Probably 80% of “culture change” in organizations is role modeling. Maybe 20% is changing systems and structures. Most organizations I’ve been part of, however, obsess about changing systems instead of role modeling.

In real life, “culture change” basically work like this.

First, someone chooses to behave differently than the status quo, and does it in a way that others can see it. This role modeling is not complicated, it just takes guts.

Two, If the behavior leads to a more desirable outcome, other institutional actors take notice and start to mimic it.

This is one reason why people say “culture starts at the top.” People at the top of hierarchies are much more visible, so when they change their behavior, people tend notice. Culture change doesn’t have to start at the top, but it’s much faster if it does.

Three, if the behavior change is persistent and the institutional actors are adamant, they end up forcing the systems around the behavior to change, and change in a way that reinforces the new behavior. This is another reason why “culture starts at the top”. Senior executives don’t have to ask permission to change systems and structures, then can just force the people who work for them to do it.

If the systems and structure change are achieved, even a little, the new behavior then has less friction and a path dependency is created. A positive feedback loop is born, and before you know it the behvaior is the new norm. See the example in the notes below.

Again, this is not a complicated. Role modeling is a very straightforward concept. It just takes a lot of courage, which is why it doesn’t happen all the time.

A lot of times, I feel like organizations make a big deal about “culture change” and “transformation”. Those efforts end up having all these elaborate frameworks, strategies, roadmaps, and project plans. I’m talking and endless amount of PowerPoint slides. Endless.

I think we can save all that busywork. All we have to do is shine a light on the role models, or be a role model ourselves…ideally it’s the latter. The secret ingredient is no secret - culture change takes courage.

So If we don’t see culture change happening in our organization, we probably don’t need more strategy or more elaborate project plans, we probably just need more guts.

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Example: one way to create an outcomes / metrics-oriented culture through role modeling.

1. Head of organization role models and asks a team working on a strategic project to show the data that justifies the most recent decision.

2. Head of organization extends role modeling by using data to explain justification when explaining decision to customers and stakeholders in a press conference.

3. Head of organization keeps role modeling - now they ask for a real-time dashboard of the data to monitor success on an ongoing basis.

4. Other projects see how the data-driven project gets more attention and resources. They build their own dashboards. More executives start demanding data-driven justifications of big decisions.

5. All this dashboard building forces the organization’s data and intelligence team to have more structured and standardized data.

6. What started as role modeling becomes a feedback loop: more executives ask for data, which causes more projects to use data and metrics, which makes quality data more available, which leads to more asks for data, and so on.

*Note - this example is not out of my imagination. This is what I saw happening because of the Mayor and the Senior Leadership Team at the City of Detroit during my tenure there.