Want to Improve Your Innovation Culture? – Start by understanding organizational culture

Culture is a little like dropping an Alka-Seltzer into a glass-you don’t see it, but somehow it does something.
- Hans Magnus Enzensberger

What is Organizational Culture?
At its most basic, organizational culture is reflects the “personality” of the organization. Culture is the combination of the held assumptions, espoused values, practiced norms and physical artifacts of organization members and their behaviors. All of which exist at differing levels of visibility to an external observer. Members of an organization sense the particular culture of an organization when they witness these attributes over time. Culture, like comedy, is one of those terms that is difficult to express distinctly, but everyone recognizes it when they experience it. For example, the culture of a large, multi-national corporation is quite different than that of a local food bank which is quite different from that of a government agency. You can witness the culture of an organization by looking at the arrangement of furniture, hearing the stories they tell, observing what members wear, etc. — similar to the techniques you might use to get a sense of someone’s personality.

Culture is a real-time system
Corporate culture can be looked at as a system. Inputs include feedback from, e.g., society, professions, laws, stories, heroes, values on competition or service, etc. Commonly used words relating to the description of culture emphasize one of its most critical aspects – the notion that things within groups are shared or are commonly held and understood. The process of creating an organizational culture is based on our assumptions, values and norms, e.g., our values on money, time, facilities, space and people. Outputs or effects of our culture may be expressed as, e.g., organizational behaviors, technologies, strategies, image, products, services, appearance, etc. Essentially, organization culture is formed as the direct result of a group striving toward pattern-forming and integration in order to create a cohesive and shared meaning. Strong organization cultures reflect a fundamental human need for stability, consistency and a clearly defined operating mindset.

You want hard? Try changing an organization’s culture.
The concept of culture is particularly important when attempting to manage organization-wide change, including the adoption of new behaviors such as a stronger focus on innovation across the enterprise. Leaders and change management practitioners are coming to realize that, despite the best of intentions, organizational change must include not only changing structures, systems and processes, but also changing the corporate culture as well.

There’s been a great deal of literature generated over the past decade about the concept of organizational culture — particularly in regard to learning how to change organizational culture. Organizational change efforts are rumored to fail the vast majority of the time. Usually, this failure is credited to lack of understanding about the strong role of culture and the role it plays in organizations. That’s one of the reasons that many strategic planners now place as much emphasis on identifying strategic values as they do mission and vision. Another fundamental reason for failed organization change efforts is that organizational cultures are not monolithic.

A mosaic, often fractured, but beautiful
Distinct societies are composites of interacting subcultures rather than a single overarching culture. Organizations consist of subgroups that have specific characteristics and a sense of identification. Within organizations, people can easily classify themselves and others into various social categories or groups based on identification with their primary work group, occupational or professional skills, union membership, or age cohort. Subgroups in organizations can and do create subcultures that comprise specific networks of meaning; yet, at the same time, they remain associated with the ideologies and values of the organization’s leadership. The reason for this is that they exist within the climate created by culture-embedding mechanisms that support the entire organization’s over-arching culture and range of sub-cultures.

And this is where an innovation culture becomes manifest. Embedded within the higher-order or dominant culture of the organization will exist an approach to innovation that will exist as a sub-culture. Depending on the nature of the organization this may be strong and vital, or it may be weak or hamstrung. Future posts will address the ways to identify, surface and strengthen this sub-culture so that it may become a stronger and more vital part of the dominant organization cultural life.

Sources:
Schein 1992
Ouchi 1980, and Ashforth and Mael 1989