Culture

Organizations seem to have lost the ability to make decisions with clarity, commit to them appropriately, and adjust course when evidence demands it. Understanding why this has happened, and what it takes to restore effective decision-making, requires looking honestly at the patterns that have emerged and the costs that they create.

Here is a pattern I see repeatedly in organizations: A leadership team recognizes they have a problem. Employee engagement is declining. Middle managers are struggling. Innovation has stalled. The response is swift and decisive. They build a program. A year later, people cannot remember why it started. Two years later, it is quietly discontinued, and the original problem remains. This is a failure of strategic thinking. And it happens because we have confused activity with cl

I am calling bluff on the entire responsibility of engagement falling on organizational leaders because wouldn’t that in fact be the opposite of engagement and a complete imbalance of the power scale? That is a hierarchy. In a democracy, we all work together in creating something that has a little piece of all of us incorporated….Culture change begins with you.

The truth is uncomfortable: every dollar invested in AI, automation, or process optimization without an equal investment in the culture that must support it is setting up the organization for expensive disappointment. So what do we do about it?