Fail fast and learn fast !

In continuing with the theme of the GLOBAL research into CULTURE –another extract of a success story in the making.

The Culture leader of an investment bank said that they needed to change the culture. “that we knew that in order to be faster, more agile in decision making, we need to change some things in our culture. So this is why all this has started in the first place, derived from the digital transformation”

“We needed teams that worked faster, so kind of in an agile way. We needed the ability to move faster. To fail fast and learn fast. So that's kind of the context”

Drivers of change

Iasked for some of the other drivers of the cultural change and the response wasthat “in our countries there's a lot of corruption so I think we wanted to makeclear that this is non-negotiable. We would rather not have business than havecorrupt or dirty business. So ethics is very important”

Thechallenge for this organization is compounded by being a merger of a number ofbusinesses. Each of these businesses has its own value set. The VP of Cultureand Development said that one of the companies has 6 values and the other 7values. Both sets of values are similar, but remain separate.

The cultural transformation is very recent, and as such is still very much a work in progress.

Onecomment that stuck out was around the traditional banking culture that hasshifted “ it used to be a very punishing culture but we specifically openedthese sorts of spaces so that we give a message that it's okay to make mistakesin this changing transformational environment.”

Thisinterview raised some interesting challenges such as

Someideas around answering these and perhaps raising more questions will be thesubject of the next few blogs and posts

Thequestion is how many of our organizations are built to fail fast and learn fast?