The Culture Matrix: Part 2

Friday, April 27, 2007

My blog from this past Tuesday introduced you to Marc Chouinard and his Culture Matrix process. Marc shared with us the two main factors that often are overlooked in any change initiative:

• Revealing and understanding the real “living” culture of the organization;
• Revealing and understanding the forces that will support or hinder the change initiative, called Performance-Drivers and Performance-Drains.

He gave us the low down on the living culture on Tuesday. Ready to get smarter? Let's go...

Performance-Drivers and Performance-Drains are culture dynamics we can reveal when we access the real, living culture (RLC) of an organization. He defines the RLC of an organization as “the coming together of what people believe they need to be and do to be successful in the particular context of their organization—the coming together of the workforce’s conscious and unconscious behaviors drivers.”

Culture elements come in pairs of contrasts.
Let’s imagine that your organization goes through a traditional culture assessment that includes the following statement: “working hard increases my opportunities within the organization.” Let’s say for the purpose of this exercise that the predominant answer to this question by your organization’s workforce is “Strongly Agree.” This means that your organization has an “assessed” culture of “working hard.”

Now, what does the concept “working hard” mean? From the angle of the RLC of your organization, the best way to define a culture element is to define its contrast. So, what is your contrast to the concept “working hard?” You can answer this question by asking yourself: “If I am not working hard, what am I?” The answer is the contrast.

Now imagine that I am asking this same question to each employee of your organization. Employees may say that the contrast of “working hard” is “being lazy” or “working smart” or “having a balanced work/life,” or anything else for that matter. The reality is that the answers will cover a wide spectrum. It is in these answers that lay the Performance-Drivers and Performance-Drains of your organization. The contrast of a culture element defines a “force” that is either supporting or hindering your organizational objectives.

What the contrasts say about your employees
The contrasts to “working hard” say a lot about your workforce. They:

• reveal how the owners of this pair of culture element contrasts perceive the world around them;
• define the multiple sub-cultures of your organization (in this case in regards to the “working hard” culture element); and
• define the targeted change strategies that change agents need to ensure sustainable change.

Let’s go a little deeper with these contrasts.

“Being lazy”—this contrast says that the employees forming this sub-culture are hard workers. They tend to do a lot and feel good when doing a lot. They may also be very inefficient, because their measure of success is the amount of work they are doing or the amount of time they spend at the office, rather than the results they are generating.

“Working smart”—these employees tend to be result-oriented. They value efficiency. One of their measures of success is the ability to produce results within a regular or reduced schedule. They tend to judge the “being lazy” contrast employees as being inefficient or disorganized. On the other hand, because they are not working long hours, they tend to be judged by their “being lazy” colleagues as being lazy, because they are not working long hours.

“Having a balanced work/life”—these employees value their personal time and their activities outside their work. They tend to work regular hours and perceive “long hours” workers as having no personal life and as being workaholics. Their “being lazy” colleagues or managers often perceive them as being lazy or lacking ambition.

Performance-Drivers and Performance-Drains
You can see that “working hard” can be a Performance-Drain for your organization. It can lead to:

• The “being lazy” employees spending a lot of time at the office, without necessarily being productive.
• The “working smart” employees being frustrated and disgruntled because they are not recognized and rewarded for the results they are generating because they are not spending long hours at the office.
• The “having a balanced work/life” employees being de-motivated because they realize that their choice of lifestyle will prevent them from growing within the organization.

Conclusion
As you can see, it is the contrasts of “working hard” that define it. Each of the three contrast-based definitions carries very different and sometimes opposing meanings, values and perceptions. In this regard, each individual subconsciously gauges his or her level of “working hard” against their particular contrast and concludes to what degree their behavior will make them successful or not within their particular organization.

As Marc points out, if you don’t know these extremes, you can’t formulate a change plan that will work. This is because your workforce may agree “at the rational level” and diverge “at the subconscious level”—where behavioral drivers and motivators rule. That’s why we have organizations where everyone says the right thing and all are in agreement and still have zero alignment on what actions to take.

