Culture Change Models & Examples

This sub-chapter provides a brief overview of some models and examples of resources you can use when thinking about culture change, whether you are seeking to effect change or experiencing it. These are not the only models and examples when it comes to culture change, and the community encourages potential contributors to expand this sub-chapter with more resources.

Emergent Strategy - adrienne marie brown

Emergent Strategy by adrienne marie brown ([bro17]) teaches us that change is inevitable, and that we can shape change. By practising at the small scale/fractals we set the patterns for the whole system. We all hold pieces of the solution and will need to transform ourselves to transform the world. By being accountable, practising generosity and vulnerability, we can connect better to others build lasting relationships. The easier it is for you to be wrong, the faster you can release your viewpoint and the easier it is to adapt to changing circumstances. The Turing Way as a project and community is influenced by the Emergent Strategy approach to culture change and design. You can read more on this in the Foreword: Emergence as The Turing Way’s Strategy

Principles of Emergent Strategy

• Small is good, small is all (the large is a reflection of the small).

• Change is constant (be like water).

• There is always enough time for the right work.

• There is a conversation in the room that only this moment can have. Find it.

• Never a failure, always a lesson.

• Trust the people. (If you trust the people they become trustworthy or the boundaries will become clear.)

• Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass – build the resilience by building the relationships.

• Less prep, more presence.

• What you pay attention to grows.

Conversation is a crucial way to explore what we believe and to make new understandings and ideas possible. Consider the areas where trust needs to be built: you will need to demonstrate that you’re thinking about the same values/concerns. To accomplish your vision for the future it needs to be clear what needs to be done and who will do it. There should be time for reflection and evaluation to apply lessons learned to future work, and time for celebration of collective achievements.

Managing Transitions - William and Susan Bridges

Managing Transitions by William and Susan Bridges ([BB17]) teaches us that a change will always be accompanied by a transition. A transition begins when something needs to be let go, and sits in between the old and the new situation. This transition phase can be insecure for people who will have to adjust to a new situation, but also an opportunity for innovation to happen if people are adequately resourced and supported (by policies, groupings, procedures).

There are four P’s in transitions ([BB17]):

• Purpose: people have to understand the logic behind the outcome and feel that the change is necessary.

• Picture: people need to experience how the outcome will look and feel.

• Plan: people need a step-by-step plan to know what they have to do.

• Part to play: especially if people have something to loose, they need to be able to play a part in the transition phase and eventual outcome.

To manage transitions it needs to be clear what the problem (reason for change) is. People will not change if they are not experiencing the problem and are convinced something needs to be adjusted. Those experiencing the problem will also have expertise and knowledge to come up with an effective solution. Individuals will stand to lose something when change is happening - a sense of control over this transition helps to make the transition more comfortable. It is important to learn what problems people are facing in a transition phase, and recognise individuals that do contribute to the change. People will need to feel safe to experiment and take risks, and not be punished when these experiments fail.

It is important that changes are meaningfully clustered, or held off until they can be, to avoid a messy change pile:

• If changes are meaningfully clustered the changes are incorporated in the bigger change picture, and it makes sense to act on these further changes right now.

• In a messy change pile, the changes are not neatly connected to the change that is already happening. This can feel overwhelming as too many different changes are happening at the same time, which may pull people in different directions.

To ensure that people will change their behaviour, they will need to learn how to adapt to new behaviours through training. People will not be able to invest in this, if the new behaviours are not adequately rewarded (for example, focused placed on publications written instead of open data/software). Short term goals can give people a sense of achievement and encourage them to move forward.

Leading Change - John P Kotter

According to John P Kotter ([Kot12]) there are eight steps in change:

1. Establishing a sense of urgency by identifying potential crises/opportunities.

2. Creating the guiding coalition, a team that works together to lead the change.

3. Developing a vision to direct the change and strategy to achieve this vision.

4. Communicating the change vision using every communication channel possible, including role modelling.

5. Empowering action by removing obstacles and encouraging risk-taking.

6. Generating short-term wins and recognise people who made these wins possible.

7. Consolidating change: maintain a sense of urgency, use situations to start a new wave of change, keep celebrating successes and evaluate/adjust if needed.

8. Anchoring new approaches in the culture.

The first four steps in the transformation process help to convince people or an organisation that they need to change. Phases five to seven introduce new practices. The last stage focusses on making these new practices stick.

Strategy for Culture Change - Brian Nosek

In a 2019 blog post, Brian Nosek of the Center for Open Science, presented the Strategy for Culture Change. It is a perspective specifically focused on examining culture change in academic research and publishing, to promote more open, transparent, and reproducible research. This model, represented as a pyramid similar to Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs, suggests that in order for culture change to be effective, there are several steps which should be followed progressively:

1. Baseline - Infrastructure - Make it possible

2. First tier - User Interface/Experience - Make it easy

3. Second tier - Communities - Make it normative

4. Fourth tier - Incentives - Make it rewarding

5. Fifth tier - Policies - Make it required

Fig. 160 Diagram for Nosek’s model of culture change in open research. Used under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. (Strategy for Culture Change - 11 June 2019)[https://www.cos.io/blog/strategy-for-culture-change].

This strategy for culture change differs from Kotter and William and Susan Bridges perspectives on culture change. Those perspectives are centred around providing and understanding the motivations for why people would want to change, and building a shared vision before building the infrastructure to support the change. Nosek argues that focusing on individual motivations and abilities ignores the wider systems and incentives that guide and shape behaviour. These wider structures can mean that even if individuals want to change, they may feel powerless to do so on their own. The Strategy for Culture Change focuses on building targeted interventions and infrastructure to enable change, then lobbying to effect adoption and incentives to further drive wide behaviour and cultural change.

However, the blog post, particulary the pyramid diagram, has drawn criticism for presenting a perspective that focuses too much on technology as a solution. This is compounded by the use of communities in the second tier of the strategy, after infrastructure has been built, as a mechanism to solely adopt changes built or agreed elsewhere. Some parties have a different opinion, and believe that communities themselves should be identifying and driving the infrastructure changes, rather than the other way around.
Regardless, this is an alternative model of cultural change which seeks to address the impact of wider forces affecting attempts to shift norms.