Reframing Culture and Organizational Change with David White, PhD

This week's episode features a science-packed conversation with David White, an expert in organizational culture and business transformation.

David's career journey through various HR functions, including recruitment, change management, and talent management, has provided him with invaluable insights into the challenges of driving lasting cultural shifts within organizations.

As the author of Disrupting Corporate Culture, David challenges conventional wisdom by reframing culture as a form of shared knowledge embedded in our brains. Unlike the traditional corporate view, which often sees culture as an external force, David emphasizes its heterogeneous and tacit nature—stuff we know but don't consciously acknowledge—that shapes our everyday actions and behaviors.

Armed with applied science, David has spent the last decade helping organizations approach culture and change with sophistication and nuance, striving to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

Tune in to this enlightening episode as David unpacks the complexities of culture, neuroscience, and organizational change, offering practical insights to empower leaders and teams on their journey toward meaningful transformation.

To stay connected and continue the conversation, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn.

And don't forget to check out our previous episodes for more tips and strategies to boost your workplace happiness. You can find them on your favorite podcast platform or on our website.

If you have any questions, comments, or topic suggestions for future episodes, please reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you!

Stay inspired, stay motivated, and stay happy at work!

Transcript

Laura Hamill: 0:06

Welcome back for another episode of the happy at work podcast, with Laura, Tessa and Michael.

Tessa Misiaszek: 0:14

Each week we have thoughtful conversations with leaders, founders and authors about happiness at work. Tune

Michael McCarthy: 0:22

in each Thursday for a new conversation. Enjoy the show.

Laura Hamill: 0:40

Welcome to the happy at work podcast. We are so excited to have David White joining us today. Welcome, David.

David White: 0:47

Hello. Thank you for having me.

Laura Hamill: 0:49

Absolutely. Thanks for being with us. What we love to do and love to start with is just learn more about you. So could you just start by sharing with us a bit about your career journey and how you landed where you are now?

David White: 1:05

Sure. I have a My tail is complex and sorted. But basically, I came in to the world that I'm in by after 25 years or so of working in the corporate world actually started my career as a headhunter in the recruiting side. So and then eventually into HR and eventually into organizational development and change work where I met you, Laura. And most of that work early on in my career involved helping organizations as an inside consultant Insider. Transform, helping organizations with large scale change of one kind or another being part of the HR function, usually that was involved with helping bring to life new ways of helping evaluate and develop people in an organization through competency models and career paths and things like that. And that's what I spent about 25 years doing. But all of that work was usually in service of a larger agenda that the organization had around culture change. And after about 25 years of doing that, in companies like lotus, which was the inventor of the spreadsheet, later acquired by IBM, and working in a couple of startups as the HR leader there, and then eventually working in a large consulting firm Mercer, which is a big HR consulting firm, and then eventually Microsoft, I was involved in a lot of culture change and business transformation, kinds of initiatives, sometimes at the periphery, sometimes in the center. But through that experience, I saw essentially that none of these efforts at culture change or business transformation really were that successful. Most fell short of stated goals, despite great leaders, great people, a lot of initiative, you know, all the you know, the the business mandate. And that got me very interested in about 2020 10 22,009 2010. In going and studying this problem academically. Why do organizations suffer or struggle with change, especially when it comes to major business transformation that inevitably involves culture? The statistics are not very encouraging, if you believe them, but 75% of major business transformations fail, they don't achieve the objectives that they say they are intending to achieve. Whether it's a merger, digital transformation, turnaround, any kind of major shift in business is a struggle. And I certainly experienced that, you know, firsthand. So I went back to school and got a PhD as a cognitive anthropologist, and anthropology is one field spent has spent about the past 125 years studying culture. And I was really interested in what the anthropologist had to say about culture and wrote a thesis on the so called cultural mind and the relationship between neuroscience and culture. And for the last 10 years or so, I've been I've been building a consulting practice around, shall we say, that question or that problem? Bringing kind of the new there's a lot of really interesting neuroscience work and cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, cognitive sociology work on the relationship between culture and the mind. And the business world doesn't know much about it. For a lot of reasons, a lot of good reasons. And so my, my role, sort of my little niche here, in the last few years, last 10 years or so has been to help organizations kind of help them approach culture and change, major change in a more sophisticated way, using some of this new science. And that's what I do. So

Tessa Misiaszek: 4:57

David, I'm I have people I want to connect you with or I want to connect to you, I can't wait to talk about change. So much of what you just said is, is really also a part of the world that I'm in right now. But I know that you just wrote a book. And as someone who worked in the corporate environment for 20, plus years before kind of moving into academia, you wrote a book called disrupting corporate culture. So can you tell us a little bit about the

