Organizational Maturity and Potential Decline

Continued success creates two organizational phenomena that make cul­ture change more difficult: (1) Many basic assumptions become more strongly held, and (2) organizations develop espoused values and ideals about themselves that are increasingly out of line with the actual assump­tions by which they operate. If the internal and external environments remain stable, strongly held

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Culture Change Through Scandal and Explosion of Myths

Where incongruities exist between espoused values and basic assump­tions, scandal and myth explosion become primary mechanisms of culture change. Nothing will change until the consequences of the actual operat­ing assumptions create a public and visible scandal that cannot be hidden, avoided, or denied. One of the most powerful triggers to change of this sort

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Culture Change Through Turnarounds

After a scandal or crisis has brought basic assumptions into consciousness and been assessed as dysfunctional, the basic choices are between some kind of “turnaround,” a more rapid transformation of parts of the culture to permit the organization to become adaptive once again, or destruction of the organization and its culture through a process

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Culture Change Through Mergers and Acquisitions

When one organization acquires another organization or when two orga­nizations are merged, there is inevitable culture clash because it is unlikely that two organizations will have the same cultures. The leadership role is then to figure out how best to manage this clash. The two cultures can be left alone to continue to evolve

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Culture Change Through Destruction and Rebirth

Little is known or understood about this process, so little will be said about it here. Suffice it to say that a culture or at least some key elements of a cul­ture can be destroyed by removing the key culture carriers. Some turnaround managers simply fire the top one or two echelons of the

The Psycho-Social Dynamics of Organizational Change

The fundamental assumptions underlying any change in a human system are derived originally from Kurt Lewin (1947). I have elaborated and refined his basic model in my studies of coercive persuasion, professional education, group dynamics training, and management development (Schein, 1961a, 1961b, 1964, 1972; Schein and Bennis, 1965). This elaborated model is shown in

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Unfreezing or Disconfirmation of managed culture change

If any part of the core cognitive structure is to change in more than minor incremental ways, the system must first experience enough disequilibrium to force a coping process that goes beyond just reinforcing the assumptions that are already in place. Lewin called the creation of such disequilibrium unfreezing, or creating a motivation to

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Survival Anxiety Versus Learning Anxiety of Culture Change

If the disconfirming data “get through” the learners’ denial and defensive­ness, they will recognize the need to change, the need to give up some old habits and ways of thinking, and the need to learn some new habits and ways of thinking. However, this produces learning anxiety. The interaction of these two anxieties creates

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How to Create Psychological Safety for Culture Change?

Creating psychological safety for organizational members who are undergo­ing transformational learning involves eight activities that must be carried on almost simultaneously. They are listed chronologically, but the change leader must be prepared to implement all of them. A compelling positive vision: The targets of change must believe that the organization will be better off

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Cognitive Restructuring for Culture Change

After an organization has been unfrozen, the change process proceeds along a number of different lines that reflect either new learning, through trial and error based on scanning the environment broadly, or imitation of role models, based on psychological identification with the role model. The Amoco change initiative to redefine the roles of the

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Refreezing for Culture Change

The final step in any given change process is refreezing, by which Lewin meant that the new learning will not stabilize until it is reinforced by actual results. The Alpha employees discovered that not only could they deal with environmental hazards but that it was satisfying and worthwhile to do so, hence they internalized

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Principles in Regard to Culture Change

When an organization encounters disconfirming information and launches a change program, it is not clear at the outset whether culture change will be involved and how the culture will aid or hinder the change program. To clarify these issues, a culture assessment process of the kind described in the next chapter becomes appropriate. However,

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Rapid Deciphering-A Multistep Group Process

The process that I will describe is designed to give the leaders of a change process a rapid way of deciphering elements of their own culture so that they can assess its relevance to their change program. I have often been asked to design a survey or do an interview program in this context

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What If Culture Elements Need to Change?

In my experience, the assessment process usually reveals that most of the culture will aid the change process. However, there may well be elements of the culture that are a barrier and require their own change program. For example, when the Alpha Power employees were required to identify and fix environmental hazards, this was

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Beta Service Company – Rapid Organizational Culture Changes Through Behavior Modification

This case illustrates that behavior can be changed by leaders and, thereby, can launch an immediate culture change process. Two years ago, the head of organization development of Beta, a large urban utility, called to ask if I would do a culture assessment because the CEO and his Chief Operating Officer (COO) wanted to

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MA-COM – Revising a Change Agenda as a Result of Cultural Insight

Culture assessment done for one purpose can reveal cultural elements that were not anticipated yet explain much of the observed behavior of the orga­nization and its leaders. In this case, once the deeper and unanticipated elements of the culture were identified, the change agenda was revised toward a better solution. A newly appointed CEO

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U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – Reassessing Mission

This case example illustrates the culture-deciphering process in a differ­ent type of organization. As part of a long-range strategy-planning process, I was asked in 1986 to conduct an analysis of the culture of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers because of concerns that their mission was chang­ing, and they were uncertain what future sources

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Apple Computer – Culture Assessment as Part of a Long-Range Planning Process

Apple Computer decided in 1991 to conduct a cultural analysis as part of a long-range planning exercise focused on human resource issues. How big would the company be in five years, what kind of people would it need, and where should it locate itself geographically under different size scenarios? A ten-person working group, consisting

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Ciba-Geigy – Did the Culture Changes?

This case examines a major multiyear turnaround that was designed to fix a great many problems that Ciba-Geigy had generated in the 1970s and that was viewed at the time as a real example of culture change. The story illustrates many of the mechanisms discussed in the preceding chapters but also raises some fundamental

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The learning culture in organization

1. What Might a Learning Culture Look Like? The ideas spelled out in this chapter have resulted from many conversa­tions with the late Donald Michael (1985, 1991) and with my colleagues Tom Malone (1987, 2004), Peter Senge (1990; Senge and others, 2008), and Otto Scharmer (2007) about the nature of organizations and work in

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