Managing Culture Change

The public debate about the Auckland Supercity is about governance and efficiency. But to make it work requires an immense effort to align the cultures of different councils and create one unified organisation where the focus is on the residents not on internal issues. Organisational culture is like a brand, the term “employer brand” is gaining currency in HR circles. Like brands, organisational culture includes both tangible and intangible elements with the intangible being the most complex but also the most important. You can design all the right IT systems and workstations but if the organisation’s heart is in the wrong place it wont work. Organisations have personalities the same as brands do. Market researchers have become trained to use different breeds of dogs as representative of different personalities. While this may sound bizarre, have a look at these two dogs and think about which one you would want you children to play with?

Old English Sheepdog	Staffordshire Terrier
Calm and accepting. Gets bitten often (but doesn’t realise).	Aggressive and independent. Bites!

 

So what kind of cultures do we have at the moment?  Here’s a little game you can play at the office:

Council	Breed?	Interpretation?
Auckland City
North Shore City
Rodney District
Waitakere City
Manukau City
Papakura District
Franklin District
ARC
IDEAL FOR THE SUPERCITY?

 

We had a go but chickened out from publishing it!  We did agree that the traditional Sheepdog (the Kiwi kind) would be a good ideal to strive for. It’s hard working but seems to enjoy its work, it is intelligent, learns quickly, follows instructions and doesn’t carry any extra weight.

Now, how do we create this from what we have at the moment? Over to you Laila Harre!

Life without growth?

As a young impressionable economics undergraduate I recall being intriged by E.J Misham’s 1969 classic “The Cost of Economic Growth”. Misham wrote about the environmental impacts of resource depletion as more recent writers who talk about the survival of our civilisation  depending on reduced consumption and greater concern for the environment (e.g. Ronald Wright’s “A short history of progress”). Published research by my old employer Research International, back in 1989, showed that changing behaviour (like paying more for environmentally friendly detergents) would only happen when consumers felt personally threatened by the trends. If we look around us now we can see a big  increase in environmentally friendly products but is it enogh?

I often wonder what would life without growth be like? Would it be the panacea of living off the land, recycling everything, less stress, more time to be friendly to neighbours? or would it be like one long recession?  Higher unemployment, no new technology, endless repeats on telly, make the car last for 20 years instead of 10!  Maybe there’s a middle path? But to keep on the middle path, can capitalism survive?  Is state control the only alternative? Certainly, some of the Green Party talk suggests much greater state intervention to achieve the outcomes they want.

The answer must be that we create markets for environmentally friendly products and services, that we factor in resource use into our spending decisions. However, the problems we are having with the Emissions Trading Scheme are symptomatic of the difficulties.  Somehow we need to change our concepts of progress; replace the GDP measures of progess with a Happiness Index or the GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator) that we have heard so much about? My thinking, based on the Research International study, is that we are going to have to endure a lot more pain before these changes take place. Sad really isnt it!