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At Stats NZ, I watched the IT department do exactly what every IT department does when told to change: they fixed the process.
New workflows. Better documentation. A task board everyone agreed was an improvement. Six months later, the same culture was running the same patterns, just through different software.
Culture wraps around everything, leadership, strategy, structure, processes, people. I started thinking of it like a rubber band around the whole organisation. Pull one piece, it stretches. Let go, it snaps back. Every time.
The snapping happens fast, and it happens for predictable reasons. The not-invented-here reflex kicks in first. Then the immunity system activates, especially from the people who've built influence through the old way of doing things. And I don't mean the executives. I mean the people who've been manning the cogs for fifteen years. They know exactly which levers to hold.
What actually worked, and I've seen this pattern since in other organisations, was moving all the pieces together in incremental steps. Not one block at a time. All of it, simultaneously, slowly.
The prep work is invisible to most people. That's probably why most culture change fails. The visible part is the new values poster in the kitchen. The invisible part is the six months of quiet rewiring underneath.
It's worked for me.
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