Culture vs. Behavior

I recently was introduced to a new perspective on Culture, and since the day I first heard it I’ve been running it through different scenarios.  So far, I’m really getting a lot of mileage out of it.  

Here’s how it came up…

I was sitting in a meeting during an Artemis consulting project a few weeks ago.  The problem is confidential, but one focus (not surprisingly) was “people are making too many mistakes… how can we get our people to do a better job”.  Also attending the meeting were experts from this company’s Organizational Effectiveness unit.  They had been invited to attend to provide advice on how to change the Culture of the factory to help eliminate errors.  When the subject of Culture came up, one of the experts (I’d love to give credit, and if I get a release I will) made a comment, which was something like this:

“When we say ‘Culture’, we really mean ‘Behavior’.  When we say we want the Culture to change, this sounds fluffy and inconclusive.  But when we say we want the Behavior in the factory to change, it brings it back down to Earth in a way that is easier for us to grasp.”

The exact quote isn’t as important as exploring the implications it raises.  At Apollo, the subject of human behavior often comes up.  In fact, I’m giving several presentations this year specifically about how risk is a combination of human behavior and the work environment, so the topic was timely.  We find that many of our clients are focused on the behaviors of their employees, often to the exclusion of the conditional environment in which the behaviors take place.  At Apollo, we like solutions that control behaviors by controlling the environment.  If you’ve been to one of our classes, you’ve heard us encourage students to identify and control conditional causes.  We won’t exclude action causes as opportunities for solutions… it’s just that the conditional causes often present opportunities to reduce systemic risks of problem recurrence.  Action cause solutions are usually less sustainable.  Contact me if you want to discuss this concept further.

So when I heard this expert discuss ‘Behavior’ as a synonym for ‘Culture’, it got my attention.  I started replacing the words in common phrases, such as:

Original Phrase		New Phrase
“Management Culture”	becomes..	“Management Behavior”
“Problem-Solving Culture”	becomes..	“Problem-Solving Behavior”
“Culture that encourages risk-taking”	becomes..	“Behavior that encourages risk-taking”
“Culture that places the highest value on production”	becomes..	“Behavior that places the highest value on production”

 

You get the picture right away.  It even works outside of the workplace.  I guess I always knew this intuitively, but it’s never been directly on the surface the way it is now.  A culture is really defined by the behaviors of the members of that culture.  

So why did this make an impact on me?  I’m a sucker for specifics.  I don’t have a lot of value for categorical phrases, such as ‘inadequate maintenance’ or ‘wrong procedure’ because phrases like this don’t provide me with the specifics I need to put an effective solution in place.  I always have to ask a follow up question, such as: “Why was the maintenance inadequate?”  The same is true with a word like ‘Culture’.  What can I do with a word like ‘Culture’?  What can my clients do with a when I tell them they would be better off by developing a ‘Problem-Solving Culture’?

The value for me is the fact that the word ‘Behavior’ quickly gets me to specifics.  What behaviors do I want to change?  What conditional causes allow and encourage these behaviors?  What corrective actions can we recommend to change the conditional environment in a way that encourages the behaviors we want to see?  

Maybe I’m making too much of this – but I’ve incorporated this new way of thinking about culture into my investigations and classes and the feedback has been very positive.  Give it some thought and let me know what you think…

Brian Hughes, 4/17/09

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