Changing culture is difficult. I wonder how much frustration companies go through, especially those that have already got a pretty ingrained culture as it is. What has been striking to me recently is how much energy one could lose having to be the constant spark for change. As a team we can help to feed off of each other, but still we ask "what's it going to take?" Today I came out of a very productive discussion with people I have yet to talk to about culture change. Productive in the way that we came together to acknowledge that it's the culture that needs to change, but how to do that exactly is still fairly unknown. One thing that came up last week during some coaching training was a conversation about engines. That conversation got me thinking today about what it will take.
Talking with one of our transportation employees, we started talking about how coaching can be a lot like cleaning an engine. We might start with something quite dirty, roughened up by years of wear and tear and not once cleaned. To clean the engine we take things apart piece by piece, learning more and more about what the engine has gone through. Slowly we start to clean up the pieces, bring it back to working order. As in coaching, we might have to work through years and years of cultural abuse. As management, we have neglected the people, the humans, in our system. We have allowed them to get worn down, and still we run them hard, trying to extract every last spurt of energy from them. When the engine sputters, we blame it for not being productive enough, we goad it to just give us a little more.
To change the culture, we have to take apart the system itself. I think more than that, we need to redesign the entire system. When was the last time you saw a modern car engine with a carburetor? It used to be a standard component, used to mix air and gas and control the speed of the engine. A complete system change made this obsolete, direct injection. Another complete system change makes the combustion engine obsolete - electric motors. Each of these examples is similar to what it takes to change culture.
First we start with our dirty worn down culture. In order to understand what has been done, we have to take it apart, piece by piece. We clean things up and get things running smoothly again. This allows us to start to regain trust again, and we see strong initial gains. If we go back to the way it was though, where we don't maintain things, we will end up back where we started - an old worn down dirty culture. Gaining a better understanding of the culture, we can now start to see where we can make system level improvements. What will be the direct injection moment? What will be the electric motor moment? Direct injection allows an engine to run more efficient, in the culture I imagine this would mean more simplified way of operating. Perhaps this is where we are going right now with the Huddle - Gemba Walk - Reflection - Improvement model. Maybe it's just the leadership training part. Or maybe it's just the mindset of coaching and developing our people. Who's to say right now.
At individual sites within the organization, these small cultural changes make pretty big impacts locally. What will it take for this to happen higher in the organization? Taking apart this engine we find different kinds of wear and tear. We find years of using traditional management techniques, years of using data points to make decisions (rather than process behavior charts/control charts), and decades of being away from the Gemba. Gemba focus, understanding variation, and the mindset of support might be the first big change at the higher level. Who's to say right now.
Culture change is difficult, but can be methodical. We must open the hood of the organization and take a look inside. We might be surprised at how bad things might have gotten, but at least we can see it now. It's time to get our hands dirty and start some cleaning, some repairing, and some major improving.