6
CULTURAL LEARNING, UNLEARNING, AND TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE
In order to understand the creation and evolution of culture and to manage culture change and transformation, you must understand learning and change theory in general. It is especially important to understand how learning and change work with human systems, in which the learners are adults who may have to unlearn something before they can learn something new. The fundamental reason why people sometimes “resist change” is that the new behavior to be learned requires some unlearning that they may be unwilling or unable to do. Adult learning is, therefore, fundamentally different from childhood learning, where everything learned is new. A model of learning and change that works for organizational employees must, therefore, take into account the fact of resistance to change and the reasons for it.
Resistance to change applies especially to cultural assumptions because, once cultural elements have stabilized in an organization, they provide meaning, predictability, and security to its members. If a culture change program is announced, discomfort and anxiety will be the immediate result because organization members will realize that they may have to give up some beliefs, attitudes, values, and assumptions—as well as to learn some new ones.
A Simplifying Model of Learning, Unlearning, and Transformative Change
One basic assumption of adult learning is that we are at all times in a state of what has been called a “quasi-stationary equilibrium” and that we are always trying to stabilize our emotional and cognitive state, which is perpetually bombarded by new external and internal stimuli that have the potential for upsetting and moving the equilibrium to a new state.1 Many of these stimuli can be thought of as “driving forces” that push us toward something new, but we also generate within ourselves “restraining forces” that keep us at the present state. Learning or change takes place when the driving forces are greater than the restraining forces. This model is best understood from the perspective of a manager trying to produce change and can be viewed as consisting of several stages, shown in Exhibit 6.1.
Exhibit 6.1 The Stages of Learning/Change
This model of learning and change raises the controversial question: Is there a natural instinct to learn and improve? Is natural curiosity a motive to try new things and overcome old habits? Or must there be some sense of dissatisfaction for motivation to learn something new to arise? The organizational version of this question is, “Can a successful organization make major changes, or does there have to be some threat or sense of failure or crisis before people are motivated to make changes?” Must there be a “burning platform” or a major disaster or a public scandal before the need for real change is accepted?
Because humans avoid unpredictability and uncertainty, hence create cultures, the basic argument for adult learning is that indeed we do need some new stimulus to upset the equilibrium. The best way to think about such a stimulus is as “disconfirmation”; something is perceived or felt that is not expected and that upsets some of our beliefs or assumptions. Whether we feel it consciously or not, disconfirmation creates “survival anxiety”—that something bad will happen if we don’t change—or “guilt”—we realize that we are not achieving our own ideals or goals.
Disconfirmation
Members of the organization can experience disconfirming forces directly, or they can be articulated by someone in the organization such as the CEO, a whistleblower, or a functional manager whose job it is to track certain indicators. Disconfirming information can involve any or all of the following categories:
• An economic threat—unless you change, you will go out of business, lose market share, or suffer some other loss
• A political threat—unless you change, some more powerful group will win out over you or gain some advantage
• A technological threat—unless you change, you will be obsolete
• A legal threat—unless you change, you will go to jail or pay heavy fines
• A moral threat—unless you change, you will be seen as selfish, evil, or socially irresponsible
• An internal discomfort—unless you change, you will not achieve some of your own goals and ideals
This last force, the internal one, is often thought of as the basis of “spontaneous” or natural learning, in that we seem to be able to motivate ourselves. We have a desire to do better, to achieve some ideal. But in my experience, such spontaneously motivated learning is almost always triggered by some new information that signals failure to achieve our own goals and ideals. I “spontaneously” decide to take some tennis lessons to improve my net game, but I realize that the reason for this decision is that someone whom I regularly beat is suddenly beating me.
Disaster and Scandal As Sources of Disconfirmation
For an organization, one of the most powerful triggers to change is the occurrence of a disaster and/or a scandal such as Three Mile Island, Challenger, Hurricane Katrina, the Texas City Refinery explosion, Enron, and, most recently the Wall Street-precipitated economic crisis. What such events reveal is that some of the ideals and values the organization espouses turn out not to be operational in practice. This leads to reassessment of what the deeper cultural assumptions are that are actually operating.
For example, in the recent economic crisis many financial institutions espoused the value of responsible lending in the housing market, yet their behavior showed blatant irresponsibility in making loans to consumers who could not possibly have kept up with the payments. The lenders rationalized their behavior by the assumption that housing values could only go up. Many of these organizations now recognize that their behavior was more motivated by the assumption that “we should maximize profits” than the assumption “we should only make loans to people who will be able to make payments no matter what.” As more economic disconfirmation piles up, not only will companies reconsider their own assumptions, but the government will step in with more regulation.
