Culture and Data? Culture is a generic term which encapsulates the behaviour and norms found in human groups, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups. These groups can be broad such as an entire society with cross-country shared cultural values, for example freedom of expression, equal value of individuals, the right to equal opportunity and the respect for private property. Groups can also be defined in a more narrow fashion, all the way down to a handful of individuals. Startups, for instance, are made up of a few individuals with a shared sense of purpose, which does not mean they have to share the broader cultural aspects. This is what makes the world such an innovative and exciting place: people from varied ethnic, regional and religious backgrounds can work together to achieve a narrow cultural objective they do agree upon. Despite having different cultural backgrounds, in the broad sense of the term, by embracing a hard core of objectives and ethics, small groups of people usually make a large difference within the societies they inhabit. And this drive coupled with talent represents the winning combination for any group in any society that is open to change and forward motion. This all sounds great, we all know and love a success story, and the world is full of them: Tesla, Spotify, Netflix, all started this way. But what happens when the above group does not share those core cultural values, the specific ones required for success within an established group, like a company in business? Does that mean a change is needed to align those values? Why do People do Anything? Cultural change can be a scary concept. However, the question is: why is the wrong culture almost always to blame when things go badly for organisations but only after the fact? Why is the concept of "technology will solve the problem" (a.k.a buying yourself out of trouble) even considered as a way forward before the fact? What about people, the people ? One of my favourite analogies is that technology is a bit like soap . Buying soap does not make one clean, it is the behaviour associated with the use of soap. This collective behaviour in the group is what, coupled with technology, combine to provide value. The behaviours of the people , the culture. So how do we achieve concerted behaviours in a group of people that are not inclined to do so, people who do not know why or what behaviours are needed? In human psychology, and by extension, sociology, people, all people, everyone, responds to Operant Conditioning. Operant conditioning, sometimes referred to as instrumental conditioning, is a method of learning that employs rewards and punishments for behavior. Through operant conditioning, an association is made between a behavior and a consequence (whether negative or positive) for that behaviour This concept is often called "carrot and stick", and of course, it is hard for anyone to consider it. Change is scary for most people, but especially for management, as it implies upsetting other people. We all want to be liked, we are humans, social beings, we need to be liked by the group. This is the main reason management in the Western world is reluctant to "rock the boat" too much . OK, so should we take example from authoritative societies such as China? These societies undoubtedly achieve change at dramatic speed, though sometimes the kind of change they achieve is not the intended one--people do not and cannot be coerced into doing something for very long until they resist and revolt. History is full of examples where leaders ended up rather "headless" when the rubber band of society was pulled too hard. For organisations, too much "stick" ends up bleeding talent, which can be replaced at the expense of losing hundreds of years of combined experience and knowledge. This rarely works, and worse, the ones who stay are guaranteed to become cynical and resist change in an even stronger manner. So that is one approach we can rule out. What other approaches do we have left? We are back to Operant Conditioning then. Why does anyone do anything? Sounds like a philosophical question, but it is the question. Despite everything, reward and punishment runs the world, in fact all living things respond to this and only this, when it comes to decision making. Of course not all decisions are good ones, but eventually punishment arrives in some way or other. The main issue in Western society is that we are accustomed to being shielded from consequences in the short term, it is hard to feel future pain and easy to seek instant rewards. This explains many of the problems human societies experience. And specifically, explains why organisations simply cannot change rapidly enough to adapt to the ever changing reality they operate under. Leadership and Talent Based on the above: the general rule of avoidance of pain and the pursuit of short term gratification, true leadership is meant to engineer a working environment where it seems that this is what's happening, but it only seems to be.This is a proven technique that works with people in all aspects of life where difficult paths have to be chosen instead of the easy ones. From education to personal fitness to cleanliness to work culture. So how does this social engineering happen? Rewarding Quality Deming, arguably the most influential thinker and practitioner of "quality" in the twentieth century proposed a list of 14 points: Create stable, measurable and meaningful purpose for improving products and services. Adopt the new philosophy. