Many of my blog posts and much of my work centers around helping individuals produce lasting change in themselves by bringing awareness to their unconscious beliefs and patterns. But I also work with larger groups, from departments to corporations, who want to change their culture. And it turns out that a major obstacle to such change comes from a direct analogue to an individual’s unconscious. Unless this obstacle is understood and addressed, lasting change to a group’s culture can be impossible.

Edgar Schein spent many years as a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management studying organizational culture, and identified three levels of culture, from most visible to least visible:

• Artifacts

• Espoused values

• Basic assumptions

Artifacts are concrete examples of the culture, such as how an office is laid out, how employees dress, and how they behave with each other; it is the most obvious to an outside observer. Espoused values are what the organization says about itself. They can include statements of corporate vision and values, strategic plans, and explicit criteria for employee assessment and promotion. Basic assumptions are the beliefs everyone in the organization takes for granted about how things are done, usually without consciously thinking about them. These assumptions are so ingrained that they are nearly impossible for someone in the organization to recognize.

 "These assumptions are so ingrained that they are nearly impossible for someone in the organization to recognize."

It is this bottom layer of basic assumptions that corresponds to the unconscious. Just as an individual’s unconscious is usually the largest barrier to lasting personal change, an organization’s unstated basic assumptions are usually the barrier preventing true organizational change. Only by recognizing and bringing these assumptions to the surface, which can be greatly facilitated by an outside observer, does change become possible.

In looking at different kinds of organizational culture, one tension Schein identified is between flexibility and discretion on one end, and stability and control on the other. Organizations fall somewhere along this spectrum, and there is often a shift from a flexible culture when an organization is initially growing to a culture focused on stability and control when an organization has matured. No position on the spectrum is inherently superior, but a problem arises when the organization's culture is a poor fit for its size and environment. Initially successful start-ups can falter if they grow too big too quickly without instituting needed hierarchy and controls, while large, established companies can become too stable and controlling to effectively respond to shifting markets and competition. 

For example, I worked with a global pharmaceutical company whose culture was strongly on the stability and control end of the spectrum. The company realized that to meet the demands of the changing market they needed to be more flexible and entrepreneurial, but simply telling their managers and employees to become entrepreneurial by taking on more responsibilities and more risks wasn’t producing the desired changes in behavior. The unstated and unrecognized basic assumptions of the company were standing in the way.

 "The unstated and unrecognized basic assumptions
of the company were standing in the way."

I was able to bring an outside perspective to help the company identify these basic assumptions that were blocking change. For many years the company had been extremely hierarchical, with employees taking direction from above. They had learned that if they passed decisions and responsibilities up the hierarchy, and just did what they were told, they would be rewarded, while if they took responsibility and made decisions themselves, they could be reprimanded. Thus, an avoidance of taking responsibility had become a basic assumption of the corporate culture.

I also discovered that there was a good reason such a culture of risk avoidance had developed in the first place. In the pharmaceutical manufacturing process, safety is the primary concern, and any proposed changes in a process need to be checked and double checked. The problem was that this avoidance of risk, while completely appropriate to the shop floor, had spread to all aspects of the company.

With these insights, the company was able to refine its approach to organizational change. Instead of a company-wide shift to embracing risk, we identified areas of the company, such as marketing and sales, that needed to become more entrepreneurial, and in those areas we explicitly addressed the unspoken assumption that taking responsibility was a career-killer, and put in place new incentives to reward employees for taking risks. In areas where safety remained an important concern, such as the plant floor, we implemented a two-step process, where we encouraged new ideas, but only allowed the ideas to be put into practice after a thorough review. With this new approach the company was able to move its culture in the right direction.