The Culture Matrix, through this multi-layered approach, dramatically increases the speed, the ownership and the sustainability of the change effort. It gives you access to the core of people’s subconscious drivers and motivators. As a change agent it allows you to target your communication and change efforts to the specific sub-cultures of your organization, using their own words. Very cool.

The Culture Matrix

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

I finally got around to talking with a colleague-once-removed of mine, Marc Chouinard, about his process for effecting cultural and organizational change. I think his approach has a great deal of merit, precisely because it targets uncovering the subconscious “frames of reference” that drive individual actions, decisions, and interpretations during any change effort. I think this “in the trenches” approach is a critical component of any change strategy. So let me try to give you a summary of Marc’s process, The Culture-Matrix.

From Marc’s perspective, there are two main factors that, most of the time, leaders overlook in any change initiative, but that make all the difference in the success and sustainability of the change initiative. These factors are:

• Revealing and understanding the real “living” culture of the organization;
• Revealing and understanding the forces that will support or hinder the change initiative, called Performance-Drivers and Performance-Drains.

This blog will focus on the first point. I will cover the second point in a subsequent blog.

Revealing and Understanding the Living Culture of an organization

Let’s start by defining what the real “living” culture of an organization is. It is the coming together of what people believe they need to be and do to be successful in the particular context of their organization. In other words, it is the coming together of the workforce’s conscious and unconscious drivers of their behaviors.

One of Marc’s clients, in a moment of personal epiphany, does a great job describing the “living” versus “assessed” culture of an organization -- “there’s a big difference between having an opinion on something and being driven by something.”

“Having an opinion on something” refers to culture assessment questionnaires which ask a series of “opinions” to the members of an organization in order to define the culture of the organization. Marc’s client continues:

It’s okay to have an opinion about the presence or absence of a culture element, but it doesn’t tell you if this culture element dictates day-in and day-out your perceptions, decisions, behaviors, judgments and the ways you react to your environment. If you would have asked my employees if customer satisfaction is important for our organization, they would have answered a resounding YES! Yet, when you look at what motivates a great proportion of them on a daily basis, you find what is critical in their mind to be successful in their role in our organization is to solve problems.

As we all have experienced when talking to a customer support organization when experiencing problems with a product or service (computer, insurance plan, car problem, etc.), the solving of our problem is only one factor that influences our satisfaction as a customer. Other factors can be, based on our personal preference, the friendliness and helpfulness of the representative, being clearly explained the steps that will happen to solve the problem and identifying who are responsible for each step.

In the case of the organization of Marc’s client, the customer support personnel focus on “solving problems” because they believe that is what will make them successful within their organization. So their interpretation of what it means to “make the customer satisfied” (the assessed culture) is “solving the customer’s problem” (the real living culture of the organization). Having the assessed culture of your organization tells you nothing about the “living” culture or your organization.

It is important to know the living culture of an organization because it:

• tells you what your employee and managers focus on to realize the objectives of your organization;
• defines the code of conduct (both formal and informal) that your employees are following.
  
  

The Culture-Matrix reveals the living culture of your organization. It is a guided individual interview process that takes place in groups of ten employees where each individual works individually and privately. Contrary to culture assessment questionnaires, the Culture-Matrix does not suggest specific culture elements: it reveals the culture elements that are present and in the words of the employees. This process takes between two to three hours per group of ten employees.

No questionnaire, no personality instruments, just good, hard investigative work “in the trenches.” I don’t know about you but I like getting my hands dirty when it comes to cultural and organizational change.

Coming up next, Performance Drivers and Performance Drains.

