Making culture change easier to understand
One of the phrases consistently repeated in corridors and offices around the world to inhibit the forces required to bring about a transformation in working conditions for staff, is ‘culture change is hard’. It is a self-limiting phrase and often used to discourage investment into the work that could truly transform how work gets done.
You may have heard or said it, yourself. Whenever I hear it, my next question is always ‘what have you done to make it simpler?’ My favourite story to emphasise this is road signs.
Here in the UK, there was no unified road signage until the mid-1960s. Up to that time, each district (council) would use their own criteria with a focus on information e.g. ‘Winchester 5’ rather than signage.
This led to complicated ‘fingerposts’ (see below), full of place names and distances, that were largely unhelpful when it came to navigation. Getting around the UK in a car was therefore seen as ‘hard to do’, especially as each district's information posts were different!
Then in 1957, designers Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert were commissioned (i.e. given time, resources and money) to design new road signs for the UK motorway system to ‘simply’ help people to get to where they want to go. What was needed was something different.
Their ethos was simple ‘How could we reduce the appearance to make the maximum sense.’
They developed a different typeface, used bold primary colours, used simple shapes and tried to keep words on each sign to a minimum. They also used new material for the white lettering so that it could be better read at night.
Research shows that humans process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Text requires the brain to read and interpret sequentially, which can be time-consuming and complex. In contrast, images can be understood almost instantly. Also, breaking information into easy to understand segments, is an effective technique for reducing cognitive load.
Their signs were implemented across the UK in the mid-1960s and became a blueprint for other countries to copy. They immediately transformed the journeys of millions of drivers and there is a fantastic tribute to their signage in the Design Museum in London - which I visited recently - that you can find out more about here.
Of course, if we don’t make things easy for people to understand, then they will always be hard to do. However, with the right design and education, we can make anything simpler - and therefore easier to change - almost overnight.
When you make culture a series of visual ‘signs’ it not only increases knowledge of what it is, how it’s built and how it evolves it also increases the responsibility that people have to uphold it and reduces the fear inherent in having to change it.
Culture change deserves its own Kinneir and Calvert moment. It’s a mission I embarked on almost 10 years ago and I’ve helped over 120 teams in over 22 countries to date.
In Friday’s newsletter I will share a video that I recorded as part of an interview recently where I share the steps I take to do just this (subscribers to my YouTube Channel can see it now!)
Culture change isn’t hard to do, you just don’t understand it…yet!
