Culture Consultants
How does an Organization Change Culture?
Over the years we have learned that employees may be faced with tough decisions between working as existing management systems intended or taking deviations or shortcuts in less-than-ideal situations.
The first step to shifting a culture is identifying the strengths and weaknesses, what needs to change and what doesn't. As a general rule most culture is good and helps us achieve our goals. That is why an organization must have a consistent approach that effectively brings to light the parts of its culture that are contributing to its problems.
The second step is to make it visible to those who are affected. This requires a practical approach to make it visible to the entire culture.
Thirdly, it is important to give the people impacted a process that enables them to see their part and requires them to define what they will do to address it.
Failsafe has incorporated the learnings gleaned over the last 40 years of learning from things that go wrong to develop a unique approach to helping an organization change their culture. Our process, outlined above, is very effective at helping individuals see and address their part.
The problem comes from each individual contributing a small part, therefore the solution comes by having each individual see and address their part.
Our Understanding of Culture
A positive work culture can make all the difference, but changing culture is challenging. To succeed, we need to shift our mindset and understand and address latency, which is essential to changing culture.
We have learned that after the dust settles, our problems are caused by Latency. Latency lies beyond the physics of what went wrong, beyond who was involved, and in the hidden parts of an organization’s culture. It affects everything we do and influences people to make poor choices that lead to incidents. Latency is the portion of an organization’s culture responsible for causing problems.
Of course, the physical issues need to be addressed, as do the people who enabled the physics, but stopping here will not eliminate future problems. This has proven true in every incident investigation we have been involved in. Addressing Latency is what helps avoid future problems. There are two ways to identify and address Latency. The first method involves waiting for an incident to happen and then performing a Latent Cause Analysis. The second method is to examine, audit, and assess your organization's culture to identify the weaknesses contributing to latency and then take corrective action.
Failsafe specializes in helping organizations identify and address Latency.
“Changing the behavior of people … is the most important challenge for businesses trying to compete in a turbulent world.”
Dr. John Kotter
Harvard Business School
In order to avoid complacency, continuously improve, and maintain a healthy balance in life it's important to adjust one's way of thinking. Encouragement, bribery, threats, or punishment cannot bring about lasting success. As humans, we have limitations in terms of how much work we can handle before our performance starts to
