the auto industry, they beat us and they beat us big time. GM was losing the market shares like crazy, Ford was losing. And so it's no surprise at that moment, everybody's writing books about it. Everybody's trying to jump on quickly onto the bandwagon. All the academics start doing it.
And the academics were talking about culture in a very different way than business were, because academics were talking about it and it's more this sense of it is us, rather than it is something we have and we have to manipulate and change in some way, which is really the old control model put on top of culture, right? And so, this was a historical moment. And it, it created its own, we suddenly were loving IBM and other more tight.
Strong culture places, of course, by the late 80s, all these companies are also failing. IBM is suddenly losing market shares to everybody else. And precisely for the very same reasons that they succeeded here. We're now finding that they're failing there. They can't do the innovations and so forth because they have such an IBM way of doing things that you can't do it. Others were having a different effect.
one of the other crises that sort of took place is that the new understanding of culture and the flattening of organizations that came with that, all of a sudden led us to having too many middle managers. And one of the interesting crises in the United States was suddenly the thinning of middle managers. Which had an effect economically because now college students most likely job was to move into middle management. Those jobs weren't there anymore.
And so you suddenly start, we started developing entrepreneurial cultures. , think about the number of things we developed because of a cultural shift that took place, needing a significantly different culture, okay? And I don't want to go too long into it, but I think we always have to understand these historical events is far more complex than the stories we make of them. Fantastic. Stan, I love the serendipity that happens from the show.
Oftentimes I've read something before I've interviewed somebody and these ideas marinate and fuse together. And one of the great experiences I've ever had on the show was to interview in a nine part series, the founder of Visa, Dee Hock, the late Dee Hock, brilliant guy. He was a mentor of mine wrote the forward to my book, but he talked in his book, the birth of the chaotic age, he talked about this idea of the machine metaphor.
And, I grabbed a quote here just to read to you, because I thought that as you were saying this about the whole idea of the metaphor of the organization was based on two things, religion, the structure of the hierarchy.
And the army and even the words we use to go into battle with the competition, all this kind of words, but Dee Hock wrote, "deep in most of us below our awareness indelibly implanted there by three centuries of the industrial age is the mechanistic separatist cause and effect command and control machine model of reality. If you do not think your internal model of reality is not largely based on the machine as metaphor.
carefully keep track of every thought and every expression you have or hear that is based on the machine metaphor. You got a screw loose there's a monkey wrench in the machinery, nuts and bolts question, get down to brass tacks, sand in the gears, grease on the wheels, put the pedal to the floor, stuck in low gear etc etc and he says our internal model of reality is in conflict with rapidly changing external realities. i thought that.
Absolutely sets us up beautifully to talk about the different worldviews that are in play. And maybe, maybe also an opportunity to talk about metaphor here and how important that is in organizational change. Yeah. The worldview's clashing is important, in every historical moment, and I think we're in a very important historical moment right now.
I mean that AI and other kinds of new things coming into the organization is making a significant change, , and at least in the companies I deal with, and I think it's international, the generational change is being felt deeply. The new generation's metaphors are not machine metaphors. They are far more chaotic than that. Far more willing to recognize the tensions and conflicts that exist and not try to control them. Because their lives are to some extent out of control.
And they are far more opportunistic. Generational culture in this, in the sense of saying that, when, even the simple thing of the fear of missing out, which we pegged an entire generation with, it is a future orientation. It is a desire for richness and completeness of experience. And when you want a rich, complete experience, many of our companies don't give that, even most of our best companies don't give that. , we've always said that companies worry about motivation.
When their work is not interesting, because if you have interesting work, you don't need to motivate anybody and so you look at this kind of a change taking place and a number of factors which are coming into play with this, but it doesn't mean that the organization isn't filled with a number of different types. , we have organizations, we went through a period of time where everybody in business school did finance and all they really did was finance and with predictable outcomes.
