Implementation Leadership Principle 6: Culture Is King Over Change
June 23, 2023 – This article is one in a series of articles about ACJI’s 10 Essential Principles of Implementation Leadership. If you’re new here, take a look at our first article in the series on principle 1 to start.
Culture is king over change. If you want to succeed at implementing something new or reenergizing an existing program, policy, or initiative, you need to start by understanding organizational culture.
What Is Organizational Culture?
Within justice and community organizations, culture is the underlying ecosystem of beliefs, traditions, and habits among the collective sum of people. Culture is omnipresent yet invisible. As a result, it is often neglected in organizational change efforts…and this is detrimental.
Understanding Why Organizational Culture Is So Important
Peter Drucker is often credited with the statement, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” In other words, most strategies for change will live and die at the hands of organizational culture.
Here’s another explanation offered by Ward Goodenough: “Culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members. Culture is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the forms of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them.”
There is more than one way to view or define organizational culture, but there is one thing the ACJI team knows to be true: Culture is a more powerful barrier to change than any budget, any policy, any law, or any strategy.
It’s up to you to recognize the attributes that make up your organization’s culture and the competing interests that test it.
Recognizing Competing Interests
The criminal justice field has challenges that those in the business world might not face. What’s more, these factors often compete with one another. For instance…
- New legislation is often politically motivated
- Case law is continuously changing
- Press attention can be controversial
- Newly elected politicians disagree with longtime organization leadership
Of course, some justice field challenges aren’t all that different from the business world. We’re all trying to figure out budgets and philosophical differences.
In our case, philosophical differences include things like punishment versus rehabilitation. Punishment is addressed one way and that simultaneously disrupts rehabilitation while also aggravating cost control and neglecting victim and community reparation…and on and on.
It is like a Rubik’s Cube. You align a few sets of goals (one color) only to be frustrated by another set of goals (another color) that don’t line up. All this wreaks havoc on organizational culture.
Imagine You Are Inside A Jar…
Let’s introduce another metaphor.
Think of it like a jar. Inside the jar, it is familiar and comfortable, but once you are in there, you can’t read the label that is on the outside of the jar. That’s a problem because the label describes where you could be headed and the progress your organization is capable of. You can’t read it because you’re stuck inside.
Identify And Understand Your Org’s Culture
If you are looking to create change and know that your culture is a barrier to success, consider this two-part solution. First, understand that you are a product of the culture you work in. You’re inside that cozy jar. You’ve acclimated to the culture. So, your task is to get uncomfortable by resisting the status quo.
Second, understand that culture change cannot be approached with policies, mandates, and checklists. Culture change is an adaptive challenge (versus a technical one) that requires you to ask many questions, listen for what is going on below the surface, and consider the big picture.
What’s Next
In ACJI’s programs, we discuss organizational culture as it relates to justice and community organizations in great detail. It is a critical component to implementation science, which is why we’ve made it one of our 10 Implementation Leadership Principles.
For more on the subject, check out other blog posts on our principles and ACJI’s Webinar titled, “You Can’t Read The Label From Inside The Jar.” In it, our own Glenn Tapia talks about criminology and real-world change. You’ll find this webinar and others on our website here.
