Understanding the strategic memes
NASA got it right, but with other organisations, especially ones that have outlived their founders, it is harder to discern exactly which strategic memes drive the direction of the organisation. It is natural for CEOs, who generally have powerful egos, to believe that everyone in the organisations believes the same things (i.e. is running the same memes) as them. It is rarely true. Not everyone will subscribe to them, or at least not fully.
What matters is the strategy that runs in the workers' heads, not in the CEO's. While I am not suggesting that you need a workforce of monomaniacal robots, isn’t it possible that your organisation would work better if everybody were trying to achieve the same thing at the same time?
The ‘strategy that runs in people’s heads’ is not always as easy to assess as it seems. Even if you have written your vision and mission statements, do you really think that every one of your employees is completely behind every word of it? Maybe some will be True Believers of the entire statement, but most will subscribe to some elements of the vision weakly or not at all.
A population of memes
Just as an organisation consists of a group of people, each person can be seen as a 'selfplex' consisting of a group of memes. Different memes run in each of the individual’s heads, and even where they are running the same memes, they will be running at different ‘volumes’. The active memes of the organisation is the ‘volume’-weighted sum of all memes across all individuals (there are, of course, passive memes in process manuals etc, but we’ll get to those in due course.
That, in an organisation of any real size, is too large a problem to solve. Let’s concentrate on the relative strengths of the predominant memes run by employees. To understand what they are, you have to ask them (well, that’s not, strictly speaking, true. You could throw a variety of messages at your employees and see how they react, and then work back to deduce the underlying memes, but you will need a lot of stimuli. Treating your employees like laboratory rats is also hardly likely to win you an ‘Employer of the Year’ award, either).
So, the first weapon in your armoury is a strategic direction survey. Find a suitable sample of people and ask them simple questions about the predominant elements of the organisation’s strategy, with answers phrased as a spectrum from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’. I would suggest something like: ‘I think that [element] is vital to the success of the company, and I think that the work I do contributes directly to [element].’ The first question, of course, tests whether you have the same understanding of the strategy as they do, and the second tests the extent to which they really subscribe to it.
Don’t forget role-specific and national culture
The other element of the strategic memes of an organisation is its set of values, or the standards it sets itself. Again, you really need to find out what values run in people’s heads, and again to do this you have to ask them.
I would suggest two ways of testing adherence to values. The first is to ask your workers to assign a certain number of points to a set of values, so that they can’t agree with everything but have to rate their priorities. The other method is to ask everyone about the values that their bosses and co-workers demonstrate in the workplace, rather than about the things that they believe. Asking uf your workers approve of motherhood and apple pie is pointless - I saw one such questionnaire that asked, ‘I approach everything I do with integrity: agree/disagree’. Hmm, let me thinkΓǪ
I would like to add two important caveats here. The first is that people will often take their values from their role rather than their company, and that’s perfectly OK. You would expect accountants, for example, to place a higher weighting on financial propriety than sales people would - that’s why you have accountants, after all. Military people also tend to think alike, regardless of where they come from.
The second caveat is about testing adherence to corporate values in multinational corporations. Geert Hofstede, one of the heroes of our section on national culture, was able to analyse the differences between national cultures because he conducted his surveys within a single huge corporation - IBM. While these surveys revealed the differences between the underlying national cultures, they revealed nothing at all about IBM’s underlying ‘corporate culture’ because there was no comparator
The immediately obvious experiment is to keep the national culture the same and to vary the organisation, and in 1990 Hofstede et al. published the results of a survey of 20 organisational units from 10 companies in Denmark and the Netherlands. The intention was to identify differences in symbols (words, gestures, pictures or objects) that carried a particular meaning in each organisation, the types of people who became organisational ‘heroes’, corporate rituals and underlying values.
The results on symbols, heroes and values are interesting and we shall get to them shortly, but when Hofstede et al. looked at the underlying values they found that any differences between the companies were swamped by the underlying differences between the national cultures. That’s not surprising, because those are vertically transmitted memes embedded in the cradle and the schoolroom, but it does render futile any attempt to measure compliance to organisational values once you start to cross national boundaries.
This is important!!! National culture is embedded in childhood and overrules organisational values. Any attempt to standardise values across a multinational corporation will fail.
This raises the question about whether corporate values should be set locally rather than globally. Most us would agree that it is wrong to discriminate against an employee on religious, racial or sexual grounds and most of you will work in cultures where this is actually illegal. But the World Values Survey tells us that while only 6% of American women would agree with the statement, ‘When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women’, 40% of Malaysian or Indian women agreed with it, outnumbering those women who disagreed. So if it isn’t discrimination in the eyes of the ‘victim’, where does it leave your global policy on diversity and equality?