David White: 5:28

book? Sure. And actually, it's my second book is the first book was a was an academic book that probably no one will ever read. But it was rethinking corporate culture, which is about cognitive science. And in culture, the disrupting corporate culture books was an attempt to take sort of those ideas into a broader audience. Without writing a best seller, I don't know how to write a best seller. But essentially, the idea is that it's really the what I've just been saying, what, what the brain science has been showing. And also what the cognitive cognitive science has been showing over the last 30 years or so is that culture is is a super complex, but be is registered in the brain, as shared knowledge typically, shared tacit knowledge. If you think about the brain, there's so much information that we have in our heads, as you both know, that we don't use a lot of that knowledge is so called cultural knowledge knowledge that we share. And it's very basic, everyday kinds of things like, you know, how to, how to order food in a restaurant, or how do you know not to look at people in the eye in the elevator? Or how do you behave on a subway, or any kind of public sphere, behavior or activity or norm are thought. And there's millions of these kinds of knowledges in our in our brains. And the content anthropologists say that's culture, that's the that's, that's the root of culture, everything else that we interpret as culture, norms, values, attitudes, behavior, is comes from sort of these germ, what the anthropologists have called a schema or cultural model, a cultural model is just a set of a set of a collection of schemas. And these schemas are basically images, sort of Gestalt like, or basic images about the world of how things go in the world, some some anthropods, some cognitive science, call them rules, sometimes we know them as frames. But essentially, it's tacit knowledge about how things are or should be. And, again, there's millions of examples. What I've learned is that the business world doesn't think of culture in that way, though, as you as you both know. And the business world tends to think of culture as a independent variable that can be more or less easily manipulated, you push an input here and outcomes that you want, organize it your employees to be more collaborative, you, you train them on collaboration, and that will change the culture. And you know, those kinds of outside in approaches for me never go much go for go very far. Because the way culture registers in individual brains is far more complex than that. And it's very difficult to change people's values, it's very difficult to engineer behavior at scale. It's very difficult to, you know, normatively, engineer, an organization, any large organization, I mean, my little boutique consultancy of five, seven people, I might be able to get away with it. But any company of scale, it's very difficult to do those things. And so when we start appreciating cultures, as this collection of heterogeneous kind of tacit knowledge stuff, we know that we don't know we know. But we use every day, when we start thinking about culture that way, the places where we can intervene and culture, cultural cultures, because it's the notion of a single culture is also kind of a kind of a myth. In any large company, the places where we can intervene become a lot more interesting, at least to me, because we're starting to sort of talk about the culture at the atomic level, or the preconscious level and that that gets super it's that's doesn't make it easy. I think one of the reasons why business the business world has been stuck in what I think are the culture industry has been stuck in a rut for about 50 years, is because leaders want simple answers. And they want it fast. And they don't, you know, and this cognitive anthropological approach to culture is, is not easy. And we can get into why but it's complex. And but we need to appreciate the complexity. And once we start to do that, I think doors unlock that we can start to go into and see things in a bit of a different way.

Laura Hamill: 9:43

That's so good. I know there's one. There's one particular piece of this that I know you've been doing a lot of work on, which is the idea that the work we do, the actual work we do helps create the culture we're in right and so you have this we are what we We do kind of free. So tell tell me more. Tell us more about that. And why is the work we do so important to understanding culture?