In another example, a large multi-national company that prided itself on a career system that gave managers real choice in overseas assignments had to face reality when a key overseas executive killed himself and in his suicide note revealed that he had been pressured into the assignment despite personal and family objections. At the level of espoused values, the company had idealized its system. The scandal exposed the shared tacit assumption by which they really operated: that people were expected to go where senior executives wanted them to go. Recognizing the discrepancy then led to a whole program of revamping the career assignment system to bring espoused values and assumptions in line.
The Texas City disaster revealed that British Petroleum’s announced policy of safety concerns was not supported by deeper assumptions. Cost cutting and ignoring warnings from the AMOCO people after the merger showed that economic assumptions were more operational than safety assumptions, leading Lord Brown, the CEO, to resign and new safety initiatives to be launched.
Introduction of New Technologies As a Source of Disconfirmation
New technology as a force for change is most visible in the impact that the introduction of computers and information technology has had on most organizations. Not only have employees had to learn how to operate the new hardware, but the networking and work-at-home options have disconfirmed many of the assumptions about how work could and should be done. Any new technology will force change in work behavior which will probably eventually impact cultural assumptions, but information technology has been especially significant as a force for change.
Mergers, Acquisitions, and Joint Ventures As Sources of Disconfirmation
When two or more cultures come together and try to work in concert many forces are unleashed that will disconfirm cultural elements in either or both organizations. Unfortunately, in most cases the need for culture assessment and possibly change arises only after the joint organization has been created, without consideration of whether the existing cultures were or were not compatible.
Charismatic Leadership As a Source of Disconfirmation
A new leader who is charismatic can sometimes create motivation to change by pointing out convincingly that “We are doing OK, but think how much better we could be doing if we learned how to do things in this new way.” It takes charisma to get employees’ attention, to avoid a complacent reaction that the bosses are only crying wolf. When a less-charismatic leader tries to convince the organization it is in trouble and must learn how to do some things differently in order to survive or grow, the message is often met with skepticism. Employees do not agree with the leaders’ definition of trouble or they do not believe that the organization is in economic, political, technological, or legal trouble, especially if those leaders give themselves generous bonuses while touting cost-cutting. Employees often do not understand the economic situation well enough because they have never been educated in the economics of their business. They often do not trust management, believing instead that if they work harder or smarter they will ultimately be taken advantage of anyway. What makes charismatic leaders so powerful is their ability to overcome employee skepticism.
Education and Training As Sources of Disconfirmation
Many organizations have learned that the only way to convince employees and managers of the need to do things differently is by “educational interventions.” As we just said, employees often do not believe what their leaders tell them unless they are educated to the economic realities of their business. A similar issue arises with respect to becoming responsible in the areas of environment, health, and safety. Employees do not accept the need for new, responsible behavior patterns until they have been educated about the dangers inherent in environmental events.
Change programs therefore often have to begin with educational efforts, which may take time and energy. Such programs do not disconfirm directly by challenging existing views but, rather, seduce the change targets by providing new and stimulating information that subtly challenges existing views. This kind of disconfirmation through seduction is especially relevant when there is enough time to educate employees and to lay the groundwork for more direct disconfirmation later.
Survival Anxiety (or Guilt) and Learning Anxiety
If the disconfirming data get through your denial and defensiveness, you will feel either survival anxiety or guilt. You do not necessarily feel anxiety or guilt directly, but you experience discomfort that something bad may happen to you if you don’t respond in some way. You begin to recognize the need to change, the need to give up some old habits and ways of thinking, and the necessity of learning new habits and ways of thinking. But at the moment you accept the need to change, you also realize that the new behavior that may be required of you may be difficult to learn, and the new beliefs or values that are implied may be difficult to accept. This discomfort is best thought of as learning anxiety. The interaction of these two anxieties creates the complex dynamics of change.
The easiest way to illustrate this dynamic is in terms of learning a new stroke in tennis or golf. The process starts with disconfirmation: you are no longer winning against opponents you used to beat, or your aspirations for a better score or a better-looking game are not met. The felt need to do “something” is survival anxiety /guilt. You can, of course, exit from the situation and decide to give up tennis or accept playing at a lower level. When employees are confronted with required changes, they do have the choice of leaving the organization. But in most cases exit will either not be possible or not desirable, so you decide to improve your game.
