Avenues of Intervention I: Contextual and Filtering Approaches
Transforming corporate culture overnight with simple little messages
How can you communicate differently to transform corporate culture?
Continuing our seven-part series on culture change, today’s article considers how such simple maneuvers as counting reports, changing from white to blue paper, or asking a simple question can transform the culture of an organization for the better by shifting patterns, contexts and limiting tacit assumptions.
—Ellen, Editor of Change
Avenues of Intervention I —Contextual and Filtering Approaches
Over the past five issues of Change, we’ve been looking at the question of transforming organizational culture quickly and effortlessly, and this week and next we’ll be drawing attention, in a fairly general way, to four broad avenues for intervention that are open to executives for transforming organizational culture when it is approached from the perspective of the new epistemology, avenues which are often overlooked in the rush to find “big solutions” to “big problems.”
Contextual Intervention: Pattern Intervention and Context Intervention
The first network of such avenues is the domain of contextual intervention, which comprises the parallel and complementary approaches of pattern intervention and context intervention.
Pattern Intervention involves first identifying and adequately specifying the pattern needing to be transformed, identifying the outlying constraints keeping that pattern in place, and then selectively removing those constraints, introducing new ones, or breaking the pattern irreparably by judicious introduction of behaviour falling outside the class boundaries (as discussed in last week’s article, The Concept of Change, and in Organizational Culture: the Distribution of Cultural Constraints).
Now even at the most general level, there are fifteen very broad modalities of pattern intervention,1 and within each of these fifteen modalities there are a whole range of available generic approaches—each with associated methodologies and techniques. But here let us just take one simple example of one small application of a pattern intervention into the corporate culture.
An R & D department suffering from inadequate team communication and a paucity of collective, creative development of ideas by the team was found to have a cultural pattern in which individuals kept ideas close to their chests and only shared them with their colleagues at a late stage, when the ideas were in a fully developed state.
Internal reports and bulletins of work-in-progress were long, the arguments thoroughly defended to the point at which they were virtually unassailable, and the presentations left little room for further significant input of ideas—for which it was virtually too late by that stage anyway.
Examination of the outlying constraints revealed that managers were monitored and informally evaluated, esteemed, according to the thoroughness, the comprehensiveness of their work—every piece a magnum opus, every idea a winner.
In practice, because these were exceptionally clever and creative individuals, it was as if it were the average thickness, the mean weight of a manager’s reports that was being monitored and implicitly valued.
The pattern intervention implemented involved, simply, a switch to monitoring these engineers only on the number of their reports and their frequency, as the measures of performance. This had the predicted result that in the race to perform, each manager started releasing a series of ever shorter bulletins at ever more frequent intervals, with a greater number of less well-defended ideas presented in a more half-baked state, drawing constructive criticism and creative inspiration from her colleagues, and thereby informing their next contribution.
They soon found that interactive process itself inherently valuable, fun and self-rewarding, and the new pattern became self-sustaining, and was soon very much the heart of the new culture of R&D in the organization.
Like pattern intervention, context intervention involves an equally extensive range of intervention approaches—in fact a far greater range of approaches than pattern intervention, many of them technically quite complex.
Indeed, a number of these context intervention approaches overlap in practice with some forms of pattern intervention. For many interventions can be looked at equally validly from either point of view—as a pattern intervention or as a context intervention—which is unsurprising given the theoretical connections between the two broad approaches, when looked at scientifically.
However, in contrast to pattern intervention in which we are looking for invariances, in context intervention the point is to identify the abstracted aspects of the communicational space that mark out the relevant contexts—the context-markers through which organizational culture is maintained, and then either
introducing new context-markers (1a), or alternatively, redeploying existing context-markers (1b)—recontextualization —to create a new context specifically selected in advance by the change agent;
orobscuring/obliterating carefully selected context-markers by introducing noise or disinformation—decontextualization—to render the context ambiguous and leave the choice of new context up for grabs, thus allowing the system to spontaneously self-organize along new lines.
Here is a simple example of one kind of context intervention, in this case a recontextualization (1a) accomplished through introducing new context markers:
A Chief Executive, call him Jones, had been seeking to develop a more participatory style of management with his executive leadership team, and was failing. Each of his principal direct reports was a high-powered, accomplished individual commanding enormous organizational resources. Indeed, each of these business heads was successfully running his own division with a P&L larger than many good-sized companies (not to mention small countries, in one or two cases!).
Well-meaning attempts were made by Jones to introduce creative, provocative, cross-divisional dialogue on corporate matters, to utilize the individually prodigious talents and creativity of these C-level executives in tackling issues of strategy across the board.
Those efforts, many of them introduced by management consultants in major initiatives, invariably ended in failure. For they were seen by the business heads (perfectly understandably, in the event) as unjustified and invidious interference with their rightful domains on the part of the CEO, or, alternately (and equally understandably) as Jones expecting them to do his job for him.
How could Jones extend the right kind of invitation, float some ideas, and so on, without being misinterpreted as either inappropriately issuing commands and telling executives how to run the business they were charged with running, or inappropriately asking his incredibly busy direct reports for help with what they saw as just his own pet issues?
The context intervention was simple, quick and easy to implement, and created the desired result overnight.
A new context-marker was introduced in the form of a special colour paper (blue) to be used for certain memos from the CEO to the members of his leadership team.
