Bugger! It’s still in Reaction.
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If you’ve decided your organisation requires an Adaptive Culture, but your current diagnosis comes back as a “Culture of Reaction” (the upper end of a Resistant Culture), what will the road ahead look like?
Firstly, the road ahead will be uphill and slippery. There is a 17% chance that this could be your organisation. You will recognise it if a lot of your leadership time is wasted continually putting our fires throughout the organisation (and yes, coming back to put out the same fires over and over again). And you are constantly doing organisational repair work – often on the run.
Secondly, it will require a methodical, root-cause problem-solving leadership style.
The “hoarder’s house” of chronic unresolved problems that you would probably encounter in a Culture of Blame has given way to a perplexed realisation that problems don’t get properly fixed. They keep recurring again and again, and they keep chewing up so much of your time.
The reason is that whilst you might be solving the problems, you’re not addressing the habitual behaviours that generate them.
If you cut your finger once, you put a band-aid on it. If you cut it 16 times, you don’t put 16 band-aids on it – you look for a better solution.
BPA’s Solution Spectrum (see the image) maps out the different levels of problem-solving – from adhoc band-aids, to proper fixes, up to the Gold Standard of capability development (which prevents the problem happening again because it totally bypasses the root causes of the problem).
Luckily, fixing (or bypassing) the root-causes of problems is something that every single leader in an organisation can get involved in and that includes everyone from executive leaders to front-line team leaders.
Sure, it takes longer to fix, or bypass, the root-cause of a problem – but not as long as it takes to keep fixing it again and again.
