On the issue of dramatically changing your organization's culture, Dr. Schneider is not optimistic. Because culture is embedded so deeply within an organization, changing it is extremely difficult and time-consuming and should only be attempted when the organization's survival is at stake. Dr. Schneider also recommends we direct our efforts toward improving the level of culture integration, wholeness and balance rather than trying to radically alter the core culture. He defines integration as the level of coherence between strategy, leadership and management, structure, power, customer relationships and compensation. Wholeness is working toward organization completeness, understanding what is missing, what is unfinished, what is damaged and what needs to be reassembled.
Balance is the extent to which the organization is operating in a state of equilibrium.
If we design workflow, technology and organization structures requiring us to move in a different core culture, we must design change management strategies that will ease this transition and address all of the organizational elements. Such dramatic changes require concerted, directed leadership and reinforcement efforts to be successful. We may have to plan several phases of change which gradually take the organization into a new culture. Leaders and managers must be prepared to reinforce such change through new behavior of their own as well as implementing infrastructure changes. Or, we may be most advised to tailor our BPR intervention to our client's core culture.