A lot of organizations are trying to figure out how to get to the “next level.” For many, it’s because the ground is shifting beneath their feet. Their market is changing, or they are embarking on a substantially different strategic path. For others, they just want growth, and to break through the results “ceiling” they’ve been bumping their heads against for the past several years (or decades).
There is no magic pill that will get you to the next level, of course, but if I had to condense it as much as possible, I’d put it like this: to get to the next level, you need the right people doing the right things, consistently. The challenge is, those “things” are, by definition, noticeably different than the things you were doing before. As they say, if you do what you always did, you’ll get what you always got, and that’s not what you’re looking for right now.
That, unfortunately, makes your current culture a problem. Your current culture was built to drive yesterday’s success, and hopefully it did that well, but since the next level requires different behaviors, it will require some changes to your culture.
For example, a LOT of us are now realizing that integrating AI into our operations is becoming mission critical. If you have your sights set on the “next level,” it seems unlikely that you will get there without leveraging AI. This could be a challenge for a lot of cultures, because the process of extracting the true exponential power of AI is going to require behaviors like these:
- Experimenting and failing, visibly
- Working quickly and easily with people outside your department and above/below you in the hierarchy
- Quickly stopping things that no longer add value
- Letting people make decisions even if they are not “in charge”
- Handling conflict quickly, and without drama.
Most cultures don’t do those things well (and I have the data to prove that, by the way). If your culture struggles in these areas, and you ignore that, then you will plod along, trying to reach the next level, but you won’t get there, and eventually your really good people will start looking around for new jobs because they are frustrated with the lack of progress.
And that’s just leveraging AI. If you need to become much more agile to meet the changing needs of customers or members, then your culture needs to change. If you need to speed up decision making to stay ahead of your competition, then your culture needs to change. In short, if you want to reach the next level, then you need to continuously adapt your culture along the way, and in many cases, you’ll need to start doing that culture change very quickly—faster than you thought you could, in fact. The good news is, now we have AI.
Maddie and I are currently testing a new app that we’ve built that applies AI in the service of culture change. We think this is going to significantly impact this field. It doesn’t take the humans out of the change, by any means. Culture change doesn’t work unless it’s driven by the people inside the culture—we’ve known that for years. But working with us and our AI tool can help you dramatically decrease the time it takes you to iterate the culture change process. We think you’ll be able to start making meaningful change within 30 days if you do this right. You can start seeing behavior changes in three months. More coming soon on this new “Rapid Culture Change” program.