Mapping the Dimensions of Organizational Change

Friday, April 20, 2007

You can’t talk about organizational culture without eventually getting around to talking about organizational change. So in the spirit of recent Herculean mapping projects, such as the Human Genome Project and the mathematical structure known as E8, I am going to start by laying out all the different dimensions I know of when it comes to organizational change. I invite others to join in and add dimensions that I miss (the E8 project included 18 mathematicians using their super-computers to lay out a 453,060 x 453,060 matrix). To keep this effort somewhat manageable, I’m going to tackle one dimension or continuum per post. Let’s start with the role that the external environment plays in organizational change.

Dimension: External Environment

• the degree of force (speed, impact, rate, and breadth) of external changes.
• the degree to which the organization’s competitors are making changes in response to the outside forces.
• the degree to which the senior leadership attaches importance to a competitor’s actions.
• the degree to which the media are characterizing the external environment and the quality of the various organization’s responses to date.
• the degree to which the organization is physically located to the source of the change.
• the degree to which the Board of Directors (both individually and collectively) is:
• paying attention to these forces;
• using data, anecdotal evidence, or intuition to characterize the external environment;
• attaching importance to these forces;
• taking these outside forces seriously;
• concluding these outside forces require the internal organization to adapt;
• communicating its assessment of the external environment to senior leadership.
• the degree to which the shareholders (both individually and collectively) are:
• paying attention to these forces;
• using data, anecdotal evidence, or intuition to characterize the external environment;
• attaching importance to these forces;
• taking these outside forces seriously;
• concluding these outside forces require the internal organization to adapt;
• communicating its assessment of the external environment to senior leadership and the Board of Directors.
• the degree to which senior leadership (both individually and collectively) is:
• paying attention to these forces;
• using data, anecdotal evidence, or intuition to characterize the external environment;
• attaching importance to these forces;
• taking these outside forces seriously;
• concluding these outside forces require the internal organization to adapt;
• making plans to respond to these forces;
• concluding which parts of the organization need to change and how quickly.
• the degree to which middle management:
• buy into senior leadership’s assessment of the external forces;
• trust the analysis and judgment of senior leadership.
• the degree to which rank-and-file employees:
• understand the external forces and their potential impact on the organization’s future success;
• believe these forces will have the consequences that senior leadership has spelled out;
• trust senior leadership’s judgment and assessment of the external environment;


Future postings will cover a different dimension of change. Maybe together we’ll be able to pull off this Dynamics of Change Mapping Project after all.

Leading Change -- This Fall on ABC

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

The April issue of FastCompany has an article on the change effort going on at the F.B.I. (“Mission Impossible?”) and I think it’s worth checking out. The bottom line is that in our post-9/11 world, we need the F.B.I. to be an organization that focuses on preventing terrorism and not just tracking down the perpetrators after the crime occurs. It has to move from a reactionary culture to an anticipatory culture. What makes this change particularly challenging is that it’s not just about “how” the F.B.I. goes about fulfilling its mission – it’s about its mission as well. In other words, the F.B.I. is going through both a business model change (from criminal investigations to counter-terrorism) and an operational change (from narrowly-focused investigations to a broad, coordinated strategic approach to countering terrorist acts). The article wasn’t too optimistic about the organization being capable of making such a change:

People who know the F.B.I. best – including many who’ve spent their careers there – would say that its culture, leadership philosophy, and links to the political arena make major change in “the bureau,” as it is also known, highly improbable. It is, they argue, just too entrenched, too bureaucratic, too rigid, too old, too slow to understand, and execute the scale and sweep of change that needs to happen.

This is sounding like one dumb dinosaur. Not good for them, not good for us.

