Edgar H. Schein, The Corporate Culture Survival Guide. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1999.
Review by Brian Fraser
Edgar Schein is the pioneer in making sense of organizational culture and how to exercise leadership within it. His academic roots are in the field of social psychology. Now professor emeritus at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, Schein’s classic in the field of organizational culture studies, Organizational Culture and Leadership (1985), set the framework and agenda for those studying and practicing the art of cultural formation and reformation in organizations over the past two decades. The Survival Guide is a short and very accessible summary of Schein’s ideas and advice.
One of the things I like best about Schein is that he doesn’t oversimplify the complex dynamics of culture in an organization. Later writers have increasingly talked about culture as the organization’s DNA: the basic genetic code that makes things work the way they do. Along with Schein, they also recognize that it’s not easy to change. Any effort to bring about organizational change must deal with the resilience of the organization’s deeply-embedded cultural code. Superficial efforts, based on quickly developed strategic plans and naive optimism about the power of people in groups to change, simply won’t work in the long term.
Cultures, according to Schein, are “patterns of interacting elements.” They are the sum total of all the shared, taken-for-granted assumptions that a group has learned throughout its history. They are the creation and property of groups who have formed them over long periods of time and they have a powerful persuasion often not easily recognized, until violated. Here’s Schein’s summary of what culture is and why it matters:
Culture matters because it is a powerful, latent, and often unconscious set of forces that determine both our individual and collective behaviour, ways of perceiving, thought patterns, and values. Organizational culture in particular matters because cultural elements determine strategy, goals, and modes of operating. (14)
Schein concludes that what really drives culture - its essence – is the learned, shared, tacit assumptions upon which people base their daily behaviour. It’s the way we do things around here. It is deep, broad, and stable. To make sense of it, you have to do more than observe behaviour. You must have a process involving systematic observation and talking to insiders to help make the tacit assumptions explicit.
Schein’s framework for what to pay attention to in those systemic observations and conversations reflects what he has come to understand culture being about:
External Survival Issues: mission, strategy, & goals; structures, systems, & processes; error-detection and correction systems.
Internal Integration Issues: common language & concepts; group boundaries & identities; the nature of authority & relationships; the allocation of status and rewards.
Deeper Underlying Assumptions: human relationships to nature; the nature of reality and truth; the nature of human nature; the nature of human relationships; the nature of time and space.
Just take a moment to begin to think through that list of elements in relationship to your own organization and you will get a good sense of the complexity and strength of culture in Schein’s view.
The Survival Guide goes on to offer concrete and practical advice on how to do an organizational assessment that gets to the deep, broad, and stable elements in the organization’s DNA. Schein devotes a whole chapter to culture creation, evolution, and change in start-up organizations and yet another whole chapter to the corporate cultural dynamics in mature organizations. He addresses throughout the book the dynamics of cultures in mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures - something that many not-for-profits are considering or going through.
But the most helpful chapter for most not-for-profits in today’s rapidly changing social, funding, and services environment is the one-on transformative change that involves unlearning and relearning culture. Schein’s model for transformative change involves three distinct and crucial stages, all predicated on the belief that some sense of threat, crisis, or dissatisfaction needs to be present to provide the motivation for change.
Stage One involves ‘unfreezing’ to create the motivation to change. The old ways of working are not working. Anxiety and guilt are prevalent. Leaders need to create a psychological safety zone to overcome the anxiety about learning and changing.
Stage Two involves learning new concepts and new meanings of old concepts. There is often imitation of and identification with role models. Leaders scan for solutions and engage in trial-and-error learning.
Stage Three involves the internalization of new concepts and meaning. These are incorporated into the organization’s self-concept and identity. They shape relationships and become part of the way things are done. They become the new culture.
Schein goes into considerable, though easily understandable, detail on each of these stages and provides an astute roadmap to the complex dynamics of cultural change.
Schein’s final thought should be encouraging to those who want to create positive change in an organization’s culture. He reminds us that such change requires effort – enlarging our perspective, examining our own thought processes, and accepting that there are other ways to think and do things. But once we have acquired what Schein calls a “cultural perspective,” anomalies will be explainable, conflicts understandable, resistance to change expected. And, most importantly, change agents will become more humble. In that humility, Schein concludes, you will find wisdom.
While Schein’s examples and case studies are largely from the corporate and public sectors, his framework for understanding organizational culture applies equally well to the not-for-profit sector. Reading this book and applying its advice will greatly increase the wisdom with which you understand and serve your organization.
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