But as you contemplate the actual process of unlearning your old stroke or swing and developing a new one, you realize that you may not be able to do it, or you may be temporarily incompetent during the learning process. These feelings are learning anxiety. Similar feelings arise in the cultural arena when the new learning involves becoming computer competent, changing supervisory style, transforming competitive relationships into teamwork and collaboration, replacing a high-quality, high-cost strategy with one that leads to being the low-cost producer, moving from engineering domination and product orientation to a marketing-and-customer orientation, learning to work in nonhierarchical, diffuse networks, and so on.
Psychological Basis of Learning Anxiety/ Resistance to Change
Learning anxiety is a combination of several specific fears, all of which may be active at any time as you contemplate having to unlearn something and learn something new.
Fear of Loss of Power or Position. The most common basis of resistance to change is the fear that with your new learning will come a new position that will be lower in the status hierarchy or less powerful than the position you now hold.
Fear of Temporary Incompetence. During the transition process, you do not feel competent because you have given up the old way and have not yet mastered the new one. The best examples probably are evident in efforts to learn to use a computer.
Fear of Punishment for Incompetence. If it takes you a long time to learn the new way of thinking and doing things, you will fear being punished for your lack of productivity. In the computer arena, there are striking cases in which employees never learn the new system sufficiently to take advantage of its potential because they feel they have to remain productive—so they spend insufficient time on the new learning.
Fear of Loss of Personal Identity. If your current way of thinking is a strong source of identity for you, you may not wish to be the kind of person the new culture requires you to be. For example, in the breakup of the Bell System, many old-time employees left because they could not accept the identity of being a member of a hard-driving, cost-conscious organization that would take phones away from consumers who could not afford them.
Fear of Loss of Group Membership. The shared assumptions that make up a culture also identify who is in and who is out of the group. In developing new ways of behaving and thinking, you become a deviant in your group and may be rejected, or even ostracized. To avoid losing group membership, you resist learning the new ways of thinking and behaving. This fourth force is perhaps the most difficult to overcome because it requires the whole group to change how it thinks, as well as its norms of inclusion and exclusion.
Defensive Responses to Learning Anxiety2
As long as your learning anxiety remains high, you are motivated to resist the validity of the disconfirming data or invent various excuses for why you cannot really engage in a transformative learning process right now. These responses come in definable stages.
Denial. You convince yourself that the disconfirming data are not valid, or are temporary, or don’t really count, or reflect someone just crying “wolf,” and so on.
Scapegoating, Passing the Buck, and Dodging. You convince yourself that the cause is in some other department, that the data do not apply to you, and that others need to change first before you do.
Maneuvering and Bargaining. You want special compensation for the effort to make the change; you want to be convinced that it is in your own interest and of long-range benefit to you; you will agree to change only if some others change as well.
Given these defensive responses and acknowledging their psychological validity, how then do you proceed to make change happen? How do you begin the learning process?
Two Principles of Learning and Change
If you are the change manager, how do you get past the resistance to change? Two principles come into play:
• Principle One: Survival anxiety or guilt must be greater than learning anxiety.
• Principle Two: Learning anxiety must be reduced rather than increasing survival anxiety.
The implementation of Principle Two means that the change process creates for you, the change target, a kind of “psychological safety”—that it is safe to abandon your old behavior and attempt to learn the new behavior.
From the change manager’s point of view, it might seem obvious that the way to motivate you would be simply to increase the driving forces, heighten your survival anxiety, or make you feel even more guilty about failing to achieve your ideals. The problem with this approach is that, with greater threat or guilt, you may simply increase your defensiveness to avoid the threat or pain of the learning process. Or you may exit from the situation altogether. That realization leads to the key insight about learning and change embodied in Principle Two, that you can attempt to remove some of the restraining forces, that is, reduce the learning anxiety by increasing the learner’s sense of “psychological safety.” The learner needs reassurance that the pain of unlearning and relearning will be possible, worthwhile, and, most important, will be supported by the provision of whatever time and other resources are needed to facilitate the new learning.
How Do You Create Psychological Safety?
Creating psychological safety for organizational members who are undergoing change and learning involves a number of steps, and they must be taken almost simultaneously. I list them here chronologically, but the change manager must be prepared to implement all of them.
1. A compelling positive vision. If you are the target of change, you must believe that you and the organization will be better off if you learn the new way of thinking and working. The vision must be articulated (and widely held) by senior management. And, most important of all, the vision must articulate the desired “new way of working.” If the learners do not understand the actual behavior that will be required of them, they cannot figure out what they will have to unlearn and how they will go about it. The new way of working must be presented as necessary for the survival or growth of the organization and be perceived as non-negotiable.
2. Formal training. If you are to learn new ways of thinking, new attitudes, and new skills, you must have access to whatever formal training is required. For example, if the new way of working necessitates teamwork, formal training on team building and maintenance must be provided.
