Why culture change never sticks and what to do instead
A bold new approach for business and HR leaders who want longer lasting culture change for less time, money, and effort
Reading Time 3 minutes
This is a summary of the Manifesto for Effortless Culture Change by Matt Furness, Founder of Click. The full version can be found here.
When it comes to culture change, we’re in a rut. The same initiatives are rolled out, with little evidence of any long-term impact.
Frustrated by this, my team and I returned to the drawing board. We scoured over 650 studies from behavioural science to understand where the industry is going wrong and to uncover better ways to make culture change stick.
Now, we’ve written our findings into a manifesto. This new approach creates longer lasting impact for less time, money, and effort. The beliefs are as follows.
1. The culture change industry sucks
Most businesses invest huge amounts of time, energy, and money in their culture. Their efforts create short-term momentum, but not long-term change.
The impact? Senior leaders think you can’t change culture. HR aren’t respected. Budgets and resource are cut.
If we want things to change, we must begin by facing this fact.
2. We must oversimplify culture to shift it
Culture consists of intangible psychological parts (i.e., values, attitudes, and beliefs) and concrete behaviours. Most efforts target both.
But targeting the intangible psychological parts is a high-risk, low-reward strategy. Values, attitudes, and beliefs are deep-rooted and stubborn. And, even if you change what people think, you probably won’t change how they act.
In contrast, we can often change behaviour simply through changing the conditions around people, instead of targeting people’s thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. Then, the visibility of behaviours creates a ripple effect and influences what people think and feel in turn.
We must therefore oversimplify culture change to focus on shifting behaviours, and less on influencing what people think and feel.
3. Motivation and capability are overrated
Traditional methods aim to upskill people and motivate them to change. The assumption? When people know better, they’ll do better.
But this isn’t how human beings behave. We find behaviour change hard because it requires our attention, willpower, and effort. And these are limited resources.
This is why traditional efforts only create short-term change. They rely on our limited psychological resources. And once these resources run out, things return to the way they were.
4. To last, culture change must be effortless
The behaviours that stick are those we can perform without willpower, attention, or effort. Those we can maintain even when we’re busy, stressed, and tired.
It turns out, long-term change is less about maximising motivation and capability. It’s more about minimising the effort needed to do the right thing.
We can achieve this by applying behavioural science built at the world’s best universities. A science that’s already been successfully applied in many other contexts. It’s just barely been applied to change behaviour and culture at work, until now…
We call this new methodology, Effortless Culture Change.
5. We must nurture 3 conditions across 3 systems
The goal is to create the conditions that make the right behaviours effortless. Behavioural science shows this happens when the conditions and systems around people make the right behaviour the obvious, easy, and rewarding option.
We can purposefully nurture these three conditions at three systemic levels:
- Organisational: business and HR leaders can design shared systems that minimise friction with the right behaviours.
- Personal: leaders, managers, and colleagues create their own systems needed to maintain the change.
- Team: managers can create an environment that makes the right behaviours the easiest, most appealing options.
After reading the manifesto, you have a choice
You can return to the old ways. You’ll enjoy short bursts of momentum, but not lasting impact. The alternative is to make culture change effortless. If you do, you will:
- Create longer lasting impact
- Save time, money, and effort
- Build respect and credibility
- Reduce reliance on sceptics
Want to create longer lasting behaviour and culture change in your organisation? Get started by downloading the full manifesto here.
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Don’t forget, multiple participants can now join the course
Two leaders or senior managers from a business with 10 to 249 employees can now attend the 12 modules of learning and get the benefits of one-to-one mentorship.