This resistance to change, given all the implications to the bureau’s future and our country’s security, got me thinking. One thing I suspect is a factor in people resisting change is our natural, human tendency to treat the unknown or unfamiliar with skepticism or downright hostility. When we are not in control of a situation, when the external environment imposes change on us against our will, we naturally imagine the worse and spend considerable time and energy fixating on the negative in all its permutations. Our imaginations kick in and we come up with all sorts of dire implications to the change. We love horror films because our instinct toward self-preservation has wired our imagination to see the worse and respond accordingly. We can’t see any other possibility unless someone shows us a different story, a picture of what the new world would be like. Something that visualizes and describes “a day in the life of…”

But if people can use their imagination for the worse, then we can tap into that same imagination to image the future. Why not use the power of our imagination and show people an F.B.I. that is working and acting in the way it needs to as a counter-terrorism organization? And who best to show us this different F.B.I. than Hollywood? Yes, it’s time to bring back “The F.B.I.,” the TV series. (In case you weren’t around, “The F.B.I.” was a very popular TV series on ABC from 1965 to 1974.)

Too farfetched of an idea? Well, I direct my skeptical reader to Master Schein’s discussion of the importance of establishing “temporary parallel learning systems” as part of any transformational change effort. In his own words:

If, however, senior management recognizes that elements of the culture have become dysfunctional, then it must launch a transformational change program and create a management process that makes such deep change feasible. The actual change activities will vary according to the situation, but almost all such programs involve creating a temporary parallel learning system in which some new assumptions are learned and tested. It is too painful to give up a shared assumption in favor of an unknown substitute. If some part of the organization can learn an alternative way of thinking, and if the alternative can be shown to work, then there is less anxiety as the alternative is gradually introduced into the main part of the organization. The trial and error in the temporary parallel system creates some of the necessary psychological safety by providing role models for new ways of thinking and behaving. (The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, p. 130-131)

So why not have a TV series serve as a temporary parallel learning system? What better way to make the new way concrete and tangible? So Hollywood, show all of us what the new F.B.I. could and should look like. Stretch our imaginations. Show us it is possible. Take us inside the drama of counter-terrorism but also organizational change – a drama many of us know only too well. Show us the patriotism of those going against their self-interests for the good of our country. But keep it real and not the fantastic nature of 24 so people can buy into it. And make sure Harrison Ford gets the big role. No one plays tough and vulnerable quite like Mr. Ford. And my vote for the name of the series is Today’s F.B.I. Leading change, sixty minutes at a time. I think it’s long overdue.

Indirect Flight to Ford

Friday, April 13, 2007

A couple of months ago I had a great conversation with a local colleague about the news of Ford Motor Company naming Alan Mulally as its CEO. In case you didn’t follow this story when it first came out, Alan Mulally was the head of Boeing’s commercial aircraft unit. Many credit him with spearheading the successful development of Boeing’s innovative new aircraft, the 787 Dreamliner.

My colleague has worked for both Ford and Boeing and had some very interesting insights into what may have gone into the selection of Mr. Mulally at Ford. Here are some things to keep in mind:

• Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merged in 1996, forming the current Boeing.
• The first CEO of the merged Boeing-McDonnell Douglas enterprise was from the Boeing side (Phil Condit). His replacement was the former McDonnell Douglas CEO, Harry Stonecipher.
• Condit resigned in December 2003 in response to the Pentagon-Boeing contract scandal.
• Stonecipher resigned in March 2005 as a result of violating the company’s code of business conduct stemming from a relationship the married, 68-year-old Stonecipher had with a female Boeing executive.
• Alan Mulally was passed over twice (2003 and 2005) for the Boeing CEO job.
• Jim McNerney, Jr., CEO of 3M, was named CEO of Boeing in June 2005 (had been a Boeing director since 2001, had not worked for either Boeing or McDonnell Douglas).

What my colleague shared with me is both the Boeing and McDonnell Douglas cultures had self-imposed nicknames and the two couldn’t have been more different. The Boeing guys called themselves “the boy scouts” and the McDonnell Douglas guys called themselves “the mercenaries.” (I guess from too many brutal negotiations with Pentagon procurement officers.) Isn’t this a great contrast in style and perception? Business Week alluded to this difference in 1998 in an article about the post-merger woes Boeing was experiencing at the time:

Part of the problem is the culture clash at the top, says Jon B. Kutler, president of Quarterdeck Investment Partners Inc., a Los Angeles aerospace investment bank. Stonecipher, who spent 26 years at General Electric Co., built a reputation there and at McDonnell Douglas as an aggressive, cost-oriented executive. Woodard and Condit, two career Boeing vets, come from a tradition that stresses more collaborative problem-solving.