3. Involvement of the learner. If the formal training is to take hold, you must have a sense that you can manage your own informal method of learning. Everyone learns slightly differently, so it is essential to involve learners in designing their own optimal learning process. The goals of learning are nonnegotiable, but the method of learning can be highly individual.
4. Informal training of relevant “family” groups and teams. Because resistance to change is often embedded in group norms, informal training and practice must be provided to whole groups so that new norms and new assumptions can be built jointly. The learner should not feel deviant in deciding to engage in the new learning.
5. Practice fields, coaches, and feedback. You cannot learn something fundamentally new if you don’t have the time, the resources, coaching, and valid feedback on how you are doing. Practice fields are particularly important so that you can make mistakes and learn from them without disrupting the organization.
6. Positive role models. The new way of thinking and behaving may be so different that you must see what it looks like before you can imagine yourself doing it. You must be able to see the new behavior and attitudes in others with whom you can identify.
7. Support groups. Groups should be formed in which problems connected with learning are aired and discussed. You must be able to talk about your frustrations and difficulties in learning with others who are experiencing similar difficulties so that you can support each other and jointly learn new ways of dealing with the difficulties.
8. Systems and structures consistent with the desired changes. It is essential to have reward and discipline systems and organizational structures consistent with the new way of thinking and working. For example, if you are learning how to be a team player, the reward system must be group-oriented, the discipline system must punish individually aggressive and selfish behavior, and the organizational structures must make it possible to work as a team. Many change programs fail because the new way of working is not supported by the organizational structures, rewards, or controls.
In summary, a change program that involves unlearning and relearning requires that all eight of the above conditions be met. If you consider the difficulty of achieving all eight, and the energy and resources that have to be expended to accomplish them, it is no small wonder that changes are often short-lived or never get going at all. As one politician put it recently, “A vision without funding is a hallucination.” On the other hand, as some of the cases in the next chapters will show, when an organization sets out to truly transform itself, the eight conditions described can be created and significant cultural changes can be achieved.
What Changes? Cognitive Redefinition
The best way to characterize the process of what actually happens in the learner is to call it “cognitive redefinition.” On the surface and in the short run, only overt behavior changes. Employees can be coerced into the new way of working, and they will continue to display the behavior as long as the surveillance and threat of punishment are present. But no new learning has taken place until the new behavior has been incorporated into the learner’s self-image—has been internalized. And that always includes some new cognitions, some new definitions and standards of judgment. If you have been trained to think in a certain way and are a member of a group that thinks the same way, you have to begin to imagine changing to a new way of thinking.
If you were an engineer at AMOCO, you were a member of a division that used engineers as experts with technical resources, clear career lines, and a single boss. In the new structure, you were now asked to think of yourself as a member of a consulting organization that sells its services to customers who can purchase them elsewhere if they do not like your deal. To make such a transformation, you must develop several new concepts: “freelance consultant,” “selling services for a fee,” “competing with outsiders who can underbid you.” In addition, you have to learn a new meaning for the concept of being an engineer and what it now means to be an employee of AMOCO. To achieve this you have to unlearn one of the central assumptions of the engineering culture that “engineering work speaks for itself, it does not have to be sold.” You face a new reward system and are paid and promoted on your ability to bring in work. You must now see yourself as a salesman more than an engineer. Finally, you must define your career in quite different terms and learn to work for lots of bosses.
Along with new concepts come new standards of evaluation. Whereas in the former structure you were evaluated largely on the quality of your work and the engineering occupation operated on the assumption that you maximize quality and elegance no matter what the cost; you now have to estimate more accurately just how many days a given job will take, what quality level can be achieved in that time, and what it costs if you try for the higher-quality standard you are used to. The requirement to sell your service in a competitive market place forces you to evaluate your work against entirely different criteria than what you were used to.
The computer designers at DEC who tried to develop products competitive with the IBM PC never changed their standards of evaluation for what a customer expected. They over-designed the products, made them too expensive, and included far too many bells and whistles. The designers were embedded in their old way of thinking, and the organization did not have a change program powerful enough to help them cognitively redefine what the new marketplace needed.
In many change programs senior management announces a strategy of shifting from a production or engineering focus to a customer-centered marketing focus. When they do this they are asking many of their employees to make a major cognitive shift that they may not be able to make. When senior management announces they are going from a formal hierarchy to a matrix or networked project structure, they are asking their employees to grasp entirely alien concepts of how to work and how to think about authority. When senior management announces that employees should become more involved and empowered, they are asking both employees and supervisors to shift their whole cognitive frames of reference for what it means to be an employee or a supervisor.