We have a period of time when HR simply did compliance and they never talked about human development at all. They talked about only compliance mechanisms, what the laws were. , and these are, generational movements that come in and they come in with the extraordinarily clear mindsets because they not only recruit people who have that mindset, but now they train people to perfect that mindset.
And so, , we have these kinds of complex relationships in organizations , and they come to battle each other. And I think one of the things that we are learning in organizations today is that the companies that learn how to benefit from those battles succeed in ways in which the ones that end up having those battles be just negative, don't. , and hire managers who recognize that their particular worldview coming in the organization is a worldview, not the worldview.
is a critical piece of trying to understand how these cultures come together. Because even in the strongest cultures, we always have cultural fragmentation. We also have competing cultures and countercultures. Before, they were treated, many of the people trying to manage culture, as the problems. , and now we're really much more in a place of saying, those are the benefits.
That , the innovation resides in the having of countercultures and fragmented cultures and having the capacity to be able to bring that together productively. , and so, we've had a struggle. United States is feeling the struggle in a much broader sense. The red blue is, is a metaphor, but it's not. It's not unlike a very different mindset toward difference. The one is, it is an assimilation concept. That is, people are different, therefore we have to make them like us.
And another is a diversity Stanpoint, which is people are different, wow, we can grow. And those two mindsets are in every organization. And they don't reside comfortably with each other. They are very different ways of understanding. And the reality is that you need both. , the difficulty is that they, that either one is extreme will fail. It's like any other, mixed economies work far better than any economy of one sort or another sort. And so, so I think that's one of the things we're doing.
And I think the metaphors are beginning to track that a bit. Yeah, I think the mechanistic metaphors were there. And, and some of my earlier work on metaphor was done with Lake Off and Johnson after their book, Metaphors We Live By Mark Johnson was a close friend and colleague , and so we were looking across cultures and trying to understand what these transformations are like and I don't, I haven't done a careful study of today's college students, but I'm not hearing mechanistic metaphors.
Yeah, it's more networked, more, as you say, chaotic, And so forth. And in fact, I remember one time I was talking to a class, I was joking about Ken Gergen's notion of organizational structure. He at one point looked at a group of managers and said, you understand organizational structure is a cloud. And of course everyone thought, oh, Ken Gergen, he's off on his space again. And he said, no, no, let me just Help me draw your culture and your, your structure.
And so they started telling him who was connected to who, and he is drawing lines all over the place and he stepped back and say, so look at your organizational structure. It's a cloud. Let's get honest, it's and, and so I think the students understand life as a cloud. And just for audience. We had George Lakoff on the show on metaphors you live by. I'll put that in the show notes and on YouTube here, wherever I'm pointing will appear up on the screen.
Let's move on to something else here, because the, this idea of worldviews.
You say one major division in the culture approach is whether primacy should be on the internal psychological factors like, beliefs assumptions unconscious mental frameworks or whether we should focus more on external factors like behavior language physical artifacts and company rhetoric i thought that was really important because you say a basic assumption of this view is that we can best change the habits and actions by first changing an employee's internal values and
belief structures so change how they think in order to change how they act. I'm of the sort that really believes that we have psychologized too much. I'm famous for saying I have no personality. Because, personality is a thing that we have labeled people by having observed repetitive action. Even their actions on a personality test is a set of activities and actions. Said on a test to somebody, it's, we have to understand it's, the very test taking is a communicative act.
We are producing the personality as we do it, People are naming our personality around things and we find that those personalities are unstable as long as we continue to reproduce the circumstances in which that personality works. We frequently find the person is very different as a human being. in other places. Most people hear me lecture would never think that I'm an incredibly introverted, shy person who finds it very difficult to connect with people. So what is my personality?
And so I am very much of the belief that what we do is to structure circumstances and understanding how it is a person comes to adapt themselves in those circumstances, that we don't spend a lot of time messing with the internal. Parts of a human being that we spend our time really working with them in an environment and learning not how do they respond, but how do they think through determining their response?
