Positive Psychology at Work:

Why is Culture so Hard to Change?

Our understanding of organizations as complex adaptive systems offers some clues as to why culture change programmes so often fail to deliver the culture change required. We have seen that it suggests that behaviour in a system is predicated on the mental models held by its members: as we understand the world so we act into it. These models, or maps of the world, are constructed from past and present experience and from both personal and shared experience. They also contain projections of the future, what we expect to happen when we act in a certain way. They create a sense of predictability. The group must have a different experience of the world, experience the world differently, if their mental maps are going to adapt. Simply being told about the need for a new culture is not normally sufficient to change established worldviews or organizational patterns and dynamics. Frequently, the mental models in place are sufficiently robust that the group is able to absorb the regular announcements of dynamic culture change plans into its experience of the world and to adapt to them within the existing organizational dynamic. In some organizations this means such announcements result in a flurry of paperwork which is largely ignored, while in others a positive storm of passionate rhetoric and hot air is released; meanwhile nothing really changes.

Culture is created, maintained and transmitted through the social dynamics of the group, suggesting that the ...