It seems that Condit and Stonecipher embodied these cultural differences perfectly. Here is an excerpt from a New York Times article from December 2003 after the Boeing board fired Condit for the Pentagon contract scandal and installed Stonecipher as CEO.

Mr. Stonecipher is not likely to copy the tactics of Mr. Condit, who once hired a poet and summoned senior managers to his house, where he urged them to write down negative statements about the company, then burn them in a bonfire to banish the unhelpful vibrations.

I looked it up in case you’re interested -- “collaborative problem solving” and “symbolic burning of negative vibrations” don’t qualify for Boy Scout merit badges. Even so, such behaviors are not going to be taken seriously by a culture reflected in the following leadership style:

Stonecipher's jowly, grandfatherly looks belie a blunt-talking, demanding nature that can alienate those around him. The 67-year-old son of a coal miner has earned millions of dollars piloting aerospace companies through turbulent times. He slashes jobs in downturns, pulls the plug on weaker businesses and pushes out executives who fail to deliver financial results. His e-mails arrive in all capital letters.

He came to Boeing after its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas Corp., where he was CEO. He said the changes that followed the merger made him a "lightning rod" for employee discontent. "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm," he said. "It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money."

That Boeing's future rests with Stonecipher angers some current and former Boeing workers. They blame the McDonnell Douglas legacy for the ethics scandals and question whether an unrelenting focus on results prompted some employees to feel they had to succeed at all costs. None of the managers implicated in the scandals was a longtime Boeing employee. They came to Boeing from McDonnell Douglas after the merger or were recruited by a former McDonnell Douglas employee. Mike Sears, the fired CFO, was a protégé of Stonecipher's at McDonnell Douglas. (source: Chicago Tribune, February 29, 2004)

Contrast this with a description of Alan Mulally in USA Today back in March of 2005 when the Boeing board was looking to replace Stonecipher.

Gregarious, polite and the married father of five, Mulally also has one other key qualification: a spotless personal life.

So why was Alan Mulally passed over twice for the Boeing CEO job? Speculation is that the mercenaries had their hands on the wheel in 2003 when Stonecipher got himself anointed and then by 2005, with numerous scandals rocking the company, the board gave up on the culture clash and went outside the company for its CEO. Was it, therefore, a culture clash that drove Mr. Mulally to Ford?

Columbo Lite

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

I ran across a short piece in the April issue of HRMagazine this week. Of course the title, “Many CFO’s Don’t ‘Fit’ Company Culture” caught my eye. The article refers to a survey Right Management conducted with HR managers and executives at mid- to large organizations in all industries about how Chief Financial Officers (CFO’s) are faring in the Sarbanes-Oxley world.

The survey revealed that 23% of the respondents listed “CFO did not fit into culture of organization” as a reason for why the CFO left the company, exceeded only by the number one reason, “accepted another job offer.” This one bit of information gave me enough pause to unleash a bevy of questions. Here we go.

Does this demonstrate a respect for and safeguarding of company culture or have we discovered the new euphemism for “he/she got fired?” Were these CFO’s getting the right results and still didn’t fit in or weren’t they getting results? What’s more important to a culture, getting results or fitting in? Or is an inability to fit in merely a symptom of a culture that can’t handle diverse leadership styles? Who is to fault, the rigid CFO or the rigid culture?

Why so many mismatches? To what degree is this a failure of the selection process? Was “cultural fit” a factor in the selection criteria? If so, how did the hiring manager(s) go about teasing out the potential match/mismatch? It’s interesting to note that the survey respondents (HR managers and executives) are the same people who would have interviewed and selected the CFO candidate. Might their explanation of “cultural mismatch” say more about them dropping the ball than the CFO’s inability to fit in? Are we talking “cover-up?” (Don’t call Woodward just yet.)

