Stop Trying to Change Your Culture — Use Your Culture to Create Change
If you’ve ever tried to lead change in a large organization, this one’s for you.
If you lead in IT or any complex enterprise, you’ve probably felt it: the constant pressure to keep up with the next wave of transformation. Agile, DevOps, digital, product, big data, now AI, and whatever comes next.
Here’s the challenge. You know your organization needs to evolve to stay relevant, but the culture doesn’t seem to support or align with the change.
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that complaint, I’d have a very full coffee fund.
The usual pattern goes something like this: we complain that culture is the barrier, quote Drucker’s famous line that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and then what do we do?
We decide the first step is to change the culture.
That’s where things go wrong. Culture isn’t the obstacle. It’s the way.
Organizational culture is more than “the way we do things around here.” It’s a source of shared meaning and values. And when we’re dealing with change, those shared values can be a powerful way to create common ground and spark momentum.
The late organizational scholar Edgar Schein described two types of anxiety that show up during change. Learning anxiety is the fear of appearing incompetent or losing status by trying something new. Survival anxiety is the fear that an important goal or value is at risk if we don’t change.
For change to happen, survival anxiety has to outweigh learning anxiety.
So how can we use that insight to make change easier?
By working with culture instead of against it.
When we connect a proposed change to our shared values—our culture—we create a bridge between what is familiar and what is new. A helpful question is: How does this change bring us closer to living out our shared values?
This approach anchors change in something that isn’t really up for debate. The culture is what it is, and by being part of the organization, we’ve already accepted its basic norms and values. When we frame the change as a natural extension of those values, we tap into a deep psychological need for alignment.
People want to be seen—and to see themselves—as consistent with what they believe. We all want to feel that our actions match our values.
In my next post, I’ll share how one leadership team applied these ideas to transform how they worked together—and how you can do the same.
Until then, I invite you to reflect: What values define your organization’s culture? And how might they become the foundation, not the friction, for your next change?
