Culture Change: Viewing Workplaces as Communities
Last month I attended a presentation by Dr. Guy Nasmyth, an organizational development scholar and systems thinker. Afterwards, in conversation, he made a point that stayed with me, organizations are most effective when they are understood as communities.
Systems thinking holds that an organization's behaviour is produced by its structure: how information moves, who can influence a decision, and what happens to the person who points out a problem. Donella Meadows argued that a system produces the results its structure is designed to produce. On this view, disengagement is an output of structure.
Etienne Wenger found that capability grows through shared practice and belonging. People who feel like members raise problems. People who feel like position-holders often stop, because raising a problem requires believing it will matter.
The research record supports this. Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety, beginning with her studies of hospital teams in the 1990s, found that teams where people felt safe to speak up surfaced and discussed more errors, which allowed them to learn from them. Google's Project Aristotle, an internal study of 180 teams, reached a consistent conclusion: psychological safety was the strongest predictor of team effectiveness, ahead of team composition or individual talent. When people stop reporting what they see, the organization loses a feedback loop, and it usually loses it quietly.
Edgar Schein identified three layers of culture: visible artifacts, stated values, and the underlying assumptions people act on without stating them. Most change efforts work on the first two layers, where progress is visible and easy to report. Assumptions shift only through consistent behaviour over time as leaders accept hard feedback without penalty to the person who gave it, and make decisions that follow stated values even when doing so has a cost.
Public engagement practice formalized this principle decades ago, for audiences outside the organization. The International Association for Public Participation's core values, a framework I follow in my own engagement work, state that public participation includes the promise that the public's contribution will influence the decision, and that practitioners must report back to participants on how their input affected it. The IAP2 spectrum makes the commitment explicit at every level of engagement, from inform through to empower, each with a stated promise to the public.
Engagement professionals treat these commitments as the baseline for credible practice, because experience has shown what happens without them. Communities that are consulted and then ignored stop participating. The same mechanism operates inside organizations, where it has no equivalent standard. Few organizations make their staff the promise that IAP2 requires practitioners to make to the public: that contribution will influence the decision, and that people will hear how.
Margaret Wheatley described organizations as self-organizing systems, open to their environments. What people experience at work, they carry into their families, neighbourhoods, and civic lives. The influence runs in both directions, and for public-sector organizations the two are difficult to separate. An organization's credibility with the public is built, in part, by people whose daily experience tells them whether their own organization keeps its promises.
Further Reading
Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems. Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline. Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone. Edgar Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership. Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science. Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization. IAP2 Core Values and Spectrum of Public Participation, iap2.org.
This post was written by Alesha Hayes, communications strategist and consultant, and founder of A.M. Hayes & Associates.
About A.M. Hayes & Associates
A.M. Hayes & Associates is a boutique consulting firm specializing in strategic communications, engagement, and public relations. We deliver tailored communication planning, implementation, and evaluation to foster inclusive dialogue and build resilient, collaborative communities. Contact us for a complimentary 30-minute consultation.
