The Happy at Work Podcast

Disrupting Corporate Culture: A Deep Dive with David White

• The Happy at Work Podcast • Season 6 • Episode 18

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David White, a cognitive anthropologist with 25 years of corporate experience, shares powerful insights about why organizational transformations fail and how understanding brain science can revolutionize our approach to culture change. His research reveals the complex relationship between our habitual work practices and the neural pathways that form our cultural thinking patterns.

• Culture consists of millions of schemas or tacit knowledge structures that reside in our brains
• Approximately 75% of business transformations fail to achieve their stated objectives
• What we do all day long indelibly shapes how we think - we are what we do
• Industrial companies develop risk-averse mindsets that extend beyond their core products
• The nature of our daily tasks creates "dominant logics" that influence all organizational thinking
• The paradox of culture: although culture lives in the brain, you change it through practices, not people
• Most organizations attempt culture change through training, values, or hiring but keep business practices the same
• Effective transformation requires rethinking fundamental business practices like planning and budgeting
• Leaders should develop pattern recognition skills to identify habitual thinking in their organizations
• Boomerang employees often have unique ability to recognize entrenched patterns and cultural models

For more insights, check out David's book "Disrupting Corporate Culture" which explores how cognitive science can transform organizational change efforts.

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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!

Speaker 1:

Welcome back for another episode of the Happy at Work podcast with Laura Tessa and Michael.

Speaker 2:

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

Speaker 3:

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

Speaker 1:

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

Speaker 4:

Hello, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:

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?

Speaker 4:

Sure, my tale is complex and sorted, but basically I came into the world that I'm in by after 25 years or so of working in the corporate world. I actually started my career as a headhunter in the recruiting side 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 business mandate and that got me very interested in about 2010,. And that got me very interested in about 2010, 2009, 2010,.

Speaker 4:

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. About 75% of major business transformations fail. They don't achieve the objectives that they say they are intending to achieve.

Speaker 4:

Whether it's a merger, digital transformation, turnaround, any kind of major shift in business is a struggle and I certainly experienced that firsthand. So I went back to school and got a PhD as a cognitive anthropologist, and anthropology is the one field that has spent about the past 125 years studying culture 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 building a consulting practice around shall we say, that question or that problem. 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 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.

Speaker 5:

So, david, 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 really also 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 book?

Speaker 4:

Sure, and actually that's my second book, because the first book was an academic book that probably no one will ever read, but it was Rethinking Corporate Culture, which is about cognitive science and culture. The Disrupting Corporate Culture book was an attempt to take sort of those ideas into a broader audience without writing a bestseller. I don't know how to write a bestseller, but essentially the idea is that it's really what I've just been saying. What the brain science has been showing, and also what the cognitive science has been showing over the last 30 years or so, is that culture is A super complex but B is registered in the brain. As, 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 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 or thought, and there's millions of these kinds of knowledges in our brains and the cognitive anthropologists say that's culture. That's the root of culture. Everything else that we interpret as culture norms, values, attitudes, behavior comes from sort of these germ, what the anthropologists would call a schema or a 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 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.

Speaker 4:

What I've learned is that the business world doesn't think of culture in that way, though, as you both know, and the business world tends to think of culture as an independent variable that can be more or less easily manipulated. You push an input here, and out comes that you want your employees to be more collaborative, you train them on collaboration, and that will change the culture, and those kind of outside-in approaches for me never go very. 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 normatively engineer an organization any large organization, I mean. My little boutique consultancy of five or seven people, I might be able to get away with it, but any company of scale, it's very difficult to get away with it, but any company of scale, it's very difficult to do those things.

Speaker 4:

And so when we start appreciating culture as this collection of heterogeneous kind of tacit knowledge stuff, we know that we don't know, we know but we use every day.

Speaker 4:

When we start thinking about culture that way, the places where we can intervene in culture or cultures because 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 pre-conscious level, and that that gets super, that doesn't make it easy level and that that gets super, 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, or 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. 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.

Speaker 1:

That's so good. I know 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 do, kind of phrase. So tell me more, tell us more about that, and why is the work we do so important to understanding culture?

Speaker 4:

I think one of the great advances in brain science over the last 30 years has been this idea that brains are patterned by habit and experience and we all know this. I mean 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 the Disrupting Corporate Culture book is sort of an exploration of that question, which is essentially, 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 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 task environment, 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 has been success meaning you've endeavored to 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. It really shapes neural brain chemistry, the solutions, the routines, the techniques, the knowledge, what it takes to have produced the operating system, entrains I'm using kind of cognitive science language, but entrains the brain. It's not the only way that brains get entrained, but collectively, when you get into an organization that is, you know, 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 environment affords. There's a fascinating relationship between the physical environment and the brain 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.

