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Posts Tagged ‘culture’

Following up on the post about the priority of culture over strategy in organizational planning, I’m drawing from another of the acknowledged gurus, this time from the non-profit universe: Beth Kanter. I’m also a subscriber to Beth’s Blog, which is a constant treasure trove of good stories and ideas, often by guest bloggers.

In yesterday’s post, Beth was about to facilitate a discussion that she titled ”Creating a Culture that is not Afraid to Fail.” She wrote,

I’m defining failure as a social media strategy or program implementation that wasn’t perfect or didn’t work as well as you expected especially the first few times you did it.   This happens quite frequently with social media, especially in the early stages.

We set unrealistic outcomes, don’t have a methodology for learning or sloppy strategy implementation.  We get poor results.  We’re quick to proclaim that social media doesn’t work, feel some shame, and drop it.  We look at the wrong measures or unrealistic outcomes. We don’t value the learning and use that insight to improve the social media strategy the second or third or fourth time around.

Like riding a bicycle or a horse, you can’t call it failure the first, or second or third time you fall off. You only learn to ride either of them by getting back on and trying again. Some of this persistence must live in the organization’s culture. If its social foundation isn’t strong enough, the first failure of a social media initiative may lead to abandonment. In an organization where social learning is recognized as precious, failure is regarded as part of a learning process. New approaches – maybe new tools – will be tried. There will be patience for social changes to adapt to the technology and sharing of observations.

On Facebook and on Twitter, Beth posted this query: ”How do you create an organizational culture that is not afraid to fail? “

Read her blog post for the details, but in summary the responses suggested the following:

(1) Must come from the top: reward learning

(2)   Unpack the fear of failure through internal discussions

(3)  Make learning the norm

(4) Emphasize what works

(5) Start small, early, and reiterate

I’ve been subscribed to Luis Suarez’s blog for almost a month now. I usually give a blogger a month’s trial to convince myself that they’re worth following. His job is to help educate, encourage and guide IBM employees in using social tools productively, but much of what he does is expose other peoples’ work and discoveries for his blog readers.

I’ll probably be commenting on his writing from time to time because – on a much greater scale than mine – Suarez is going about the same task – supporting better organizational use of social technologies.

The current article has an irresistible title: Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch.  I’m in complete alignment with Suarez when he says:

To me, social computing within the enterprise is about everything, but the tools. It’s a philosophical and social corporate movement, a lifestyle, a new way of connecting and interacting with people, both inside and outside of the firewall; one where the main focus is not on the technology itself, but on the people behind it.

He’s talking about the culture of organizations and how they are changing to adapt to the evolution of business, technology and culture beyond the organization. This is the Big Shift I refer to on the Context page of this site. Suarez posted his thinking about “how collaborative your corporate culture needs to be in order to embrace these social tools. ”

As he tends to do, Suarez uses his writing to lead to someone else’s article or paper or video presentation, which you may or may not find as enriching as he does. But his truth in this case is that social computing and the culture of the organization will have more impact on strategy than the other way around. So when an organization talks about putting together a social media strategy, their starting point should be a frank assessment of their culture and its compatibility with what the strategy would have them do.