Such cognitive shifts are possible if the organization manages to create enough psychological safety—especially if it involves the people who are the targets of change in the learning process. Then the learning takes place through either trial and error (based on the learner’s scanning of the work environment to locate possible options for new behaviors) or a more formal training process (which usually involves imitating role models and psychologically identifying with them). For all of this to happen, the desired new behavior must be clearly defined and the learner must discover that the new behavior leads to desirable outcomes. Whereas initially the employee can be coerced into new behavior, only if that behavior leads to better outcomes will the employee begin to internalize new meanings and standards of judgment.
Imitation and Identification Versus Scanning and Trial and Error
There are two major mechanisms by which you learn new concepts, new meanings for old concepts, and new standards of evaluation. You learn through imitating a role model and psychologically identifying with that person, or you keep inventing your own solutions until something works for you.
If you are the change manager, you have a choice as to which mechanism to encourage. As part of a training program, you can provide role models through case materials, films, role plays, or simulations. You can bring in learners who have acquired the new concepts and encourage others to find out how they did it. This mechanism works best if it is clear what the new way of working is to be and if the concepts to be taught are themselves clear. However, we sometimes learn things through imitation only to find that they do not really fit into our personality or our ongoing relationships. Once we are on our own and the role models are no longer available, we revert to our old behavior.
Alternatively, if you want the learners to learn things that really fit into their personality, then you must withhold role models and encourage learners to scan their environment and develop their own solutions. For example, AMOCO could have developed a training program for how to be a consultant, built around engineers who had made the shift successfully. However, senior management felt that the shift was so personal that they decided merely to create the structure and the incentives, but let each engineer figure out for himself or herself how to manage the new kinds of relationships. In some cases, this meant that people left the organization. But those engineers who learned from their own experience how to be consultants genuinely evolved to a new kind of career, one that they integrated into their total lives.
The general principle here is that the change manager must be clear about the ultimate goals, the new way of working that is to be achieved. But this does not necessarily imply that everyone gets to the goal in the same way. Involving the learner does not imply that the learner has a choice about the ultimate goals, but it does imply personal choice of the means to get there.
Refreezing-Seeking a New Equilibrium
The final step in any transformative change process is to internalize the new concepts so that the new behavior now occurs automatically. If the behavior fits the rest of the learner’s personality and is congruent with the expectations of important others in the learner’s work and social environment, it becomes a stable part of the person, and eventually of the group. But note that if you learn some new concepts that lead to new behavior that does not fit into your work or social group, you will either revert to your old concepts and behavior if you value the group, or leave the group if you now value the new concepts and behavior more. Group disapproval or personal discomfort will act as new disconfirmation and launch a new learning process. As individuals we achieve some sense of stability by only incorporating those new elements that fit our personality and help us to maintain our important group memberships. As the world becomes more dynamic, groups will become more and more important as islands of stability.
The Bottom Line-Implications for Change Managers
If you are the change manager, you must think carefully about which outcomes you want. First, you must decide whether entire groups or units must adopt the new way. In most culture change programs, it is almost always the case that you want the entire work unit to adopt a new way of thinking and behaving, so the training should initially be geared to groups, not individuals.
As you examine the entire organization whose culture is to be changed, think in terms of the various workgroups, hierarchical levels, departments, geographical units, and so on. If only key individuals change, chances are that when they go back to their workgroups they will revert to the norms of those groups.
Second, you must decide whether or not the new way of thinking and behaving can be more or less standardized. If there is clear consensus on the new way, then you should provide role models and behavioral examples of the new way of thinking and behaving. This process speeds up the learning but also leads to adopting new behaviors that may not fit the learners, that fail to be internalized, and that are eventually abandoned. On the other hand, you can state clear behavioral goals but invite learners to develop their own solutions. This trial and error is a slower process, but it guarantees that whatever is learned is internalized. In this instance, you should withhold role models or clear examples.
Third, you must ensure that there is sufficient survival anxiety to induce some motivation to change, but then must work to reduce the learning anxiety by providing psychological safety.
How this all works out will be illustrated in the next few chapters in relation to the growth stage of the organization. If you are in a young and growing company, go to the next chapter; if you are in a mature company well past its founding stages, you may wish to skip to Chapter Eight or Nine.
Questions for the Reader
• Think back to a recent change that you made. Can you identify the disconfirming forces that motivated you to want to change?
• Once you were motivated to change, how did you go about it?
• What actually changed, and how did you ensure that the change would last?
• Now think back to a recent change that was required of you by your organization and answer the same questions.
• What was different between when you initiated the change and when you were required to make the change?
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