Being and Seeing the System
Why ‘Culture Problems’ Are Really System Problems (And What to Do About It)
A large part of organisational life centres around culture. Organisations recognise the impact of culture on business results and expend considerable resources enhancing or repairing their cultures. You would, therefore, expect there to be a commonly accepted definition and understanding of culture. Despite this obvious need, definitions remain broad. Indeed, one study described 15 different definitions of culture (1). Without a clear definition, how do we even begin to discuss and understand organisational culture?
Organisations often talk about their culture as if it’s one thing, ‘the culture’ or ‘our culture,’ but if you’ve ever worked in a large organisation, you know this isn’t true. The sales team operates differently from the finance team. Head office feels different from regional offices. The executive floor has different, unspoken rules, than the factory floor.
The ‘Few Bad Apples’ Response
The few times organisations acknowledge they don’t have one homogeneous culture is when something goes wrong. A recent example occurred in Australia, when a large consulting firm fell short of public expectations.
The initial response from the organisation was along the lines of ‘there are a few bad apples,’ suggesting that these people don’t represent ‘our’ culture. In essence, these individuals are framed as an aberration, the implication being that removing the so-called bad apples will restore the culture to its previous, whole state.
What can be crazy making (a form of gaslighting?) for stakeholders is when this person who now supposedly no longer ‘fits the culture’ was, until recently, not only seen as highly effective but celebrated as a leader of that very culture. What changed? And how is it that rogue behaviour can play out in plain sight at the highest levels, yet remain entirely ‘unknown’ within the organisation?
Another manifestation of this disconnect occurs when organisations recruit for ‘cultural fit’ while simultaneously investing in rhetoric and programs of diversity and inclusion, ‘please be you but also be like us.’
When the Few Become the Many
In the case of the consulting organisation, as the scandal progressed, more ‘bad apples’ came to light. At some point, it became widespread enough to trigger a tipping point, after which the blame shifted from a few individuals to the culture itself. The solution is often some form of culture change, and the success rate of these change programs are notoriously low, often cited around 70% failure rate (2).
What If There’s Another Way to Look at This?
Rather than continuing to try and square the circle, we could shift our perspective from talking about culture to discussing systems. By system, here I’m referring to social systems and using Irving Borwick’s (3) definition: “any set of relations within a boundary having rules developed over time”. When we look at organisations this way, it becomes easier to see what anthropologists have always known¹: complex societies contain a number of coexisting, overlapping, and competing subcultures. Why would organisations be any different?
The influence of systems (their role relationships, rules and boundaries) is profound and has been described as being akin to gravity (3). Like gravity, systems remain mostly invisible, but we feel their effects powerfully. We tend to only notice systems when we bump up against their rules or exceed their boundaries.
When issues arise, instead of asking ‘who are the bad people?’ we can ask ‘what are the conditions in the systems and subsystems that gave rise to this situation?’ That means looking at boundaries, role relations, friction between subsystems, and rules, written and unwritten. This shift moves the conversation away from subjective personal judgments and toward a systemic view. It also shifts authority: from hierarchy to the individual role holder. In this way, individuals working fully in role can self-authorise. They are liberated enough from systemic constraints so they can act independently. Rather than being told they should feel ‘empowered’ they act in the authority of role.
System Blindness
Systems powerfully influence behaviour, if we want to understand or even change behaviour we do need to become systems literate, we need to better see the world through a systems lens. Here are two examples of how systems influence behaviour:
Historical Example:
During World War I, British women took up formal roles in farming and manufacturing that had previously been held by men. This occurred because the system needed them in new roles. To make this work, women’s dress had to change. What was previously unacceptable for women quickly became acceptable. Women didn’t change overnight as people; they simply changed their roles. The system needed them to act differently, so wearing trousers became acceptable. See The Role of Role³ for a fuller explanation of the power of role in change.
Contemporary Example:
In traditional schools, girls wear dresses or skirts while boys wear trousers or shorts. When girls in skirts don’t want to hang upside down on playground equipment and boys in shorts do, the easy, and wrong, interpretation is that girls are ‘naturally less adventurous.’ Australian schools⁴ are discovering that the uniforms they put girls into impact how girls play, especially when compared to boys. When we look past gender at systemic and structural artefacts, it’s easier to see how the uniform rules (derived from tradition) create different behaviours. Architects have long understood that structure governs function.
In both cases, the behaviours weren’t about inherent personal characteristics. They were about how the system’s rules, written and unwritten, influenced what people understood they were capable of and/or ‘allowed’ to do.
Getting Out of the Box
The challenge is: how do we see systems differently when we’re inside them? It’s like trying to ‘think outside the box’ when you’re in the box. All design starts with an idea; the big idea here is, systems impact behaviour. Once we have a new way of seeing, we need new language. Organisations need to cultivate this language.
This act requires leadership. The challenge for the status quo is that when organisations engage in a systemic way of seeing and the corresponding language they must give up some of the benefits of fostering co-dependent employer/employee relationships that have served them in the past. This is the very same dynamic at play now in organisations in relation to remote working (I’ll write another article about this at a later date).
Why This Matters for Leadership
Think about major organisational failures that have made headlines. Those involved, when interviewed, often reveal that they believed they were adhering to expected behaviours as modelled by their peers and bosses. Rather than see them as ‘bad apples,’ we can see them as following the system’s implicit agreements.
Organisations could benefit from those able to see these patterns, the ones who see the world differently, the same ones, organisations can inadvertently drive out or fail to recruit as they pursue a monoculture.
The problem isn’t bad people or bad culture. The problem is that we’re not seeing the systems that shape behaviour and vice versa. Once we can see them and can harness them by increasing our systems fluency we can harness the positive results in service of the organisations purpose. With systems and role literacy, change and revitalisation are a constant and iterative quest as the organisation acts as a coherent living system capable of self-correction and evolution.
References
1. Hudelson, Patricia M. Culture and quality: an anthropological perspective. International Journal for Quality in Health Care. 2004, Vol. 16, 5, pp. 345-346. Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève Médecine Communautaire Genève Switzerland.
2. McKinsey & Company. Changing Change Management. [Online] July 2015. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/leadership/changing-change-management.
3. Borwick, irving. Organizational Role Analysis: managing strategic change in business settings Page 19. Coaching in Depth Edited by Susan Long, John Newton, Burkard Sievers. London : Routledge, 2006.
4. Mergler, Amanda and Cariss, Simone. Girls Uniform Agenda. [Online] 2023. https://girlsuniformagenda.org/supporters/.
5. Bayman, Peta. Role of Role. Substack. [Online] 2024. https://substack.com/home/post/p-170954849?source=queue.