“Change is a door opened from the inside” says a French proverb. Organisational culture change efforts fall under many banners, usually tagged with aspiring adjectives like: transformational. In the hard light of day, one sees that the majority of the change efforts fail for a variety of reasons, one of which is that the thoughts, feelings and beliefs that drive staffs’ behaviours are not taken into account. Quite simply: we humans, often don’t behave in a rationale manner, our emotions drive us, we are not as logic driven as we like to think. Like the preacher, intoxicated with their own verbosity, management generally thinks that it is someone else, not them, that has to change.
Conventional change efforts usually fail, to succeed one must take into account counter intuitive insights, that are not immediately obvious. Listen, listen and listen are the first steps. Focus on root cause analysis, continually asking why.
