Thanks for your interesting post. It is true that I have given a rather individualist-sounding explanation of influence, which is not what you’d expect from one so oriented in social thinking as myself. The reason it sounds individualistic is that I am saying that even at a roadshow speaking to thousands of employees, a leader can only influence in a very strong way, a relatively small group of people – the executive team and perhaps some other key stakeholders.

At the roadshow, the CEO makes a grand gesture, but cannot control how that gesture will be taken up by the multitude of employees. How it is taken up will be influenced by their peer group and their supervisors.

So I am not pointing to an individualist view of influence, but rather to how the spheres of influence are limited in terms of how much the leader can control or greatly influence hundreds or thousands of others.

I am not sure how your musical analogy of timbre and tone applies and would love to hear more of your thoughts on this.

As for power, I agree that it is important. To me power is a relational thing, that fluctuates and is based on the need the parties have for each other. If I need you more, you have more power over me. But my need for you can change – hence negotiating strategies to reduce the appearance of my need for you and to increase the appearance of your need for me.

This is quite different from “ability to do work”.

Once again Tom, thanks for your interesting and stimulating post.

I think not.

Systems thinking was developed to explain a non-human world. Then we tried to adapt it to explain a human world (even though the orginator of systems thinking, Kant, warned us against doing this).

So I suspect that any thinking about a human systems theory would be, like soft systems theory, critical systems, emancipatory systems, postmodern systems, interpretive systems, system dynamics, living systems, autopoiesis, or complex systems are always going to be struggling to shoe horn a view of human consciousness into a theory that was not designed for dealing with social phenomena.

Very clever thinkers have been involved in attempting to adjust systems thinking for sociological situations, and I do not think this track has led to the breakthrough that was hoped for.

With regard to your affiliation with story, I agree that narrative is one important way that people interact with each other. Further, narrative is undervalued in managerial discourse.

I think narrative or stories though, are inseparable from the people telling them in specific circumstances in specific organisations.

So, it is tempting to think that as a manager you can manage the stories and so manage the culture.

I am not inclined to this view, but am willing to listen to attempts to persuade me otherwise.

Reminds me of being a child, wishing away the bully on bus at school. I used to get quite creative at avoiding catching the bus!

From that I learnt that you can’t wish away your problems.

I’m not saying either that culture is so fast moving or changeable that we can’t grab hold of it, compared to some cultures that are slower moving. To me, that’s like attributing physical Newtonian characteristics of velocity and direction to an abstraction that doesn’t exist in the physical world.

I guess I’m just wondering how helpful it is to have this concept of “culture” that exists on a different level from the humans involved, that is created by them and at the same time acts back on them.

This concept makes it sound like there is an actual thing called “culture” that you can manage if you are clever enough, perhaps by a “light touch”.

But I am wondering if this is so, and I suspect not. Still working on how to explain it!

You ask a very valid question – I am critical of systems thinking, so what do I in fact think organisations are, if I don’t think they are complex systems?

I am happy to refer you to the very first post I ever made on my blog “What is an organisation?” in which I attempted to answer this question.
http://www.changingorganisations.com/2008/08/what-is-an-organisation/

Cheers, Stephen

It sounds like you had something in mind when you wrote this comment, and I’m not sure what it was. I don’t think organisations are systems, and I don’t think they are becoming systems. The reason organisations are not systems, is because systems don’t have any place for humans as part of the system – rather, systems have parts in service of the whole – but organisations are comprised of humans in relationship with each other and they have human consciousness and choice, which are not part of any systems thinking.

It sounds like we are both questioning “culture”. Schein’s own thinking about culture has evolved since he first saw three levels of culture – basic assumptions, artefacts and espoused values. So should ours.

I think that defining core competencies is another attempt to articulate what this “indefinable something” is. Core competencies in New Zealand seem to lead inexorably to Lominger’s 67 generic competencies and the generic descriptions you end up with seem woefully inadequate for this. As do aVI – a Values Inventory, which has one hundred and something different values identified.

The question is, what is that something that we recognise as the organisation? When we call it a personality we are giving the organisation the qualities of a human being. And yet an organisation is not made of flesh and blood like a human being. Rather it is a whole lot of people with different intentions, all interacting over time. I want to question whether or not it is actually culture that gives this very subtle yet recognisable quality of the patterns that emerge from the myriad interactions of those involved in the organisation over time.

If we expand the concept of ‘organisation’ to the scale of a region or nation, it’s immediately evident that there _is_ such a thing as culture. Some aspects remain relatively stable – the ‘organisational DNA’, to quote a previous commenter – but each of these can be emphasised or deemphasised, to change the impacts and effects of that nominal defined culture.

What is also clear is that leaders can have a major influence on this ‘nurture’-adjustment of culture. Look at influential politicians such as Kennedy or Reagan or Obama in the US, Thatcher in Britain or Howard in Australia, epitomising particular human traits that perhaps had little to do with their own real characters but heightened national traits and tendencies to hope and inclusiveness in some cases, self-centredness and bigotry in others. ‘Influence’ here is not just in the person-to-person sense described in your post, but is often something much more subtle and pervasive: in musical terms we would call it timbre and tonality, rather than the specific tempo or score.

So yes, whilst I would agree that culture is not something that can be ‘managed’ in the classic business sense of edict and ‘control’, personal behaviour and example certainly _do_ play a key role in influencing culture – and this applies in _every_ domain and direction within the enterprise, bottom-up and sideways-in as well as top-down. Being aware of the impacts of behaviour and example create choices to ‘do things differently’: in that sense, culture _can_ be ‘managed’, though the way we do so is more emergent – as you say – rather than classic ‘control’.

The same applies to business metrics, and to criteria for appraisals, hiring, firing, bonuses and much else besides within the organisation: each of these reflects cultural assumptions, and emphasises and/or deemphasises specific behaviours and interactions. So again, we need to become more aware of what these impacts are, and the psychological, social and other mechanisms through those impacts occur in practice. Only then do we start to have choices about culture.

One of the key themes I look at in my own work is the organisation’s cultural concept of power. The physics definition of ‘power’ is ‘the ability to do work’; most social definitions – especially in large organisations – are closer to ‘the ability to _avoid_ work’. Understanding the trade-offs and dysfunctionalities, and what to do about them, is core to co-creating a culture that works for all its stakeholders. More info on that at http://sempermetrics.com , if that’s of interest.

But yes, an important question, an important topic – and as you say, nothing like as simple as it may seem at first sight.