What do organizations need in a rapidly evolving age?

Mindset & Culture Change Consulting

  • Innovative, future-oriented leaders who recognize the necessity of change—but may not be sure yet what that means for them and their business

  • CEOs, Senior Executives, and Business Owners

  • Any industry or divisional/operational function

  • Team sizes ranging from ~20-250

  • Companies based anywhere in the world

Who This is For:

A New Business Case for Mindset and Culture Change

In a world where technological and social conditions are evolving in front of our eyes, leaders must reimagine their role in facilitating the ongoing process of organizational reinvention and renewal.

You don’t need me to tell you that the world has changed. Whether from game-changing technologies like Generative AI or from rapid evolutions in the expectations of customers, employees, and stakeholders, every business in every industry is grappling with the realities of transformation. Change brings new risks and radical disruption. It can also open up new doors, avenues, and possibility.

As a leader, you have probably thought long and hard about your vision of the future. You may already recognize the need to reinvent aspects of how your business works—whether that means innovating your products or redesigning your operational systems. You may have already invested in developing your organizational purpose, leaning more into your ESG goals, or helping your workforce build essential skills of the future.

You may have also asked yourself whether this is enough—whether you’re on the right path towards organizational and personal success.

The good news is that most leaders already understand that focusing on human performance is key to building an organization that can thrive today and tomorrow. But to close the gap between knowing and doing, they will need to let go of the mindsets, operating constructs, and proxies of the past.

— Deloitte, 2024 Global Human Capital Trends Report

Mindset and Culture Change as a Business Capability

What you may not have considered—yet—is the nature of organizational change itself. (Indulge me here, while I give you my short TED talk.)

Traditionally, the narrative of organizational change has come from the top. Many very smart leaders have hired many very expensive consultants to conduct in-depth and highly analytical assessments of various scenarios and options. Many very polished thought leaders have delivered speeches at many exclusive conferences, opining about the threats the future may hold—and where smart leaders may find opportunity.

Then, for a variety of reasons, many of those smart leaders have left their brains at the door and attempted to bring other people’s ideas into their businesses. By and large, those initiatives haven’t worked—the global consultancy, McKinsey, estimates that as many as 70% of organizational change initiatives end in failure. Yet organizational leaders everywhere continue to invest trillions of dollars in the same solutions, the same mindsets, and the same change management processes…

It reminds me of that famous Einstein quote about the definition of insanity.

The problem is not in the choice of solution. The problem is in the process. Because as we all know—and as we have all experienced personally—no one likes being told by someone else that they need to change. We really, really don’t like it when those same people also tell us how.

Perhaps, once, it was appropriate for change to be designed and perfected in a corner office before being rolled out and “managed” to a wider organizational team. After all, at a simpler time in history, a business may have only experienced a significant organizational change once or twice in any particular leader’s lifetime.

Now, of course, most of us experience more change in a few weeks than our ancestors did in a few centuries. In this environment, when change is continuous endless and exponential, every leader must ask ourselves: have we built the right transformation infrastucture?

In this case, I am not necessarily referring to the business systems that empower change, like software systems, leadership frameworks and so on. I am instead referring to the human element of change inside the hearts and minds of our people and leaders.

How open are you, as a company, to the idea of change? How much does your company embrace or resist it? How effectively do your leaders initiate it and guide it? Do you wait until your solution is perfected, or do you engage in a wider, more collaborative transformative process with your employees… and maybe even with your customers and competitors as well?

Questions like these have become urgent. More and more leaders are recognizing that the future has become inherently unpredictable. In corporate boardrooms—or, should I say, Teams conference calls—everywhere, right now, leaders are actively designing transformational change.

Are we approaching it intelligently? What if we could get way better at change—what if our organizations and our world could reduce that 70% statistic to 65%… or 50%… or even 30% of change initiatives that end in failure?

What if we could get that number down to 0%?