Because, because I think that's a much more important issue at stake when we think about culture. And that is if people respond their Stanard way, and we've drawn them a nice kind of response. psychological profile. That's not what we want in today's world. We want, the person to understand the world is chaotic in which they have to pull on parts of themselves that may not be the repetitive thing.
I've always said about psychology, one of the difficulties was they had line bred white rats running very structured mazes and developed a learning theory around that. The fact is we're New York brown rats.
Cross bred in so many impossible different ways confronting circumstances that we'd struggle to even figure out that it is a maze And if is it is absolutely amazing because it has so many and we ought to develop our learning theory around brown rats in New York City Not white rats in life because that's the person we want today, right? We don't want the quick learner of the maze, we want the ability to understand that the environment is chaotic and will change.
And whatever you think to be true about it probably won't be true tomorrow. And that you are not such a stable thing themselves. You may have your preferences. But you have to understand that you have a lot of talents and skills that you only use sometimes. And that those talents and skills are what's really essential here. And so I think if we think about culture as a way of developing human beings, , that can see more quickly in the situation what is important.
What is the difference in this situation that makes a difference? And to see what it is that they can bring to bear on that, that's the kind of really agile cultures that we need today. And that is a culture, but it's not a culture as we used to think about it as let's get people lined up on their norms and values and stuff. Fantastic i was just thinking about the idea of the rats we want to more.
Because it's more networked and it reminded me i don't know if you know the story about how researchers use slime mold. To map out the subway system in Japan. Did you see that? I haven't seen it, but yeah, pieces of oath, which is like, like the, a nutritious gold for a slime mold. And they put it around the different cities around Japan subways, and then they let the mold connect and it picked the optimal subway system.
How the subway should be mapped and i was like no wonder because these creatures that you know ants, molds, fungi, they're actually our elders they've been on the planet and survive a lot longer than we have and they have intelligence that we don't because it's mechanistic intelligence. and one of our advantages and disadvantages is that we've always had the greater ability to transform our environments than most of the creatures.
Therefore, other creatures have tended to find highly adaptive ways to fit the environment. We have found a massive ways to change our environments. And I think we have to understand that both in its benefit and its costs. Ecologically, we can see some of the costs. of the endless ability to maintain unsustainable lifestyles in this context. Because we can manipulate our environments to sustain that longer than any other creature could have.
But we also have to think of this in the other way, and that is we have a profound ability here to produce healthy conditions for human beings. to make choices that other creatures don't have. And I think once we think about it in that way, that we have the capacity to do things like change environments, but in that we have an obligation to change environments in a way.
And that's not measured by the bottom line is measured by a whole set of complex things, which ultimately I believe have positive effects on the bottom line.
If you get away from the quarterly report and into looking at, in fact, healthy organizations and how we develop organizations, I think we would find that there is a, if we think about this in a much more complex way of how do we create positive environments for people, for the communities and so forth, there are significant benefits in that. And that's where I feel this work is so important that if we change the metaphor, it changes the structure of how you think, you start to think more
network, you start to think more organic versus mechanistic, . It's so powerful We have these kind of organic, Metaphors that think ecologically rather than mechanistic metaphors that we act on things. We have a different space going. Thinking systemically is hard for people. When I was working on nuclear power plant safety, trying to work with, I used a simple process called soft systems analysis, where we actually could map out how one part of the organization's decisions impacted other parts.
And it's amazing how hard it was for people to think, not in mechanistic terms. I act, it has a consequent. And rather in terms of systemic terms, you act and the system vibrates to maintain some kind of an equilibrium and to take it into account, and that will change. What your action is really hard for people. It is, it's very hard to get into really thinking of ourself as always as complex systems.
I always start by saying that, anybody who has a puppy knows that when you go in and say, I can't train my dog, the dog trainer will train you. , we understand the most basic level that we are a system and you can't act on one without, and any manager that ever talks to me about changing culture, I say, you have to understand when you come to me, we don't mess with the dog. It's, it's yeah, must start this in systemic terms. Absolutely really hard for people.