Blue paper meant, “this is not a directive, this is not a request, there is no particular response required of you in response to this at all, there are no hidden agendas, feel free to throw this in the wastebasket and forget you ever received it, however: here is some coordinating information you may find useful, and/or some thoughts that might stimulate some thoughts of your own, and this might give us something to think about together at our next executive leadership team meeting.”
Over the years, we have from time to time employed a number of different variations on the theme of this ‘coloured paper’ intervention, which, I believe, was first used in some form in the late 1960s by Stafford Beer, the father of Management Cybernetics himself.
Filtering Intervention: Limiting Presuppositions
As we discussed in the previous five installments of this series on culture change, organizational culture operates to a great extent in the form of shared presuppositions which go unrecognized as presuppositions, but which have instead become part of the wallpaper or are even taken to be part of the unalterable fabric of reality itself, and which therefore tend to go unquestioned.
After Contextual Intervention (again, comprising pattern intervention and context intervention), the second of the four broad avenues of intervention that we are briefly drawing attention to this week and next is Filtering Intervention—intervening through simply renegotiating the definition of the presenting problem with the client (the ‘problem-owner’) while filtering for, teasing out, and gently challenging or subtly undermining tacit, limiting assumptions (presuppositions), and thus enabling the client to see her way clear to taking appropriate managerial action at once without any further intervention being needed.
Once again, there are many different species of such approaches within the genus Filtering Intervention.
If organizational culture is operating noxiously as a constraint in a particular instance, it may be doing so simply through the “culture-blindness” of a key executive (in the form of cultural presuppositions she has unwittingly taken on board), and who would otherwise be in a position to open up new and perfectly feasible organizational options, which may not in any way be countercultural in themselves.
In such an instance, the only intervention required may be, in the course of mutually constructing (negotiating) the definition of the presenting problem, to defuse one little presupposition. And to do so may, at times, be only a matter of telling a carefully selected story or joke (minimalism indeed!).2 The action taken as a result of defusing the limiting presupposition can in many cases initiate a benign circle of escalation (dominoes toppling dominoes), leading to a significant transformation in the culture of the organization.
Here is an example of Filtering Intervention which included the implicit challenging of a number of different presuppositions:
A marketing and distribution company that was a subsidiary of a large multinational electrical engineering combine, was having difficulty with its service engineers. Its corporate strategy revolved around securing a competitive advantage through excellence in after-sales service, and it had a well-developed and responsive service organization capable of fulfilling such a role.
However, far from being “ambassadors” of the firm, the service engineers were making matters worse, rubbishing the company’s own products in the time-honoured British service engineering tradition of “Who put this rubbish in, then?”
For example, a point-of-sale machine (it wasn’t, but its identity is being changed here to protect a partly innocent machine) was called, let us say, a “Kashmatic.”3 A major corporate client would phone the service department, and the engineer would say, “Oh it’s you, Hi! How are you? Wait. . .don’t tell me . . . the Crash-matic is down again. Doesn’t surprise me in the least!”
A senior manager reporting directly to the COO had been asked to get a big consultancy firm in, to introduce a large-scale management development programme aimed at making its managers more “customer-orientated,” and above all—the implication went—to teach those engineers some manners and how to be brand ambassadors instead of brand detractors.
However the manager decided instead to first seek a more minimalist solution to the problem and brought the challenge to us at Interchange.
After hearing a number of horror stories along the lines of the “Crash-matic” story, in our first and only one-on-one session on this issue where we first learned of the matter, we simply asked the client, “O.K, now give me an example of when your service engineers delivered superlative customer service and demonstrated exemplary ambassadorship on behalf of the firm—you know, an IBM-type story where the CEO phones at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night to say ‘the truck has just left Swindon,’ and the whole place is up again and running by 5 a.m. Monday morning.”
The client proceeded to tell an amazing story of this kind. “O.K,” we said, “How did you get that to happen?” Details followed.
Together with the client, within less than fifteen minutes of further discussion, we pulled out the key principles and assumptions that had served as lynch-pins. “So, what would stop you from just doing that all the time?” “Well, nothing really.” “And if you did, would you need to hire a firm of management consultants to put in a big management development programme to achieve the same result?” “No, I suppose not. I see your point.” So instead, he suited action to words.
Without the need for further intervention, the problem went away forever.
This post has been adapted from “How Change has Changed: Organizational Culture and Justified Intervention,” by James Wilk
© Copyright 1987, 2022 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
For a much simpler approach in a psychotherapy context where these fifteen modalities of pattern-intervention were enumerated and illustrated, see my book with my co-author Bill O’Hanlon, Shifting Contexts, New York: Guilford Press, 1987.
I have more than once been jokingly accused of thinking organizations could be transformed with one-liners; though of course, on our E2 epistemology (see The Concept of Change), there is no reason to think they couldn’t be, at least on some occasions! Certainly one-liners have often transformed companies’ fortunes for the worse. One of the great success stories of British retailing in the 1980s, an award-winning high-street chain of jewellers (Ratners), collapsed overnight after the CEO told two ill-considered jokes as a speaker at a conference of the Institute of Directors at the Royal Albert Hall in 1991. Likewise, a number of expensive rebranding campaigns (Exxon, Bovis) have been significantly undermined in this way. In our own work at Interchange we have seen the reverse situation on a number of occasions, namely a carefully deployed one-liner transforming the culture and performance of a company dramatically for the better.
There is no connection at all here with a real-life, branded machine of a different kind, with a similar sounding name; the actual machine in question, in this case example, was of an entirely different nature from either of these in any event.