cultural transformation

To deliver real, long lasting, effective change in any organisation often requires a combination of factors. When an organisation can embrace Inspirational Leadership, with the best LEAN and 6Sigma have to offer then organisations truly change for the better.

A simple way to see this in action is through Lighthouse Consultants’ “change the world, not the person” analogy.  Many organisations, and indeed consultancies, try to change the attitudes and then the behaviours of staff.  This directly challenges their core beliefs, and creates resistance to whatever change is being proposed.  Instead, we aim to change the world around people, leading to a change in their behaviour in a more natural way.

For example, Lighthouse Consultants once visited a company who made washing machines and tumble dryers. We wanted to put up a sign on the notice boards illustrating all the projects we were working on and the effect we were having on productivity. The warehouse manager just laughed, “no-one reads the notice boards.”

We decided to investigate further. Interestingly the earliest notice Iwe could find was of “Dave’s leaving do” in 1969, the most recent, the “Christmas party in 1999”, exactly 30years apart (it was 2008 when we visited).  If we had tried to directly change attitudes, we could have sent an email or memo telling people to read the notice board.  Instead, we simply changed the world – and not the people.

We removed all the notices from every board we could find, made them all completely blank, then placed our notice, an A3 sized, colour notice with  charts at the bottom, in the top right hand corner of every board I could find.

We then camped by the notice board next to the clocking in station and waited. On the shift change over, every person who stopped to clock in looked at the board, some laughed at it, some read it with interest, some read it, grunted and walked away, one even scribbled on it, but they all looked at it.

This would not have been achieved by challenging their core beliefs and asking them to read it, so rather than change the person, change the world around them – then they will naturally change to fit in it. If you would like further details on this please download our article – “Change the world, not the person”