And it's not just the metaphors and mechanistic, which is true. Our, our notion of psychology is mechanistic as if it is a fixed thing that does. Our notion of communication is mechanistic as if we have messages that are transported. I it is so deeply a part of what it is to be a person in this world. That we've struggled now for at least 40 to 50 years with people doing general systems, with people doing complexity. We have all the models out there in the world.
We can't get everyday people to be able to think in their ordinary life or everyday managers, to think in their lives in the notion of complex systems.
It's an important thing Stan for managers to understand or anybody that's in a position of authority and it's one of the drivers for me doing the show it's like i. I didn't eat it worth in quotes that i have that i love that i talk about the show and i said there's two ways to spread the light one is to be the mirror and there is to be the candle.
And for me the show is mirror work to mirror great work from people like you and then candle work is my own writing but i think sharing this and helping to try and influence a listener, try and change the internal metaphors the internal model of reality, then that can be passed on to the next generation and that's where you make the difference think it is. And I think my own experience has been that people do not learn by teaching them the metaphors.
They learn by putting them into circumstances where the old metaphors do not work. I truly believe in a pull versus a push theory of culture. When people ask me about change, I always say, people are inevitably like strings. They're a lot easier to pull than push, and you have to understand that. Or the other one, people talk about herding cats. This is some big problem. I grew up on a dairy farm. You get a bucket of milk. Herding cats is not hard. You can take them anywhere.
You have to understand that the pull of something is what works with human beings. Not to push. The slime mold is pulled to the oats. was hungry. Damn it. It wasn't. I mean, and so, so when you think about it that way, then, then we're really thinking about, the kind of if we want systemic metaphors where people put people into situations.
Whether it's required it's, I've said when I was working with STEM education people, I said, at some point, one of the problems is that, physics students learn all this stuff about quantum physics but , they're Newtonian as soon as they go home and because all they do is measure rooms and the curvature of the earth doesn't matter much when you measure rooms, but if you want them to understand this, you've got to understand the problems that take place Scale.
and the same way with workers, you can't simply put them into mechanical spaces and express them to understand systems. That's one of the huge problem with my work i go and i talk in organizations the goal is to try and change the lens through which they see things to have a show up how they approach innovation say. It's useless without the opportunity to practice it then afterwards cuz you have nothing done to stick it to. No, that's right.
Or, or if you don't give them the skills to do it along with it. I mean, I mean, I, I, work with all these people that can implement Teams and then I don't understand why they fail. And I say, what did, what were the skills that you taught them about Teams? No, you spent all your time persuading them that Teams were a good idea. You're so surprised they end up having the same long worthless meetings you've always had because, the capacity to do a meeting is a new skill.
It's basically what you're doing is the same thing that happens in elementary school, where they've suddenly discovered teams, you put kids together on a team. And the lesson they learn is teams are highly inefficient. And if I don't do it myself, it isn't going to get done. what a terrible lesson to learn by the team exercise, right? And that's about how we design the. The team itself and the activities.
So it is the focus on that these take real talents and skills and the ability to practice not selling the concept. And that's hard because I was, I actually joked to a guy once, the manager is saying, I'm having a terrible time getting training people to do teams. And I said, so what are your team skills? No, he's really good at giving orders and instructions, right?
I tell them what to do and they don't do it god damn it Whatever you would have to learn to be a team person, they have to learn too. And don't believe that, it's, I always joke about, democracy in America. We make believe that you put people in a room and stir and you have democracy. It's actually the most difficult skill that I can imagine. And we do the least training toward managing how to do it. Right. So I think you're right. Practice, would practice.
Requires that you've identified the skills that were needed for the practice and your point so important one of the most frustrating things in my line of work is when, it's ordained from on high that the team need innovation training or a keynote or something like that and then the leadership don't show up to that meeting cuz things are too important you're the guys who, Need to be here more than anyone else. We'll get to talk about that.