“(Leaders must) make fundamental evolutionary shifts, well beyond the standard expectation that they continually develop additional skills. They must, in fact, reimagine themselves, undertaking inner work to shift their mindsets and consciousness to see the world anew; to rethink their interactions, roles, and ways of working as part of leadership teams; and to reimagine their organizations and the industries in which they operate.

— McKinsey Quarterly, New Leadership for a New Era of Thriving Organizations, May 2023

Going Deeper Into Organizational Change

In 1967, the computer programmer Melvin Conway developed a brilliant maxim for organizational change. Conway’s law is expressed like this:

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?

Conway was expressing his version of the old car industry joke: you can see the organization chart of a car company in the dashboard, and also see whether the steering wheel team hates the gear stick team.

In other words, he was pointing attention to the reality that organizational thinking itself is a technological system.

Huh? Bear with me here for a second.

Basically, even though many of us think about technology as, say, the device you’re using to read this article, the ancient roots of the word tell us that technology means a systematic way of applying an art, craft or technique.

It’s similar to the discrepancy that many have with the word “science.” Even though many people think about science as the results that scientists produce, such as new medicines, in truth, science really is the scientific method that they use to develop these results. This scientific method creates hypotheses and runs tests; the knowledge and outputs it creates is the result that comes from careful observation and rigorous scepticism.

Just like a new medicine, your phone is an example or result of a systematic way of applying an art, craft or technique.

In other words, technology is not just thing—it’s the mindset and approach behind designing it.

Conway’s Law is an elegant way of expressing this same idea. Conway’s Law is the answer to questions like: how has Apple continuously put out groundbreaking and beautiful products for decades, or how does Amazon consistently stay on top?

There are practical, “tangible” answers that have gone into particular projects or product design. Then, there is the “technology” behind it—in this sense, meaning the systematic organizational approach behind it.

Many people would use the word “culture” here, and in some ways, it fits. But, in the mainstream of business, many people see culture as a mission statement or a collection of values at best. They don’t necessarily think of it in terms of the DNA of the organization—again, in this case meaning quite literally how a group of people working for the same company literally think, act, and feel.

Thankfully, more recently, this perspective has started to change. But only infinitesimally. Certain foundational myths or master narratives still persist.

For example,

  • “Culture starts from the top”

  • “Culture is limited to the shared values, behaviors, and assumptions that drive business operations and influence decision-making”—and, as a result, not necessarily affected by, say, how whether the CEO is going through a divorce or how the CFO thinks about her mother

  • “Organizations can create a cohesive and consistent work environment that supports business goals and employee satisfaction by aligning culture and organizational DNA”—as if how people think and feel can be manipulated like a marionette.

In change leadership, as in storytelling, the medium is the message

The unspoken idea here is similar to the misconception that many people have about science. Mainstream business still sees culture as a “thing”—a set of tools, strategies and levers that can be aligned or effectively (and ineffectively) managed, rather than the manner of working and thinking that’s behind it. Conway’s Law is brilliant because it directs our attention to two things that we wouldn’t have necessarily associated otherwise:

  1. What an organization does or produces

  2. How that organization communicates with itself

This same idea is at the root of the very popular form of software engineering called Agile:

If the parts of an organization (e.g., teams, departments, or subdivisions) do not closely reflect the essential parts of the product, or if the relationships between organizations do not reflect the relationships between product parts, then the project will be in trouble ... Therefore: Make sure the organization is compatible with the product architecture.

Another brilliant thinker, Marshall McLuhan, framed it quite elegantly: the medium is the message. How we do something—and what we intend for that thing to do—determines how effectively it can do the thing we want.

This philosophical approach, so fundamental to developing tools like the device you’re using right now, is now coming to disrupt the current paradigm of leadership. Because, right now, even in the world’s top business schools, the world’s top MBA students spend a lot of time thinking about what an organization does or produces—and a lot less time thinking about how that organization communicates with itself.

Even in the current field of change management, strategy and output consistently trumps amore emotionally insightful approach.

A few representative examples:

Jordan Bower has worked with nearly 200 companies, including: