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

1 Comments

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

1 Comments

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

4 Comments

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

2 Comments

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

1 Comments

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

1 Comments

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,

1 Comments

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

1 Comments

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

1 Comments

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

1 Comments

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

1 Comments

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

1 Comments

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

1 Comments

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

1 Comments

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

2 Comments

Learning-Oriented Leadership

Having described the generic characteristics of a learning culture and the implications in general for the learning leader, it remains to examine briefly whether learning-oriented leadership varies as a function of the different stages of organizational evolution. 1. Learning Leadership in Culture Creation In a rapidly changing world, the learning leader/founder must not only

1 Comments

Implications for the Selection and Development of Leaders

What, then, is really needed to exercise learning leadership that will stimu­late cultural learning? 1. Perception and Insight The learning leader must be able to perceive the problem, to have insight into the culture and its dysfunctional elements. Such boundary-spanning perception can be difficult because it requires leaders to see their own weak­nesses, to

1 Comments

Cultural islands: managing multicultural groups

In the previous chapter, I outlined what a learning culture and learning leadership must be. It is easy to specify these requirements; it is very hard to fulfill them. In particular, it is not at all clear how cultural insight and mutual understanding can be achieved in multicultural settings, groups, and organizations when several

1 Comments

Cultural Intelligence

One approach to solving multicultural issues of this sort is to educate each member about the norms and assumptions of each of the cultures involved. I have already indicated that this approach would not only be cumbersome because of the number of different cultures involved but also would have to be so abstract that

5 Comments