Stan, I thought given that we're not even through chapter one, that we might finish with assumptions because I think it's such an, a powerful thing, particularly to you, the change maker. If you're in an organization and you're frustrated, which inevitably you are because you want to make progress. Then it's really important to understand assumptions for the rest of the organization that's resisting the change because i Stan says in the book.
Think about a time when your assumptions were shocked where you felt disbelief or horror. Or you felt a sense that the gods must be crazy. And it's in those moments, because when you're trying to drive change, that's what's going on in the heads of other people and understanding, and even just giving some time to the assumptions is so, so valuable over to you, Stan. yeah, I mean well, one of the amazing things is that the Is how smart some managers think their workers are, right?
It takes them six months to get their head around an organizational change project and they roll it out in a one hour meeting and think it's been successful. You've got to really think those people are smart. If they could do it in an hour, what you took six months to achieve. So we start with a bad start with this thing, right? Because we, Make believe they can get their heads around it a lot quicker than you ever got your head around it.
And we don't assess very clearly how they will begin to think about how that change will have impact directly upon them, right? And this is, for most people, this is it, right? That is it.
I'm trying to work out that if we do that, What will it do to the various kinds of relationships that I have, the skills that I have, what's going to be expected of me, what the reward we're talking about a whole bunch of things that a person has to get their head around, and they know full well how the past has worked. And now you're presenting something which sounds like a brilliant idea, but none of the little strings.
How does this work itself out in the, and so what happens, and especially we see this in public administration, but in a large bureaucracy, most people in the organization are what we call weebies. Which is basically an attitude, we be here, you be gone. Because, think about how many change processes the average worker has gone through. How many brilliant new ideas that the guy picked up at, some have come into. And so it's no wonder that there's change fatigue.
And change fatigue is based largely in the kinds of things this has happened too often. It has been uncertain as to whether it actually will ever be fulfilled. It's unclear what will happen to me. So just simply keep my head low, and eventually we will win. because our old system will continue to reproduce itself against whatever thing you come in with. And to make it worse, most of the managers begin this whole thing with fear. And that is, if we don't do this, all these things, right?
And without understanding that when you produce fear, you've reduced greatly the likelihood of change, because the more fearful people are, watch your body, right? The more fearful you are, the more you pull in.
And so many of these things are created by this notion of fear, presuming that fear will motivate people to change when the reality is that fear almost always leads people to protect and so, part of it is to recognize the period of time that takes people to get a head around it, make sure that it's focused on the positive outcomes that there are very clear strings that we can see that attach what is needed from me to the positive outcome that will be achieved and that we give
people the kind of milestones and small wins that it takes to understand that next week this will be different. Three months from now, this will be different. This is not one more time. that we're going through Rigmor and never measure whether or not it made any difference, right?
, the, get these basic things in place that is positive, that is identifiable, that is clear about what is going to be needed, and we're measuring instrument, incrementally as we go, is extraordinarily important, and we don't see that in very many change processes.
Beautiful beautiful man that's a brilliant way to end part one and i highly recommend the book and we're gonna talk about vision as well because vision is the strings to envision that future to help people pull and pull them to the future not push them as well Stan for people who want to reach out to you you do a select amount of work with different types of organizations where is the best place to find you, I have a website that's under my name, Stan Deetz.
Dot org which is always the easy thing. People can freely email me. It's not at all hard to find my email address since it's everywhere on the web. And it is again, [email protected]. And so it's, it's always available. I'm very good at screening things and responding where I can. I'm on LinkedIn. I, it's, if people wanna find me, it is not hard.
It's what's the good and bad thing Stan up a to your website as well so people can find you for now with absolute pleasure man talking to you and this is the book if you can track it down, it will set you back a hundred dollars like it did for me leading organizations through transition, author of the book Stan Deetz thank you for joining us. Thank you so much,