The Culture Cycle

To change a culture, you must start at the beginning – the programming. You can modify any culture for awhile, but to initiate true change, you must start with the way it is programmed.

A culture develops over time. It is not an overnight process. It must be influenced time and time again before it takes shape. When a company is founded, its corporate culture is like an infant at birth. It is a living, breathing part of the company, which takes years to fully develop. Just as there is a cycle of development for an infant, there is also a definitive cycle that a culture follows as part of its development. When you understand this cycle, you will understand how your culture grew to become what it is today and, more importantly, you will know how to change it.

 Exhibit 32 shows a snapshot of what this cycle looks like. Before we begin our journey through the cycle, there are two principles about this cycle theory that you must accept before it will work for you.

1.              This is a cycle. It repeats itself daily. These are not stages over time: rather, they are a daily routine that feeds your culture - either reinforcing it or modifying it. When your company first started, this cycle was more of a stage-development process. Today you have a mature culture, which has already developed. You are looking to change this “adult” and the change follows the same cycle.

2.              If this is a cycle, then it must follow the sequence outlined. You cannot let the people on the bus until the door is open and you cannot start the bus until there is gas in the engine. These facts about your culture bus are true for your culture cycle as well. There are no shortcuts in this process, so do not try.

The culture cycle states that your culture’s programming determines your beliefs, and beliefs determine your values, and your values determine your attitudes, and your attitudes determine your emotions, and your emotions determine your culture’s behaviors. As you can see, the cycle builds upon itself with each step. You cannot have a set of values until you have determined your belief system. You cannot control attitudes until you understand the values of your culture. 

I am making this post today because this principle is at the core of everything I believe about corporate culture. And also, because it is at the core of why 90% of culture change initiatives fail. 

For more on this topic, see Culturrific! available on Amazon.com