Imagine you’re a leader, and you’ve been tasked with driving a big culture change strategy. The company’s usual ways of doing things aren’t working, and it’s up to you to identify changes that would allow people to do their best work and deliver top-tier results.
You work tirelessly for weeks on the project and proudly present your findings. Except, after your presentation, the feedback you receive is all over the place. One group loves certain ideas but rejects others, while another faction has the opposite reaction.
How will you know which feedback to accept and which you can safely ignore?
Culture change strategies—those slide decks outlining the journey leaders envision for an organization—are like blueprints for a house. When we build a house, we use engineering and architectural principles to ensure it’s safe and solid and will last for decades. Considering we spend most of our waking adult life at work, shouldn’t we do the same for culture initiatives?
Most organizations don’t approach culture change this way because it seems more nebulous than architecture. However, the truth is there are engineering principles for organizational behavior change. Just as experienced architects can read the blueprints for a house and know whether the design will work, every organization should have a change architect—someone who can look at a change strategy and know immediately if it will work, or require constant attention.
3 concepts of ‘change architecture’
At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we’ve been thinking for over a decade about the knowledge and skills needed to help leaders become better change architects. We believe there are three core ideas to understand:
- cognitive capacity
- coherence
- habit activation
Let’s take these apart one at a time.
Cognitive capacity refers to the amount of information the brain can process, retain, or recall at once. Humans are notoriously bad at estimating how well others will remember or understand their ideas; leaders, even more so. This tendency is a type of experience bias called the “false consensus effect.” It’s why leaders often assume everyone understands an idea as well as they do.
The reality is, most employees are overtaxed and overcapacity on any given day. Without considering cognitive capacity, change strategies almost always overwhelm the people they intend to support. They create decision fatigue and stress, lessening people’s openness and ability to change.
On the other hand, leaders who recognize the limits of cognitive capacity give their change strategy the best shot at success because employees can focus on what matters most. Leaders need to have a keen sense of when “just right” becomes “too much.” One way to think about this is by focusing on what’s essential, versus what’s exhaustive. Or, as musicians say, it’s what you leave out that makes a song really work.
Working with Microsoft almost 10 years ago, we simplified a complex set of leadership models into three principles for everyone to focus on: Create clarity, Generate energy, and Deliver success. Almost a decade later, these principles are still one of the most important frameworks for how leaders at Microsoft should lead—and, by extension, create the right culture. That’s because executives at Microsoft, many of whom are engineers themselves, listened to the science of cognitive capacity.
The second principle, coherence, is how different goals, models, or concepts fit together. Think of coherence as the structural integrity of ideas. Just like a house needs structural integrity so that everything holds together, in a culture change program you need everything to fit together: the organization’s purpose and mission, its strategy, its current goals, the way you want people to lead, and the change strategy itself.
Coherence also helps encode the change strategy into memory. When everything fits together, every time you activate one idea, you reanimate the entire mental map in employees’ brains, further embedding the overall map and therefore the change strategy. When you have decoherence — for example, not enough alignment between a company’s purpose and its business strategy — people get stuck trying to solve an unsolvable puzzle. We believe coherence is something that can be measured with real metrics.
The final area to understand is perhaps the most complex: building habit activation strategies that really work. We think of culture as shared everyday habits, or the way people automatically interact internally and externally. These habits can be seen in the way we speak to customers, the way we support other colleagues and the way we solve problems. These habits combine to make up a company’s culture. To change culture is to change habits.
However, organizations and individual people generally don’t succeed at changing habits. Around 75% of change initiatives fail, and the biggest reason turns out to be that people simply didn’t do things differently. Companies are good at telling people what they should do, but poor at closing the knowing-doing gap.
We believe there is a real science of habit activation that rests on issues such as the quality of attention people pay to a change initiative, the strength of insights people have when they touch on new ideas, how tightly woven these ideas are in the social fabric of the organization, and the amount of time people focus on building the new habits. We’ve found that these factors can be defined, measured, and managed in quite powerful ways.
Embracing the need to build
Instead of looking at a proposed change strategy and scratching their heads, leaders who are fluent in change architecture concepts can immediately start asking how the strategy accounts for what matters most.
They can ask intelligent questions about cognitive capacity (Will the strategy overwhelm people’s busy brains?), coherence (Do the pieces fit together in a way that makes sense?), and habit activation (Will the strategy actually shift behaviors toward the desired outcomes?). They can discern the difference between various strategies and respond intelligently to internal and external consultants outlining their plans.
With entire industries likely to be transformed through AI and other emerging technologies, change is only going to intensify. Smart organizations are buckling down for a period of continuous disruption. In this fast-changing world, having a true science for culture change can be a strong strategic advantage for companies of all sizes.
This post was written with Rachel Cardero and Chris Weller.
