All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Organizational Effectiveness|Last Updated:

What’s the difference between culture and stereotypes?

Bear with me.

In Bananas, Woody Allen plays Fielding Mellish, a nebbish from Brooklyn (maybe it was Queens) who finds himself leading a Latin American revolution.

For one reason or another (and, given the source, probably no reason at all), Mellish finds himself back in the United States. His hosts helpfully provided a translator. But because he was a schlimazel from Brooklyn who only spoke English, the translator listened to the welcomer’s English-language statements and repeated them, in English, to Mellish, and then repeated Mellish’s response, also given in English, back to the other conversant.

It’s funnier on screen.

Mellish’s hosts decided to provide a translator based on their expectations. Doing this isn’t wrong, although validating our expectations improves our outcomes even more.

But what we all-to-often do is invert the sequence, basing our expectations on our decisions. That’s when we start to ignore the facts that are right in front of us.

Stay with me. We’ll get to the point soon.

Back when IT was Data Processing, business managers had conversations with programmers about what computers could do. The conversational template went like this:

Business Manager: “Can you get the computer to do x?”

Programmer: “Sure,” after which the programmer got the computer to do x.

A slightly different template went like this:

Business Manager: “Can you get the computer to do y?”

Programmer: “No, computers don’t work like that. But I can get the computer to do z. Will that help?” After this, and a few more back-and-forths, the programmer got the computer to do a. And after quite a few of these exchanges, programmers had the computer doing abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.

These conversational templates and their results worked well enough to create the first-generation of legacy applications that businesses ran on for decades. And if you think it all sounds a lot like Agile you aren’t wrong.

Anyhow, someone decided programmers couldn’t be expected to converse with Regular Ordinary People. And so they invented the business analyst to, very much like the translator in Bananas, translate between Geek English and Business English. In the process they convinced both business managers and programmers that they must have been fooling themselves when they thought they’d been having productive conversations.

Which (finally!) brings us to this week’s topic – the difference between stereotypes and cultural norms.

They certainly do resemble each other. A stereotype creates an expectation that all members of some identified group will behave the same way when faced with a given situation.

A cultural norm, in contrast, is the approved response to a given situation exhibited by all members of a self-identified group that’s enforced by the group through peer pressure.

And yet, most of us, most of the time, consider stereotyping to be a bad idea, especially when they are guilty of stereotyping us.

At the same time most of us, most of the time, consider our culture to be one of our strengths and sources of strength.

What’s the difference? First of all, stereotypes tend to be disparaging, used to describe something about them that makes them inferior to us. That’s as opposed to cultural traits, which tend to be complimentary, describing something about us that makes us superior to them.

Bob’s last word:

Still too subtle a difference? Let’s try this: When we deploy a stereotype we rob members of the group we’re stereotyping of their individuality. When we express a cultural trait we’re usually trying to achieve coherence, trust, and membership. Culture preserves our individuality while establishing that we’re part of a larger whole.

Bob’s sales pitch: And on an entirely different subject, hop on over to CIO.com to read my latest article there. It’s about Lifecycle Management and I think you’ll find it useful. Whatever else, I think it will give you a practical take on how to handle one of IT’s most significant architectural challenges.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Draw a Venn diagram. Label one of the circles “What I’m good at.” Label the next “What I enjoy doing.” The third reads, “What someone will pay me to do.

Where the three intersect? That’s your career, if you want one. It’s also the core  framework hiring managers have in the backs of their minds when trying to staff their organizations.

They’re accustomed to hiring employees. They bring in contractors – independent workers, also known as members of the gig economy – for situations that call for individuals with a well-defined “sack o’ skills” for a finite duration.

Contractors are, that is, members of the workforce who have decided they won’t scratch their circle #2 itches through their careers. Their numbers appear to be increasing, very likely as an offset to those who prefer the traditional employment/career approach to earning a living.

Managers generally think of their organization as a social construct. When staffing a role, hiring an employee is their default, and for good reason. They want someone who will do more than just a defined body of work. Beyond that they want people who will pitch in to help the society function smoothly, who will provide knowledge and continuity, who find this dynamic desirable, and whose attitudes and approaches are compatible with the business culture.

Bringing in a contractor is, for most open positions, Plan B.

Which is unfortunate for hiring managers right now. The trend appears to be that if they want enough people to get the organization’s work done they’re going to have to make more use of contractors … and not only contractors but also employees who have no interest in pursuing a career, just an honest day’s pay in exchange for their honest day’s work – who want jobs, not careers.

A different approach to staffing to what we’ve all become accustomed to is evolving, one that’s more transactional and less interpersonal. Culture will be less of a force because contractors will spend less time acculturating than employees; also, the ratio of time working independently than in the team situations where culture matters most is steadily increasing.

In some respects it will be more expensive. Contractor turnover will be higher than employee turnover because that’s built into how the relationship is defined. The ratio of onboarding time to productive time will increase.

Managers who don’t want to head down this road do have an alternative: They can compete for those members of the workforce who don’t want to become independent. The law of supply and demand suggests that this approach will cost more. It will also mean thinking through how to make the work environment as desirable as possible.

One more factor, as if one was needed: The security ramifications of a more transient workforce are significant.

Bob’s last word: “Digital” refers to changes in a company’s marketplace that call for changes in a company’s business strategy in response. Digital is all about products and customer relationships.

The current restructuring of traditional staffing practices is the result of digitization, the rise of the remote worker digital technologies have enabled, and COVID-19, which accelerated it all. It’s the next digital marketplace transformation to which businesses must adapt, only this time the marketplace in question is the one that trades in labor.

Adapting to this nascent transformation of the employment marketplace is less familiar territory, but it isn’t different in principle. Strategists have always had to think in terms of where their organizations fit into an overall business ecosystem. Staffing has always been part of this overall ecosystem. It’s just that few business leaders, not to mention those of us who engage in punditry and futurism … anticipated how quickly and dramatically this ecosystem would morph.

Bob’s sales pitch: Ten years ago, when I published Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century IT, “Digital” was still an adjective, “everybody knew” the rest of the business was IT’s internal customer, and “best practice” was a phrase people tossed around when they had nothing better to say.

Oh, well. You can’t win ‘em all. But even though Digital has been noun-ified, this book’s 13 principles for leading an effective IT organization are as relevant as the day the book was published.

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