We have all heard the saying, and I am willing to bet that most of us have even said it to others, or inserted it in a presentation. Yet I realized that, while everyone seems to understand this on an academic level, none of us seem to understand it intuitively. In particular, we are very bad at understanding the full effects of culture, or taking it into account when we are making decisions on a day to day basis. And above all, we wave culture away, thinking that our strategy will overcome any of its detrimental effects.

Perhaps the most commonly known example of such a failure, is the failure of NASA to adjust to the learnings that came out of the major space mission disasters. For example, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, the Rogers Commission found that the safety culture within NASA was flawed, with a significant lack of oversight. As a result, NASA reacted by instituting the Office of Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance, attempting to correct by strategy what was clearly a flaw in culture. By the time the Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry in 2003, the office was very much implemented and operational. Nonetheless, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) reported that oversight was still an issue, and that the oversight was not truly independent. Strategy certainly proved incompetent in the face of culture in that scenario. It is probably worth remembering that the Challenger incident was not the first time NASA had identified safety culture as an issue: similar issues, with known quality problems being suppressed, go all the way back to the Apollo 1 accident and the infamous Phillips Report.

I am inclined to believe that strategy always proves incompetent in the face culture. In a previous article I had defined Culture as the actions that come under the idea of “That’s how we do things here”. By definition, culture is the default choice of actions; a collective habit, and just like any other habit it is very hard to break. Furthermore, culture as a decision-making process tends to be instinctive rather than a conscious choice. This means that any strategy that simply tries to prescribe a different course of action, is likely to fail to make a difference, because strategy needs to be processed and executed by conscious effort, and by the time the conscious mind has engaged, the action has been not only selected, but probably executed as well.

To illustrate using a common example: In most software vendors, support often asks customers facing an issue to provide screen-shots showing the erroneous behavior, as well as any error messages, so that the details of the issue can be precisely determined. As one would expect, they would then attach the screen-shots to any internal tickets pertaining to the issue, to help the engineers troubleshooting the issue to determine exactly what is wrong. For many companies this worked well enough before GDPR was enacted. Unfortunately, however, the arrival of GDPR created an unexpected problem for global companies with regards to this particular behavior: screen-shots can sometimes contain GDPR-regulated information, and in a global company, some of the people with access to the internal ticketing system may not be resident in a country where such information can be transferred without user consent. In other words, the “way things are done around here” all of a sudden came to contradict the law. Most companies reacted by putting new processes in place that would prescribe a different set of actions than before. For example, some instituted the policy that screen-shots could no longer be attached to the tickets, while others would allow it as long as the screen-shots were sanitized first so that they did not contain sensitive data. The problem was that most of these policies had little effect, either because people forgot to sanitize the screen-shots, or because they felt it was not necessary to go to all that trouble, and that the legal department of the company was overreacting. Either way, the end result was the same: people still took the default action prescribed by the culture, of attaching un-sanitized screen-shots to tickets. By trying to work around the culture, the strategy of instituting a process simply failed to achieve its intended goal.

So if strategy cannot force a process over culture, what can a company do? The only available answer is to create a strategy to change the culture! Continuing with the example above, the companies that were most successful in resolving the challenge were the ones whose strategy emphasized creating new habits. One way to do so is by having an oversight mechanism that reminds users to sanitize the screen-shots when they forget, instead of emphasizing that everyone must read and abide by the new policy. This process can also identify who may be resisting the new policy, and provide them with a deeper insight into why things must change. The important thing, however, is that a strategy that targets the process flow will most likely fail; the only way to succeed is to create a strategy that replaces the old culture with a new one.

The second, and much more insidious, challenge is that we don't often see all the little ways in which culture can intervene in our strategy. To illustrate again by example: Imagine that you decide to create a new “Tiger Team” which will work closely with customers to iteratively develop visionary products for a time-horizon of five years into the future. In other words, this team will target, not the product that you will be selling in the next couple of years, but a product ahead of the market, that will only find acceptance 5 years from now. Given that the team will work directly with customers, you decide to hire client-savvy engineers, coming primarily from of pool of people working for technical consulting companies, as these people tend to have significant exposure to the clients, and tend to come with the appropriate skill-set. Without deeper thought, this probably already sounds like a fairly solid hiring strategy. It is unfortunately very easy to miss the subtle way in which culture can interfere with the strategy. To reveal one of the concerns that is obvious to me: people working for technical consulting companies typically lay significant emphasis on delivering on time (or in a “reasonable” amount of time), and less emphasis on exploration. Even when working under Time & Materials (T&M) rules, the client is likely to be very cost-sensitive, hence the emphasis on time. At the same time, most clients only engage such companies once there is a well-defined problem to be solved, and therefore, little need for exploration. The end result is that if you implement this particular hiring strategy, your Tiger Team will have a hard time delivering visionary solutions, with culture defeating the purpose of the strategy. I am sure that for this scenario alone, people can come up with many other ways culture can interfere with the strategy.

The point I find intimidating is that it is so easy to miss the various ways in which culture can interfere with strategy, even with conscious effort. That being said, the more of these you can uncover before committing to a strategy, the more you can adjust your strategy to accommodate them. In the end, I would advise that, while creating a strategy, you leave some time in your schedule to ideate on all ways you can think of in which culture could interfere, and to adjust the strategy accordingly. Your chances of success can only improve.

With my last point, I would like to end on a positive note: It is worth remembering that culture does not always have to be a detriment to your efforts. You can actually use culture to your benefit. Once again an example: last month I was fortunate enough to attend a fireside chat with one of the leaders of the very early Chrome team. He related the story of how, when they first brought the early versions of Chrome up, they were stunned at how quick it was, and at the same time hit by the realization that it would never get any faster. But then they asked themselves: “What if it never got any slower either?” And the rest, as they say, is history. Culture can be just as powerful when used as a force for good, and perhaps then it becomes easier to find success no matter what the strategy.