Take a Skills-Based Approach to Culture Change

Though Shell, BP, Hanover, and Harley-Davidson took very different approaches to developing capacity to work with mental models, their work involved developing skills in two broad categories: skills of reflection and skills of inquiry. Skills of reflection concern slowing down our own thinking processes so that we can become more aware of how we fo

A practical tip: explore the assumptions with your team, not on your own. And as a first step, start by uncovering the unspoken assumptions behind the traditional hierarchical organizational (Amber/Orange) model: workers are lazy and untrustworthy; senior people have all the answers; employees can’t handle difficult news; and so forth.

This question eventually led O’Brien to Chris Argyris, whose writings resonated with Hanover’s managers’ experience. Argyris’s “action science,” offered theory and method for examining “the reasoning that underlies our actions.”9 Teams and organizations trap themselves, he says, in “defensive routines” that insulate our mental models from examinati

To make effective change take place, managers need to find a way to tap this rhythm—-to create not only time to think, but time for different types of thought and collective discussion. Our preferred tool for this is the “wheel of learning.”*