Speaker 4:

So example 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 an endeavor that is, an is an endeavor that, by definition, will mitigates risk. 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 all of that goes into doing that, all of the work on an assembly line on a manufacturing plant, all the engineering work, et cetera, patterns the brain, especially if you do that habitually over time, over years, right. And so 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 and use right now, I guarantee you has bugs in it. But most of my manufacturing clients would never dream of shipping a product with known defects in it, and so that might seem like a trivial example.

Speaker 4:

But that patterning, that way of thinking, gets extended culturally into all other domains.

Speaker 4:

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.

Speaker 4:

So these patterns, or 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 a person in promoting them or in hiring somebody from outside our industry and even 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 show 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. I mean, it's that level of detail that it's just anathema. So I have a quick question as it relates to.

Speaker 5:

So 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.

Speaker 5:

They're dealing with new technologies. 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 volumes-based chemical company going from a volumes-based to a values-based business model, sales model. So it's really around 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 and 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 change is happening. So how do you kind of approach those situations with clients?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, it's a great question and, tessa, you're a marketing professional, you're in this field, you understand this. But I believe the way we approach that question is the same. It's the. I believe the way we approach that question is the same, based on the same principles of what I've just said.

Speaker 4:

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 for me, the more I work in the transformation space, 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 try 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 Right. 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 them through a training program and you can't write new values, and you can't. You can do all those sort of cultural things. Hire people from the tech industry, and you can't you can do all those sort 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?

Speaker 4:

For me, the great paradox and the great opportunity is when you start to rethink business practices, fundamentally.

Speaker 4:

Rethink the business practices, the ways in which you run your business, and rethink them in ways where you can inculcate new schema or new what I call dominant logics, new cultural models, new shared mental models that are directionally aligned towards the 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, spent several million dollars to try to do that needs to be rethought. Or again, in my practice, my consulting practice, I identify six practice areas that each need could use intervening, to use that word, ranging from people to product, to customer planning, day-to-day management, and you can find ways to intervene in these practices to then start to shift the dominant mental models or the dominant logics over time.

Speaker 4:

But it's difficult because these practices are also the things that generally have made the company successful and so it's very difficult to say to you you need to interrogate your own practices, your own success, you need to look into why you're successful. And then it's very difficult to 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 a hard argument.

Speaker 1:

It's just so much easier to say hey, employees, go, do the things I want you to do, right.

Speaker 4:

Isn't that just Go do that training Exactly?

Speaker 1:

Go wear that swag, you know.

Speaker 4:

I firmly believe that's why we have the failure rates that we have in M&A 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, succeeding in the digital space. They're 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, struggling mightily with this digital world there's so much Because they're reluctant to change business practices.

Speaker 4:

And just to be clear 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.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, completely. That makes so much sense. There's so much in what you're saying we could 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?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I knew you were going to ask that question and it's hard. The answer would be you know this would be just a start. Right A toe in the water, yes, this would be just a start. Right A toe in the water, yes, I would say there's two toes in the water. One is learn to become adept at spotting patterns in your organization. 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 newcomers are usually better at this than those of us who've been in an organization forever but when you can start to spot these habitual patterns in the way the business runs, you're kind of onto this dominant logic cultural model. You're now into that substrate, that tacit knowledge. You're kind of onto this dominant logic cultural model. You're now into that substrate. You know that tacit knowledge. You're kind of into that space and that's your first window, or your first portal into a possible intervention.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome.

Speaker 4:

The second thing I would say very quickly is when you start to do that, you're going to meet major, major resistance. And so this is where and 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 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.

Speaker 5:

It's interesting what you said about patterns. So I'm a boomerang employee. I don't know if you've heard that term, but I worked for my, the company I work for now. I worked for them 12 years ago for a few years, left for 10 years and now I'm back and 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.

Speaker 5:

I'm like, oh my goodness, we haven't changed this yet and it's kind of an interesting position and I know that there's Boomerang employees in particular, employees in particular. They're just an interesting. It's an interesting topic to explore at some point, because I do think they have this kind of they left 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.

Speaker 4:

It's a really unique perspective and probably makes you a great anthropologist, a great ethnographer of your organization, right? And the question is how can you keep that, how can you preserve that? 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 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 my stuff versus what's your stuff? What's just my own heuristic here, yeah, so David, this is so cool.

Speaker 1:

I mean I can just keep listening to what you're saying. It's so helpful and so thank you so much. We love 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.

Speaker 4:

Thank you, Laura.

Speaker 3:

Always wonderful to talk to you. 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.

Speaker 2:

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 admin at happyatworkpodcastcom and lastly, follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter for even more happiness.

Speaker 1:

See you soon.

People on this episode

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Laura Hamill, PhD

Host
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Michael McCarthy

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Tessa Misiaszek, PhD

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Braden Misiaszek

Producer