Sowing Seeds of Change

he hardest part of trying to improve an organization's performance, we often hear, is changing its culture. An organization's culture is built on the basic, sometimes unconscious, assumptions its members make about what they are trying to accomplish and how they should go about accomplishing it. If the Immigration and Naturalization Service's culture stresses strong-armed enforcement actions against illegal immigrants, shaping an organization that's committed to legal immigrants or good at customer service is difficult. A police culture that measures its success by arrest rates will have a hard time focusing on crime-prevention strategies. And, as happens all too often in government, an organizational culture that tolerates mediocrity makes it difficult to bring about a strong commitment to results.

New Ground
Because changing culture is fundamentally about people displaying new attitudes and the new behaviors associated with them, it is useful to think about how scholars and attitude researchers view this challenge.

If nothing or very little exists in an organization as a potential seed for cultural change, then such change is going to be difficult. The challenge is to find features of the existing culture, even if they're not dominant, that can serve as a basis for reforms. Attitude research as far back as the earliest studies of voting behavior in the 1940s by the social psychologist Paul Lazarfeld show that it is more difficult to change attitudes than to emphasize submerged elements of existing ones. Advocates gathering public support for a cause or a political candidate often make less of an attempt to change public opinion than they do to encourage citizens to focus on existing beliefs that are favorable to the cause.

So, for example, environmentalists concerned with environmental policy seldom spend much effort trying to persuade people who are indifferent to the image of a smokestack bellowing foul smoke over a pristine lake. Instead, they encourage people who already value pristine lakes to focus on the lakes rather than on the opponents' image of strict environmental regulation, which may be a shuttered factory closed down by zealous regulators.

Research also shows that the best path to attitude change often starts with behavioral change. Getting people to change their behavior often sets in motion a process of further behavioral and attitudinal change. A 1966 study in a neighborhood near Stanford University showed that 76 percent of subjects agreed to place a large, crudely lettered, ugly "Drive Carefully" sign in their yard two weeks after having been asked (by a different person) to sign a petition or place a small sign on their car window supporting safe driving. Only l7 percent of subjects who hadn't received the earlier visit agreed to display the sign.

Any salesperson intuitively understands the power of the foot-in-the-door technique. Those involved in change management need to understand it as well.

These lessons ring true in efforts begun in l993 to change the culture of the government's procurement system. I was involved as administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy and procurement lieutenant for Vice President Al Gore's reinventing government program. In the old system, the culture of government contracting glorified adversarial relationships with industry ("liars and thieves") and with government program officials making purchases through contractors ("in bed with contractors"). Contracting shops perceived themselves as serving predominantly a regulatory or police function. And contracting officials' knowledge of arcane procurement regulations was their source of power in the process.

It would have been easy to throw up one's hands and say that culture could never be changed. Indeed, having studied the system before entering government, I hesitated about taking the procurement reform job for that very reason. Yet today, the procurement culture looks very different-better relationships with industry, an emphasis on customer satisfaction vis-à-vis program officials, and an effort to serve as business advisers rather than regulatory cops.

Buried Treasure
How was this change possible? First of all, elements in the existing culture created a basis for reform. Perhaps most important was the customer concept that people took not so much from their experience as contracting professionals but from their everyday lives outside government. The total quality management movement of the late l980s and early l990s paved the way for procurement reform by applying the customer idea, which was already familiar to contracting folks. The cultural change wrought by the customer concept, not just in procurement but also throughout much of government, has been amazing. Ten years ago, the word "customer" was scarcely used in government. The cultural change of today would have been impossible had people not already known what it means to be treated like a customer.

Reformers also latched onto two other qualities submerged in the procurement culture-the human instinct to strive for excellence and commitment to the agency's mission. People could be convinced to change after bureaucracy's mediocre ambitions and lack of direction were exposed as harmful consequences of the status quo.

Culture change starts when people try new behaviors even before reformers can use supporting studies or simple persuasion to make a solid case for change. In the first year of procurement reform, for example, senior procurement officials publicly signed five pledges to apply reform initiatives, such as the use of past performance in source selection or alternative dispute resolution in contract administration, to certain contracts. The idea was to start changing behavior.

Taking Root
Change, indeed, is virtually impossible if little or none of the new culture isn't already embodied somewhere in the organization. However, in just about any agency, three underlying features-serving customers, striving for excellence and promoting the agency's mission-constitute a basis for reform. One advantage government organizations have over private ones in effecting change is that employees in public service have a keen sense of mission. Other elements that could be used to promote reform are likely to exist in any organization's culture, if change advocates look for them. In the case of procurement, it was the resentment employees felt because of rules that stifled their ability to make their own decisions. If executives and managers can make use of these raw materials to get reforms started, they can bootstrap that hard-to-achieve objective of cultural change.