David White: 10:10

I think one of the great advances in brain science over the last 30 years has been this idea that brains are pattern by habit and experience. And we all know this. I mean, this is this is now becoming kind of a trope in society. But in the organizational context, what we do all day long, indelibly shapes how we think. And I in the disrupted corporate culture book is sort of an exploration of that question, which is essentially, you know, why do engineering companies look and sound and feel like engineering companies? Or why do doctors act and talk and think like doctors or lawyers, like lawyers or social workers like social workers? Well, it's because the the nature of both the professionalization, how these occupational groups have been socialized and professionalized over years. And also the nature of what cognitive science will call the tech task environment, that the stuff that the nature of the stuff that you're organized, to try and do, and the problems that you are tasked with solving as a corporation. At the very large scale, shape, how you think, and particularly if there is been success, meaning you've you've endeavored to, you know, in the Microsoft example, you've endeavored to create an operating system. And it's proven wildly successful over the years, well, that patterns, the collective brain that really shapes neural brain chemistry, the solutions, the routines, the techniques, the knowledge, the what it takes to have produced the operating system in trains, I'm using kind of, you know, cognitive science language, but in trains the brain, it's not the only way that brains get in trained. But collectively, when you get into an organization that is focused on those sets of tasks, or those kinds of problems, people start to think in very similar ways. Why? Because that's what the task demands, it's the the environment affords, there's a fascinating relationship between the physical environment and the brain and, and how brains use the physical environment to think through which to think. And there's a lot more to say about that. But the simple answer is, we are what we do to Laura's to your point, because the nature of what we're trying to do all day long as a business will indelibly shape, how we think about how we make sense of problems. And that thinking gets over learned or shall I say, over applied to other domains. So example, you know, I work with a lot of industrial manufacturing type companies. And by definition, making an industrial product, like a pump, or an aircraft engine, is is a is an endeavor that, by definition will mitigates risks, you do not want your engines or your pumps, and we'll leave Boeing us out of it for a minute, but you don't want aircraft engines to fail, right? But so the the practice of making an industrial product really reliable and safe, and, you know, all of that goes all of that goes into doing that all the work on an assembly line on a manufacturing plant, all the engineering work, etc. Patterns, the brain, especially if you do that habitually over time over years, right. And so, in engineering or industrial companies, manufacturing companies have a orientation to risk that is, for example, very different than, say, a software company, every piece of software that you own and have in use right now, I guarantee you has bugs in it. But most of my manufacturing clients would never dream of ship shipping a product with known defects in it. And so, that might seem like a trivial example, but that patterning that way of thinking gets extended culturally into all other domains. So my manufacturing clients tend to be very, extremely risk averse when it comes to hiring, when it comes to planning when it comes to approaching customers when it comes to budgeting. So these these, you know, these patterns are these, what I call dominant logics of the organization spread across the organization, into other domains where it might not be so advantageous to be so risk averse, like we might want to take a chance on some on a person in promoting them, or in hiring somebody from outside our industry. And, or anything if or when we acquire a company, and but we start managing them, you know, we're in my industrial clients are, are doing a lot in the digital space trying to acquire digital companies. But they start managing them managing them and running them as if they were industrial companies. And what happens in that moment, most of the founders leave because they don't want to have you know, they don't want to have to share Over an ROI of a new product, you know, over the next five years, show monthly cash flows for five years for a software product that's still on the whiteboard. You know, I mean, you know, it's that level of detail that just anathema. So

Tessa Misiaszek: 15:15

I have, I have a quick question as it relates to so you, you started out talking a lot about your previous work thinking about change, and I'm having similar conversations with companies around transformation. And I'm talking to engineering based companies that are very risk averse, yet at the same time, they're dealing with AI coming into their industry space, they're dealing with new technologies, I'm working with a company in Europe that actually has to totally redefine their business model because of the Green Deal. And the fact that they really have to go from a volume space chemical company going from a volume space to a values based business model sales model. So it's really around that that concept of not necessarily change management, but change readiness. And it's about building a culture for change. So what are your thoughts on kind of bringing these two pieces together that you've just described in understanding, you know, the layers of habitual thinking and, you know, the internal scripts that people have around? This is the stimulus. And this is what I do automatically in that situation and trying to interrupt that script, but also in the context of so much emergent changes happening. So so how do you kind of approach those situations with clients?

David White: 16:40

Yeah, it's a great question. And Tessa, you're, you know, a marketing professional, you You're, you're in this field, you understand this, but it's the I believe the way we approach that question is the same, based on the same principles that what I've just said. And one of the great paradoxes of culture is that although culture lives in the brain, the way you access culture, in order to change it at scale, is not through people. But through practices. And this is a for me, the more I work in the transformation space, the more the more convicted, I am on this point, which is, you know, it's very difficult to change people. But if we start to change the practices around the people, we charge to sort of intervene on the ecosystem, then the way people behave and start to think in that ecosystem will over time start to shift. This is not an easy argument to make with a CEO or a leadership team. When I say your business practices, your digital industrial company that wants to be a digital company, and embrace AI and start to move faster. You just can't tell the people that got to start moving faster and embrace AI and you can't put into a training program and you can't write new values. And you can't, you can do all those sorts of cultural things, hire people from the tech industry, those things are destined for failure, because your business practices remain the same. And so when so the, for me the the great paradox and but the great opportunity is when you start to rethink business practices, fundamentally rethink the business practices, the ways in which you run your business. That and rethink them in ways where you can inculcate new schema or new what I call dominant logics new cultural models, new meant new shared mental models about that are directionally aligned towards your future, whatever that is. That's where you start to see traction and start to see change. But it's a long process. And it's very difficult to say to a leadership team, hey, you know, the way you guys do budgeting, you guys and gals do budgeting that needs to be rethought, or, you know, your five year strategic planning process that you brought McKinsey in for and, you know, you spent several million dollars to try to do that needs to be rethought, you know, or, again, there's, in our, in my practice, my consulting practice, I identify six practice areas that each need intervention could use intervening, to use that word, ranging from people to cut product to customer planning, day to day management. And you can find ways to intervene in these practices to then start to shift the the dominant mental mental models or the dominant logics over time, but it's difficult because these practices are also the things that generally have made the company successful. And say to you, you know, you need to interrogate your own practices, your own success. You need to look into why you're successful. And then let's think about changing that. That's, that's a hard argument.

