"Culture eats strategy for breakfast."
This is quoted so often because it speaks to a real problem.
A strategy can be thoughtful, well built and full of good intentions, and still fail to take hold.
Part of the reason is that we pay a great deal of attention to the plan and far less to the invisible operating system underneath it. Culture shapes behaviours, decisions and beliefs, and culture is built on stories.
Stories about how things work here. Stories about what gets rewarded. Stories about what change usually means in practice.
Those older narratives can hold an organisation in place. So when a new plan arrives, it needs to be more than a roll-out of new stories; it needs to be stories that make change feel credible, help people see what is possible, and give them something they can take part in.
As Philip Stiles of Cambridge’s Judge Business School puts it, “To change anything in an organisation, you have to have a very strong story to tell - there has to be a narrative of the current and future state.”
That's what this piece I wrote for Dynamic Magazine (p. 118) is about. Read it Here