The four cultures
In the book The Reengineering Alternative, William E. Schneider explains that each company can be categorized into one of four predominant cultures. Control, Collaboration, Cultivation and Competence. These cultures can be displayed in a diagram using the personal (People oriented) vs. impersonal (Company oriented) focus of the company as X axis and the actuality (Reality oriented) vs. possibility focus as Y axis. In theory, all of these four cultures have their own advantages and disadvantages and none of them are better than others. Through talking to people I noticed that the perception they had was vastly different, though.
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| W. Schneider Culture model |
When asked about what people thought the predominant culture of their environment was like, a pattern emerged. Those that were happy with their environments saw their department or company predominantly in the left half of the diagram, illustrated with yellow color. On the other hand, the unhappy workers found the environment to be hostile to them, limited and mainly dominated by a control culture, painted in cyan. To summarize, collaboration and cultivation cultures are seen as where the fun is, where people want to be. Control culture is seen as the enemy, the evil side, limits, restrictions, commands that take away the fun. And to many, it is seen as a synonym to what they refer to as the System.
A system without people?
Now that I understood that many people thought of a system as nothing more than the set of rules and instructions that were designed to limit them, I suddenly became aware why they reacted to my suggestions in such a hostile way. They saw something gone wrong inside their perceived culture - something that had to do with people - and I was seen as suggesting to fix it with some tweaking of rules or even introducing more of them? What good could ever come of that? Nevertheless, this approach is flawed. A system is not just a collection of rules but one has to think using a big picture. All interactions between customers and company, between departments, between workers and management, all procedures, even if they are not defined but common practice, it all counts towards the system; and the more people there are involved, the more complex the system (usually) becomes. If you were to paint the area defined by the system in the diagram above, it would contain all the four cultures at the same rate.
Only 5% people but 95% system
According to Dr.Deming, 95% of an organization's performance are to be found within the system, leaving only 5% to people. This leads to a big misunderstanding. Many hear these numbers when confronted with Systems Thinking and are shocked, as they perceive the 95% / 5% ratio to be mutually exclusive: if 5% have to do with people, the other 95% must be something completely different; and they can't agree with it. As a result, they resort to trying to fix any occurring problem by dealing with people directly, through coaching, counseling, fines, motivational techniques and much more. Unfortunately, if you take a group of great employees and put them into a disastrous system, in all likelihood the results will be very poor - and no amount of coaching for them will fix that. So, if you want to care about people: deal with the flaws in the system. It's not some abstract thing that stands alone for itself - and if you fix it, 19 out of 20 issues you might think have to do with people might be fixed by that as well.
