Is the Deep State destroying your business?
Real-life business lessons from the whacky fringes
This week has seen a flurry of publicity as Liz Truss has published a book about her vanishingly short and wildly unsuccessful stint as British Prime Minister.
Plenty has been written about both author and book already, but the thing that leapt out at me from the coverage was the use of the same ‘it wasn’t my fault’ argument that we’ve heard from other populist leaders around the world when things have gone against them - ‘the Deep State thwarted me’.
This argument is particularly rage-inducing because in the hands of a politician it is used to conjure up a vision of a shadowy, Illuminati-esque cabal of civil servants and central bankers meeting in secret locations to think up new ways of stopping plucky Liz from saving Britain.
The reality, of course, was that she and her team were surrounded by people with years of experience pointing out that what they wanted to do was daft, and then being proven right. It didn’t take a secret handshake to spot that a massive unfunded budget was going to spook the financial markets.
So why is Moving Tribes wallowing in this unfortunate bit of political history? Because despite simplistic way it is often presented, there is just enough of a kernel of truth in the Deep State accusation to be worth thinking about, and because it has implications for our business lives as well as our political ones.
Any large organisation, whether it is a business, a civil service or a whole country, ends up with ‘norms’. They might be couched as ‘the way we’ve always done things around here’ or ‘received wisdom’ or ‘best practice’ but whatever you call them they add up to a culture and some generally accepted views of what is right and what is wrong.
That’s the real ‘Deep State’. Almost every retired politician will describe how difficult it can be to drive policy change through if it challenges those accepted norms - not because of a shadowy secret society but because the change runs into hundreds of little objections that ‘that isn’t how we do things’. Those objections end up causing delays and small changes of emphasis that can derail a new idea entirely.
Now when things are going well, an ingrained culture and set of practices can be hugely beneficial. It means that right across a big organisation you can be fairly sure how individuals will respond in a given situation. In business, for example, if your cultural ‘norm’ is that ‘we always put the customer first’ then that will impact decisions made at every level in the organisation and means that the intended outcome will happen even when managers or supervisors aren’t around to mandate it.
That is particularly valuable in a multi-site, devolved organisation like a retailer or hospitality business. When most of your customer interactions are happening a long way away from the corporate centre it can be very difficult indeed to ensure that they always happen the way the leadership team would want them to. Of course you can try to write a huge manual describing the ‘correct’ response to every possible situation, but is much more effective to simply have a strong culture in your organisation where the response you are aiming for ‘feels right’ to everyone in the business.
But if a deeply ingrained culture and set of norms can be a powerful tool, it can also be a huge problem. The challenge typically comes when change is needed, and where that change feels uncomfortable or alien to the organisation. Just look at the struggles many retailers had (and some, unbelievably, still have) to convince their teams that the internet was a thing they should take seriously and embrace.
Older organisations, with lots of people with very long tenure can be most vulnerable to this situation where their culture stops being an asset and becomes a liability. I still vividly remember being told in one business “all that marketing stuff doesn’t work in our industry”. (Spoiler - it did).
Just as politicians will talk about how hard they found it to get policy implemented, so many experienced business leaders will tell you how difficult it is to change a long-established culture. But if, as your customers and the world around you changes, you need to implement a new strategy then challenging and changing the cultural norms in the business may well be essential.
So how might you go about doing that? Here are a couple of suggestions:
Culture change comes from respect
Walk around your business bemoaning and belittling the established cultural norms and you can virtually feel people around you folding their arms and turning away. The prevailing culture of a business has developed over years and is held by hundreds or thousands of people. You aren’t going to change it by being a smart-alec about it. Instead, explore and embrace where that culture comes from and then challenge it from a position of respect - “I can see why we’ve always done it that way but…” will get you a lot further than “I can’t believe you idiots still do that”.
Give your team a license to learn
The kind of thing you often hear when encountering cultural resistance to change is “that won’t work here”, or my personal favourite “we’ve tried that before and it doesn’t work”. The most elegant response to this kind of objection is often some version of “well, let’s try an experiment and see what happens”.
By reframing ‘trying new stuff’ as ‘experimentation’ you take away the fear of being associated with a new project that fails and simultaneously give the organisation a license to learn. When people start coming to meetings saying “we tried an experiment and learned something useful” then you know you are well on the way towards creating change, and you’ve also just identified the people who will be your biggest asset in doing so.
Develop early wins
Once you find those helpful people in your organisation who are the most willing to step out of their comfort zone and try something new, focus that effort on demonstrating some early proof that a new approach might pay dividends, and then market that early success relentlessly internally. That way, a new ‘normal’ begins to emerge and conversations all around the business start to change. No-one wants to be associated with a risky project that might fail, but everyone wants to be associated with positive change that is delivering results.
In summary
“Don’t be like Liz Truss” is a motto useful in many circumstances, but in this case I mean something very particular. Don’t see resistance to change as some kind of conscious attempt to thwart you. See it instead as the inevitable and very human response that it is. Consider actively the idea that resistance to change might be justifiable caution (just like the resistance to Liz’s budget was) but if you conclude that it isn’t, then treat it as an aspect of a culture that needs to be changed and you’ll be surprised at how easy that ends up being.
What are your culture-change war stories? I have a feeling that we can all learn a lot from each other by sharing our experiences of challenging and overcoming the prevailing ‘norms’ in our businesses.