Your organisational strategy is dead in the water without culture and systems

Congratulations, you reached the end of a long strategy formation process and you’ve just published your new strategy.

Now the teams know exactly what to do and they can just get on with it, right?

Wrong.

Without culture and systems that support your strategy, there will be no change.

Strategy is what the organisation says it's teams will do. Systems are what the organisational context will allow the team to do. Culture is what the teams will be willing to do (both in the negative and positive sense).

You can't execute a strategy your systems block. And you can't execute a strategy your culture undermines. This means that culture and systems are essential to strategy.

Strategy requires culture and systems. Join the conversation on LinkedIn here.

A good strategy diagnoses the situation that your organisation is currently in. With a realistic view of the situation, the strategy then defines guiding principles that inform strategic choices. And through those strategic choices, the strategy lays out coherent actions that address the strategic diagnosis and are coherent with the guiding principles. (At least, according to some guy called Richard Rumelt.)

Your culture and systems need to form part of your diagnosis. And your strategic actions must address your culture and systems. Otherwise, your strategy is based on an incomplete view of your organisational reality.

Recently a newsletter subscriber, asked what frameworks can guide cultural change that supports strategy.

I haven't seen a specific approach for culture change with strategy. My thoughts would be that you need to consider your culture in your strategic diagnosis. Because if your strategy relies on teams suddenly being high trust, high performing, insightful decision makers and your culture is low trust with slow decision making, the strategy will fail.

To be successful, organisations must either adapt their strategy to make it realistic given the organisation’s culture, or the strategy must come with a robust plan to change culture. The same goes for systems.

My current mental model for culture is that it's the sum impact of the behaviours of individuals within a team or organisation. The most influential behaviours define how others choose to act and the perception of what behaviour is acceptable or desirable. This means that culture change is behaviour change. To make change, we must target at the most influential behaviour leaders.

For change of any kind I'd start with COM-B and the behaviour change wheel. It's the change model with the strongest mix of science with practicality. I posted about COM-B in this LinkedIn post. You can read more about COM-B and the Behaviour Change Wheel in Susan Michie, Lou Atkins and Robert West’s book.

So if you’re about to release a strategy (or better yet, if you’re about to design a strategy), make sure you’re thinking about culture and systems.

Some questions I'd use:

Culture

• How well do we make decisions throughout the organisation? (Are we decisive? Do we consider strategic impact or make knee jerk decisions? Do we decide slowly or quickly? Do we always need consensus before anything happens?)

• What cultural facts about our organisation could derail our strategy?

• Who are the biggest cultural influences and are they likely to block or enable our strategy?

Systems

• What organisational systems is our strategy reliant on and would be a critical failure point for the strategy?

• Do the systems our people use to get everyday tasks done create sludge that will limit our people’s effectiveness?

• Does our performance measurement system (both the design of metrics and how they’re gathered) create perverse incentives that don’t align to our strategy?

These questions represent the bare minimum to start creating strategy, systems and culture that are mutually reinforcing.