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality: train for quality End the practice of rewarding business performance on revenue alone. Reward behaviours as well. Improve constantly and forever every process for planning, production and service. Institute training on the job. Adopt, institute and reward behaviour-based leadership. Drive out fear. Break down barriers between staff areas: share the vision and the view. Eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for the workforce. Eliminate simple numerical quotas for the workforce, especially for management. Remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for everyone. Constantly. Put everybody in the company to work accomplishing the transformation. The above points sound a bit academic, so we can really simplify them to drive three and only three key points: Define what good looks like and reward it. Define what not-good looks like and disincentivise it. Make it real, make it believable: people see though fads, fashions and short term "we did this back in ... and did not work" People There is a quote attributed to "millennials": "they do not want to work for you, the want to work with you". This is as true for millennials as it is for everyone else. We have not have major conflict in the Western world for a long time: people do not understand threats and the inevitability of events over which they have no control. The Blitz is long forgotten. We are shielded from the consequences of bad decisions (in the Western world, again) and this makes the role of incentives all the more important. Working with people, in a way that makes people feel good for making incremental effort towards long term change is the only key to success in modern times. And this applies to business culture and specifically applies to behaviours around data based on learning, implementing, reviewing, improving, repeat, where mistakes are perfectly fine as a learning tool. Process: Bottom-Up... Positive thinking is a major factor in success. So instead of assuming that because something worked somewhere else, make sure you know how it works here. Work the bottom layer of the organisation first, ensure the people who actually do the work are listened to. They know what is in need of improvement, they do the work everyday. Management often do not have the correct understanding of what it takes to deliver results, especially in these days of running companies in Excel and PowerPoint. This, of course, should not be generalised, but there is truth in it. When foot soldiers are properly fed, they march better., fight better and win better An army runs on its stomach (c'est la soupe qui fait le soldat, "the soup makes the solider" Napoleon, though he did not take his own medicine). Once the voice of the people who do the work is heard, distilled, condensed and processes are analysed, then these messages on "how" can be taken to management with a high degree of confidence, and more importantly, with the "blessing" of the workforce. Process: ...and Top-Down At the same time, higher level objectives, strategic and tactical have to be mapped, and this happens at the top. the "why", "when" and "what" are defined at a high level and then cascaded down as processes to the point where they marry up with the "how". This is relevant to all aspects of business, but is specifically true for information and data. After all, it is data and only data that can tell whether something happened as planned or not. We do not see the customer anymore, we see the data related to them, so it better be damn good quality, else we are looking at a broken mirror for our reflection. If data is increasingly the only view of the world, all data has to be consistent with the semantic value, the meaning it ought to reflect. Management must be convinced about this, out of their own initiative or with external help. Once both streams converge into a strategy for the business that is explained in terms of information, the organisation can say they all speak the same language. Information is the language of the business, data is the bricks, what the home looks like can be shared across the entire business. It takes time to learn a language, and it is somewhat hard, but it is the only way and anyone can do it. Information Data is the mirror image of the business, and when looked at, the picture reflected back is information : meaning. Data must be connected with that meaning, the only thing we humans understand, once more: meaning. This connection starts with behaviours and uses technology to bridge the gap. When people feel good about doing something hard, the reward that comes after is the biggest incentive we humans understand. The pride in doing something we did not feel capable of doing. This feeling, in bite-sized doses, concatenated over time is the only real competitive edge organisations have at their disposal. And it has been there all along, waiting to be tapped into. PEOPLE > PROCESS > INFORMATION > SYSTEMS > DATA These are the ingredients for the "secret sauce", in that order. I often tell clients that if you get people, process and information right, you can buy systems and data takes care of itself. Working together is the only way the single language for the business, its information model, can be understood at all levels. And only when everyone understands some aspect of the vision, each from their own unique perspective, we can all work together for a set of shared goals speaking the same business language. This is what we do. AVANZ.IO