Who Moved My Cheese? Why Culture and Process Are So Important.

In my line of work, and perhaps due to my insatiable and somewhat annoying need to always ask, “Why?”, I come across a lot of issues that always seem to come back to two major problems: culture and process.

I’ve spent lots of time talking on culture and process and the reason I chose the very tag line of this blog, “where technology and business collide” is in dealing with the two greatest influencers of success or failure when you overlay technology to solve a business problem. In other words, if your culture and your processes are broken – no amount of business or technology acumen is going to save you.

Having said that, I received a call from a friend a few days ago asking for a some advice on an issue he was dealing with (let’s call him Jamie for our story). Jamie had come to the conclusion that many of his customers were not being serviced properly when calling in to place orders. They were complaining of either being treated rudely or not receiving shipments of his product in a timely fashion.

We both agreed that there were some issues with the people handling the calls, and in talking back and forth zeroed in on a change in the process that would sidestep the problem department and forward the order requests down a different path.

I asked a simple question of why he didn’t prefer to deal with the issue head on because it seemed something was amiss. He instantly came back with the rebuttal that we couldn’t address that issue because 1) it would make too many people angry, and 2) nothing would ultimately change.

The Rub:

Here’s the rub with this: The process is not working for his customers so the typical solution would be to simply address the deficiencies while promoting the correct behavior. However,  the culture is clearly diseased, suffering from a real lack of perspective needed to step back and embrace truth instead of hiding from it.

Of the two (culture and process), culture is the most important and will ultimately decide whether the company and its many processes survive. Culture is to a company like the blood flowing through your very veins. If it is not functioning optimally, you will eventually die.

So, Jamie decided to implement his solution and solve the problem by redirection to his “A-Team”. While this may work in the short term, in the long term not only will those high-capacity people on the his “A-Team” come to resent the lower-capacity team, the lower-capacity team will end up resenting the “A-Team” once they discover what is going on (behind their backs) – and notice I said “once” and not “if” – because it will happen.

In general, breeding and grooming a winning culture takes time, energy, money, and lots of patience. It doesn’t happen overnight and everyone involved will generally be frustrated. As long as it is frustration of the “creative” persuasion, everything will work out just fine. But when you start seeing this end-run around the center, something is way out of whack – not just a little, but a lot!

Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. Ken is also the founder of Seeking the Son, a website centered around achieving a more intimate relationship in faith. All are welcome to connect with Ken, and may visit him at DandyID.