Can the powers-that-be hold a culture in too high of esteem? Where is the tipping point between upholding the culture because it serves the business and the business serving the culture? Do we always know when we are slaves to our own culture?

Can an executive create a culture within his/her department that is different from the organization’s culture? Would this reflect a strength or weakness of the culture?

Who is the keeper of the culture? The executives? Human Resources? Who has the right to say, “This is the way we do things around here?” Who owns the culture to claim the right and responsibility to protect the culture’s standards and values? Does HR or the executives see the culture the same way as the rank-and-file? Who is more in touch with the reality on the ground?

To what degree was the culture really rejecting the rigor of the CFO’s financial standards and not his/her leadership style? CFO’s can make life difficult inside organizations that don’t adhere to rigorous financial standards. Were these CFO’s sacrificed because they played by the rules of others, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission?

Would Inspector Clouseau be proud of me?

A Culture of Scarcity

Friday, April 6, 2007

One of the interesting insights I have gained from reading Thomas Friedman’s columns in The New York Times is his observation that oil-rich nations have a history of not investing in the development of their human talent. These countries tend to spend less on education as well as technology infrastructure, such as broadband Internet capacity. I agree that having lots of something that other countries desperately need can make you “fat and happy” and less likely to spend public money on things that don’t bring the same immediate, financial returns, such as education. Of course this state of bliss can only continue if the right mix of supply and demand continues. Lower the demand and increase the supply and countries like Nigeria, Iran, and Venezuela are in a different boat. In any case, these countries both benefit and suffer from a culture of plenty – summed up by “why bother trying to compete in the world when we have enough oil to take it easy?”

But the opposite is equally revealing – a culture of scarcity. In a recent article in The New York Times Magazine (I swear I read things other than The New York Times), Jon Gertner explains how Toyota conquered the car world. I found the following excerpt very revealing on the roles national culture, resource scarcity, and marketplace demands played in shaping Toyota’s corporate culture. I’ll let Jon explain it.

Toyota’s success has often been attributed to a Japanese quality of persistence and ingenuity. One of the first Western academics to look deep inside the company, Michael Cusumano, now a professor of management at M.I.T., debunked that notion when he compared Toyota and Nissan in the early 1980’s. “The founders and the managers created and refined Toyota company culture, which is far more powerful than Japanese culture,” he says. “It does build on many things that are Japanese – precision, quality, loyalty. But the Toyota culture dominates.” Cusumano adds that Toyota’s origins, in a rural prefecture, hours from the international influences of Tokyo, provided a beneficiary insularity. The company began growing just after World War II, nurtured by government regulations that effectively shut out big American automakers. Still, the devastated postwar economy in Japan necessitated extraordinary resourcefulness: because there was a lack of materials and parts suppliers, for example, Toyota had to create them from scratch. Since the early 1930’s, Toyota engineers have looked everywhere for inspiration while tearing apart American products to see how they work. Toyota’s systems and worldview derive from an economy of scarcity. In 1950, the company’s near-bankruptcy during a difficult year further defined its philosophy of frugality. Toyota soon began to focus obsessively on reducing muda – or waste – and building up a vast storehouse of cash for security.

So early on, circumstances and its leaders hardwired Toyota’s culture in a particular way. My take on Gertner’s reporting is that it is this very culture that gives Toyota a particular competitive advantage in today’s marketplace. Yes, Toyota has lots of money to throw at product development and quality but this cash reserve seems to come directly from a cultural characteristic of the company – frugality. Now contrast this with Microsoft. They have their own version of “having more money than God” and have spent lots trying to get into the Internet game. But Google is still the king of the search hill and Window’s Vista continues to require patches as well. Even with all this money, Microsoft can’t seem to be a heavy hitter in the places they need to compete (with the possible exception of Xbox. I’m no gamer, any out there that can educate me on Microsoft’s competitiveness in the gaming industry?). When was the last time Microsoft was seen as innovative? Have they slipped into a culture of plenty? Can Steve Ballmer turn Microsoft’s banquet into a Victory garden to re-ignite a culture of “hunger?”

