How do you fix "culture"?

For the past few weeks, we've been discussing the recent Quality woes of Boeing and Toyota, woes which some observers have attributed to their company cultures. We've considered whether "culture" can strictly be considered a root cause at all. But of course the biggest question is, What can you do about it? At the very end of my post about Toyota, I described one approach that I've seen work, but it was hardly advice! It was more a counsel of desperation than anything practical.

Still, we know that company cultures do change sometimes. It's not common, but it happens. How? What methods actually work? I know a couple, and I'll describe them here. But the first point to make is that it matters critically which direction you are trying to change. Techniques that work in one direction absolutely won't work in the other.

The way down

The gates of hell are open night and day;

Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:

But to return, and view the cheerful skies,

In this the task and mighty labor lies. 

Virgil, Aeneid, Book VI, Lines 126–129 (tr. John Dryden)

If you want to change an organization to focus less on Quality and more on easily quantifiable measures like cost and schedule, the playbook is well understood. This is the mission that Harry Stonecipher set himself when he took charge of Boeing. Mandate strict targets across the organization for schedule and cost-cutting, and then fire people who don't meet the targets. Make it clear that these principles will continue, that they apply at all levels of the organization, and that there is no appeal. Employees who want to keep their jobs will respond by prioritizing their cost and schedule targets, no matter what. Employees who can't do that, for whatever reason, will end up leaving the company (voluntarily or otherwise). So in the long term they won't pose a significant obstacle. 

As I say, this approach is well-understood. I have oversimplified the picture in a hundred ways (and of course I don't deny that every business has to run a profit to stay open). But a rigorous application of this approach or one like it will reliably orient a company around whatever quantifiable measures you choose. And the values of those measures will reliably improve over time. Partly this improvement is the natural result of unwavering focus. Also, there is no measure in the world that cannot be gamed; and so if the incentives are high enough, people will figure out how to game whatever measures you put in place.

The way back up

If on the other hand you want to pull an organization back up to more of a Quality focus, the approach has to be less brutal. Quality is a direct consequence of loving or caring about your work; and people cannot afford to care when they are governed by fear. But this in turn means that the ascent back up to a Quality focus takes time. The key, as in so many other Quality implementations, is Kaizen—introducing little changes in the right direction, so small that they are easy for everyone to absorb ... and then following up with new ones. Again and again.

I saw this done once, gently but very efficiently. A man I'll call Franz (not his real name!) was assigned responsibility for the engineering programs at his company. Franz soon realized that the different concurrent projects all affected certain common modules. In other words, Project A would have to use module M, so they would change it to fit their needs. But then a day later, Project B would change it again, to fit their needs! And so on. In addition, there were a couple of experts in the company who knew areas that no one else knew; when several projects needed their expertise all at once, the work quickly bottlenecked.

The classic solution to this problem is to set up a Change Control Board that reviews all the upcoming work and decides what will be done when. But Franz quickly learned that his organization was more or less allergic to formal structures like CCB's, even when they promised to be helpful.

So Franz started bringing in a box of doughnuts every Friday morning, and asked all the project leads to come join him around 10:00—casually, whenever they could get away—for coffee and doughnuts. "I really don't know what you guys are working on these days, so come have a doughnut and tell me about your work." Pretty soon it was well established that every Friday all the project leads gathered at 10:00 in the conference room next to Franz's office, and talked casually over coffee and doughnuts about what they were doing. And sure enough, from time to time the conversation went like this:

Project Lead 1: Yeah, as soon as we get our heads above water on these run-time problems, the next thing is we have to dive into the Whitzinframmer Module.

Franz: Wow, really? The Whitzinframmer Module? [Turns to Project Lead 2.] Say, didn't you tell me last week that your team is totally rewriting that module right now?

Project Lead 2: That's right. We are.

Franz: Maybe the two of you want to talk about this for a few minutes, so you don't step on each other's toes.

Project Lead 1: Sure, no problem. [To Project Lead 2.] Can I come by your desk right after this, so we can talk for 15 minutes?

And thus, week by week, Franz nudged this group into a fully-operational CCB. He never used the name "CCB." It was always just "Doughnuts with Franz." But step by step the Quality improved while the frustration and bottlenecks diminished.

There's no magic recipe. Every case requires understanding where you are today, where you want to get, and what tools are available to help get you there. Maybe you can do it with doughnuts, or maybe it will take something else.

The key is that people want to do a good job. You can squeeze that desire out of them by subjecting them ruthlessly to the wrong incentives. And if you do, then it may take a while for them to find their way back once your successor sees why it's needed. But step by step it can be done.