Laura Hamill: 19:45

It's just so much easier to say, hey, please go go do the things I want you to do. Right? Isn't that

David White: 19:51

don't do that training. Exactly.

Laura Hamill: 19:54

Where that swag, you know, I firmly

David White: 19:57

believe that's why we have the Fed The rates that we have in m&a and and in transformation and digital digital transformation is so hard for these for my industrial clients. And I think I think it's proving to be true that very few industrial companies that are succeeding in the digital space are struggling mightily. Or, you know, shall we say, you know, non digital native companies, companies sort of, you know, that were born before, you know, the mid 90s. Right, struggling mightily with this digital world. There's so much because they're reluctant to change business practices, when and when, just to be clear what I say when I say business practice, I don't mean behavior. I don't mean individual behavior. I mean, the way you run your business, the habits, routines and business processes. Yeah.

Laura Hamill: 20:45

Yep, completely. That makes so much sense. There's so much in what you're saying. We can just go on and on. And I know, our time is almost up. But last question for you, David. For those organizations who just don't know where to start with this work, what are some simple things they could do that would still be meaningful? Like still would make a difference from your perspective?

David White: 21:08

Yeah, and you're gonna ask that question. And it's, it's hard, the answer would be, you know, this is would be just a start right at a toe in the water. I would say there's probably there's two deaths, two toes in the water. One is learn to become adept at spotting patterns in your organization, pattern, pattern recognition, by a leader or really anybody in an organization done in a somewhat systematic way, can go a long way. Because what you're seeing when you start to spot those patterns, and this is how new newcomers are usually better at this than those of us who've been an organization forever. But when you can start to spot these habitual patterns in the way the business runs, you're, you're kind of onto this dominant logic cultural model, you're now into that substrate. Tacit knowledge, you're kind of into that space. And that's, that's your first window or your first portal into intervention into a possible intervention.

Laura Hamill: 22:11

That's awesome.

David White: 22:13

I would say very quickly, as is it when you start to do that, you're going to meet major, major resistance. And so this is where I'm where I spend most of my time is helping leaders become much more effective, much more self aware, and much more masterful themselves as change leaders. Most of my work is in helping organizations, teaching organizations how to transform themselves, rather than bringing bringing in armies of consultants, but helping the leader become self aware, and courageous enough. And also compassionate enough to interrogate his or her own logics and the organization's own logics, so they can start to shift that it's,

Tessa Misiaszek: 22:58

it's interesting what you said about pattern. So I'm a boomerang employee. I don't know if you heard that term. But I worked for my company I worked for now I worked for them 12 years ago, for a few years left for 10 years. And now I'm back. And I, I feel like I'm in this kind of special place where I've seen a lot of change. But I also see recognize the immediate patterns that, you know, I saw 12 years ago that I'm like, Oh, my goodness, we haven't we haven't changed. And it's a it's kind of an interesting position. And I know that there's boomerang employees in particular, they're just an interesting, it's an interesting topic to explore some point, because I do think they have this kind of they laughed, and then they came back. And they can be quick to recognize those old patterns. But I don't know if you've ever thought about that, from that perspective,

David White: 23:49

a really unique perspective. And probably it makes you a great anthropologist, a great ethnographer of your of your organization, right. And the question is, how can you keep that how can you preserve that we in our leadership programs, we talk about, how do you stay at the boundary, which is kind of a gestalt term for how do you stay at the at the contact boundary between inside and outside as an insider? Very difficult to do. But it takes a lot of curiosity, and a lot of self awareness. What's, what's my stuff versus what's your stuff? What's you know, what's just my own heuristic here? Yeah.

Laura Hamill: 24:22

So, David, this is so cool. I mean, I can just keep listening to what you're saying. It's so helpful. And so thank you so much to have you back. Thank you so much, David, for your time today and for all your just amazing ideas, really grateful for you to join us.

David White: 24:37

Thank you, Laura. always wonderful to talk to you.

Michael McCarthy: 24:42

We hope you've enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to hear future episodes, be sure to subscribe to the happy at work podcast, and leave us a review with your thoughts.

Tessa Misiaszek: 24:52

Are you interested in speaking on a future episode or want to collaborate with us? Let us know. You can send us an email at At admin at happy at work podcast.com. And

Laura Hamill: 25:04

lastly, follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter for even more happiness. See you soon