Side bar: for some strange reason I googled Microsoft to find its website (here’s a guess, maybe its www.microsoft.com) and the first thing that popped up, as a Google sponsored link was “Microsoft Updates: Detect & Remove Malicious Software. Free Removal Tool from Microsoft.” Does the expression “canary in a coal mine” come to mind?

View from the Margin

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

When we hear or use the word “marginalized,” we often think of negative connotations. We picture the dominant group pushing one or many, against their will, to the outside. This very act of exclusion carries with it a loss or diminution of the marginalized’s power to influence. All they can do is look in from afar and curse their outsider status.

But when it comes to interacting with unfamiliar cultures, being the outsider looking in can bring with this status clear advantages, but only if you can accept the positive quality of the marginalized stigma. Watching the film “The Namesake” this past weekend illustrated this for me.

It is a story about an Indian couple (Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli) who come to the United States for opportunities and end up starting their family in America and raising their two children (Gogol and Sonia), with all the tensions associated with a microcosm of Indian culture existing within a broader, dominant American culture. Gogol is intent on moving beyond his Indian roots and fully embracing the American culture, in one case Americanizing his given name and in another, seriously dating a non-Indian woman (Maxine). It is only the shock of a sudden family tragedy that draws him back to his Indian culture.

One scene in particular stands out in my memory. In it, the local Indian community gathers at the home of the Ganguli family to collectively grieve their loss. Maxine arrives and is knowledgeable enough of the Indian culture to observe certain rituals. But overall, by her words and actions towards Gogol, it is clear she wants no part of being the outsider and tries to persuade him to return, in so many words, to her world. But Maxine’s efforts to pull Gogol back out of his Indian culture just when he has returned to it through his grief is enough to distance them from each other and apparently leads to their break-up.

Thinking about this scene later, I thought about the incredible opportunity Maxine missed by not stepping or staying outside the group. To allow herself to be marginalized, she would have gained a perspective on Gogol and all his complexities that is nearly impossible to see when one is immersed in the cultural context. She, as an observant and curious outsider, would have gained the power of discernment and insight and possibly as well, wisdom uncommon to most people. But it takes courage and self-confidence to be an outsider, to be on the margin looking in.

Going back to my posting from Friday, Schein in The Corporate Culture Survival Guide also talks about this idea of being marginal. In his discussion of what it takes to bring about a transformative change in an organizational culture, he emphasizes the need to have a parallel group that focuses on learning an alternative way of thinking or doing that can be proven to be workable, that can be “sold” to the organization to foster the change. Here is Schein’s explanation for what I would call “the power of the outsider.”

The essence of the concept of a temporary parallel system is that some part of the organization must become marginal and expose itself to new ways of thinking so that it can be objective about the strengths and weaknesses of the existing cultural elements, and how these will aid or hinder the changes to be made.

Fully engaged insiders simply cannot see the culture in which they are embedded clearly enough to assess and evaluate its elements. On the other hand, having an entirely outside assessment of the culture is equally unlikely to be productive because the outsider does not know enough of the cultural nuances to be able to make an assessment. The solution is for the parallel system to include key insiders who then work with consultants to decipher the culture and plan the change program. (p. 131)

Even more significant is the implication this has for leaders of the organization. Schein continues:

It is also assumed that the organization cannot learn anything new if the leaders themselves do not. Leaders need to be made marginal, to have some new insights, and to participate in the parallel system to explore the new learning in a wider context. (p. 131)

Isn’t this wild, that leaders need to be made marginal, to place themselves on the outside looking in? But it’s not one or the other. A leader is highly effective when he or she can straddle the line between outsider and insider; enough distance to gain a perspective and enough immersion to understand the intricacies.

Where do you stand?