I was excited to read a long article in the February 2010, Balanced Scorecard Report by business intelligence guru Howard Dresner, author of The Performance Management Revolution, in which he shares a recent revelation. He states that for an organization to succeed it must first attend to its culture and that “people trump processes and technology every time”.

This is indeed exciting stuff because many of us who have been working with companies to improve performance through strategy, process, technology and people have learned that sustained improvement absolutely requires the development of performance-directed behaviors. That’s not what one typically reads in the literature.. Therefore it’s helpful to the cause when someone of stature in the industry “officially” asserts the role of culture in creating improvement.

In his new book Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change, Mr. Dresner provides some worthwhile advice on how organizations can develop this “performance-directed” culture. First he defines what he sees as the 6 primary attributes (Alignment with Mission, Transparency and Accountability, Actions on Insights, Conflict Resolution, Common Trust in Data, Availability and Currency of Information). These primary attributes are spread equally among three categories: strategic, operational and technical. Then he uses a 4-level maturity model framework to help organizations a) identify where they are in the development of these attributes, and b) chart a course to higher levels. He then makes the point that progress is impossible without attending to what he calls the “four forces” (strong leadership, a dissolving of silos, improved data literacy, and committed, persistent people). And finally he points out that in his experience it takes “setbacks and wakeup calls”, triggered externally or internally, to motivate an organization to initiate and sustain a program of cultural change. The second part of the book presents a rather extensive case study about a $250 million a year US company that successfully developed a performance-directed culture using Mr. Dresner’s maturity model and four forces approach.

I appreciate how Mr. Dresner places the focus of organizational performance on culture and that he offers a well thought out and systematic process for moving culture in the proper direction. For those of you who are interested in this approach I offer three thoughts. One, I’m a big fan of using maturity models to address organizational change because they work. If you’re not familiar with them I suggest you Google capability maturity models. Secondly I remind you (perhaps unnecessarily) that creating change in an organization is extremely difficult and requires incredibly strong and committed leadership, much like Lou Gerstner brought to IBM in 1993 (with help from a deafening wakeup call!). Lastly I’d emphasize the point that culture change and process change go together. Certainly we behave the way we think, but we also think the way we behave. For example, if we all are “forced” to meet every week to review long term goals and plans, that in turn causes us to become more long term focused. That long term focus in turn causes us to want to meet to review progress toward our long term goals. In other words, implementing processes slowly and building buy-in is one of the best ways we have of making cultural change.

Please contact me if this topic is of interest to you and if you’d like to explore how it applies to your organization. Brian Kinahan