5 Cultural Antibodies Which Resist Organizational Change Efforts
By: Nitin Kumar
Tags: Startup, Innovation, Change Management, Leadership, Business

Picture by author using Pixabay

Introduction

Technological advance has been accelerating change at a furious pace in the past decade and things are only going to accelerate exponentially in the coming decade.

Disruptors and disruption are both inevitable and gaining acceptance as a business reality today. There is a radical shift across customer needs, buying behaviors, consumption patterns, cost structure, competition, and many other business dimensions. In today’s world, disruptors attack an incumbent’s competitive advantage and neutralize it and leave them in a reactive posture with limited alternatives other than rapid response, change and adaptation.

The last decade has ushered an era of disruption with industries (hotels, taxis, print media, music etc.) coming under value eroding attacks from new players and many iconic brands from the last century now laid to rest through bankruptcies, acquisitions etc. It is now widely accepted that rapid change, adaptability, and proactive change is an essential corporate survival and growth skill.

This is however not easy due the pre-existing forces rooted in the structure and culture of organizations, which rise to resist change. This resistance manifests itself in the form of certain behaviors which we term as “cultural antibodies.”

Just as the immune system in a human body is designed to produce antibodies to fight off disease, many corporations seem wired to guard against change. Like an overactive immune system that attacks healthy tissue, forces deep within these organizations tend to rise to fend off any threat to the status quo. Unfortunately, this dynamic is all too common, and that is why most change initiatives fail to deliver their intended return on investment: this despite the proliferation of change methodologies and the recognition of change management as a necessary management discipline.

The popular change methodologies have much to teach us, but none on its own offers the entire cure. Rather, leaders need to be alchemists, extracting and blending from each the solutions that will treat the ailments unique to their organizations. First, however, they must arrive at the right diagnosis.

Strategic Patterns of Change Resistance

Common resistance categories are temporal, emotional, affiliative, and positional; they are generally intertwined. These patterns are observed at a more strategic level.

§ Temporal resistance is time-based, characteristic of organizations that are slow to learn and translate learning into action, thereby taking months and years to implement or change anything.

§ Emotional resistance arises from perceived threats to one’s well-being and tend to occur when individuals are deeply attached to the status quo and push back against changes that threaten their comfort.

§ Affiliative resistance comes into play when changes threaten to disrupt our sense of belonging, for example in a restructuring or acquisition, when change pulls people away from groups to which they feel a strong attachment. Thus, this type of change has a strong emotional component to it and can be extremely difficult to counter.

§ Positional resistance roots itself in structural advantage enjoyed by the organization creating a sense of invincibility, executives tend to be dismissive of smaller sized competitors.

Tactical Manifestations of Change Resistance

Such resistance tends to manifest itself in a very tactical manner within organizations as behaviors adversarial to change. Many years of senior line management roles and consulting engagements running large scale transformations have helped us categorize these tactical behaviors as:

Unnecessary Uniqueness

The belief that the business is so unique or its market position so strong that it is insulated from competitive incursions. Perception that every aspect of the business is radically different from others, with no commonalities to perceive any threat and specialized knowledge is required to execute everything which others cannot replicate. At times, customer and market uniqueness used to justify the status quo. Another observation is creating a perception that day to day tasks might be too complex to perform with change creating operational risk.

Culture of Optionality

When people within organizations believe they can opt out of participating in change. They prefer the flexibility and comfort offered by the status quo as opposed to the future state. Our observation is that legacy behaviors only focus on the task at hand enjoying preferential priority while the change oriented new tasks are deprioritized. Often individual agendas superseded organization goals with executives creating optionality on adherence.

Technical Overload

When, instead of rising to the challenge, the leaders responsible for implementing technological changes overwhelm their peers with obscure jargon on why the change will not work. Creating a perception that quality, scale, growth, and efficiency are correlated to current state of the business and any change will cause a downward spiral attributed to technical reasons. Legacy behaviors influence tendency towards process reversion even after a certain level of change. Contractual and customer risks are typically served as viable excuses to seek exceptions to the new trajectory.

Justified Deferral

Typically using delay tactics and sabotaging changing by creating barriers to slow down departure from the status quo. Inject subjectivity such as risks, intuition, emotions, and culture to defer doing anything new. Change task priority can be unclear, leading to “everyday” tasks taking priority over critical transformation tasks.

Zones of Appeal

Typically observed in consensus-oriented management cultures, every decision is appealed, contested, and justified towards protecting legacy behaviors and culture. All appeals are often based on “gut feel” with disregard for data, facts, or externalities. Even trivial matters of preservation are appealed in the board room while existential matters of the future are appealed and nipped at the bud.

Suppressing Cultural Antibodies

There is no question that corporate survival today requires a change-nimble culture, and that means understanding the cultural inhibitors that will act against you in a change scenario. These might be overt and relatively easy to identify, but often they are quiet and subversive, lying dormant until activated by a perceived threat.

As I have said before, there is no single anti body serum. Taking on the cultural antibodies can be a complex endeavor, their diagnosis and treatment a matter of trial and error. There is, however, a preventative measure that can be taken to elevate an organization’s change fitness, and that is to cultivate a learning culture. A learning culture is the miracle drug, the nutrition-and-exercise equivalent, that is the hallmark of a healthy organization, flexed, taut and ready to rise to any challenge. Pivoting to a proactive position is much easier than battling the reactionary cultural antibodies.