Organizational Culture as Hologram
Changing one part in order to change the whole
Why would it be worthwhile to address a company-wide cultural issue with one manager or one department?
Would that get us anywhere?
Could it ever end up being more efficient and effective to go about creating change in this way than attempting to implement a cultural change program across a whole organization?
We can look at an organization’s culture as a hologram in which “the whole is encoded in each of the parts” because culture is about pattern, the recurring invariances that can be observed throughout an organization.
Looking at it in this way allows us to consider that creating a small, targeted shift in one part of a pattern can have wider ramifications across the whole organization.
More often than not, patterns found to obtain in one part of the organization will be found to operate in all the others…. What is more, when a shift in the pattern is found to be occurring in one part of the organization, a similar shift will mysteriously appear in numerous other parts that are apparently only remotely connected.
—Ellen
Organizational Culture as Hologram
So long as we don’t take the metaphor too seriously, it may be useful to think of organizational culture as holographic in nature. In holography, information is encoded in such a way that if the holographic plate is shattered, any single fragment can be used to reconstruct the whole. The whole is encoded in each of the parts.
Anyone who has spent much time in or around large multinational corporations must be struck by the extent to which knowledge of the curious ways and apparent idiosyncrasies of one part of the organization can provide one with an inordinate amount of insight into the workings of the rest. More often than not, patterns found to obtain in one part of the organization will be found to operate in all the others. At different levels of description, at different levels of recursion within a single department or division, and across all departments and divisions, the same patterns appear again and again. What is more, when a shift in the pattern is found to be occurring in one part of the organization, a similar shift will mysteriously appear in numerous other parts that are apparently only remotely connected.
Indeed, much of our intuitive sense of organizational culture (i.e. when, so to speak, we can catch a whiff of a cultural issue in the air) as well as our common sense notions of organizational culture, seem bound up with this “Don’t tell me, let me guess…” phenomenon. Getting to know the culture of an organization means getting to know what to expect wherever one ventures within it.
But note: there is nothing terribly mysterious about the apparent holographic nature of organizational culture. If culture is (according to our definition) about the patterns that connect—the recurring, invariant features pervading the organization (and hence the only thing enabling us to ‘point to’ an identifiable organizational culture at all, amidst all the messy complexity), it is no wonder that a description of the pattern that can be observed in one part will be the same as that in another part. And if the formerly invariant features in one part are starting to vary, the pattern starting to shift, this is but one reflection of a contextual pattern-shift that will of course be reflected in other parts.
To stay fairly close to the holographic metaphor, if, after a rainfall, the moon is reflected in one puddle of water, it will be reflected in all the others, and—take note—if a cloud passes over the face of the moon in one puddle, the same will occur in the other puddles as well. That changes in organizational culture likewise appear holographic in nature will also seem less mysterious once we discuss the notion of context.
Organizational Culture as Pattern
To speak of the pattern of anything is to speak of whatever is invariant from one observation to the next. Some invariances within an organization can readily be attributed to the following of official company rules, or to the (relatively more remote) consequences of following those rules. But even if we rule out all those instances of “law-like” organizational behavior that can be attributed to the presence of laid-down “laws,” there remains a good deal of “law-like” behavior to be observed in organizations.
It is as if people were following unwritten rules.
The “rules” in question are descriptive—introduced by an observer (us) to describe the regularities observed—rather than prescriptive—say, introduced by senior management. Many of these as-if “rules” are to be found throughout the “host” society (e.g. in British culture at large) or are to be found in any organization of this size and nature (perhaps anywhere in the world). But still other descriptive rules mark this organization out from its fellows, and it is these idiosyncratic behavioural regularities that constitute a particular organization’s culture.
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