Culture - Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything - page 97

the needs of employees. The plan was to fix it with a centralized, top-down redesign. During our
research, we stumbled upon a brilliant annotated index. Built and maintained by and for the ad-
ministrative staff of HP Labs, it boasted an organized, curated list of contacts, links, and instruc-
tions. It was an unofficial, under the radar, totally awesome guide for getting things done. We
held it up as an example of the decentralized, bottom-up tools that employees should be encour-
aged to create in order to complement the top-down structures we'd been asked to design.
Sadly, there wasn't much interest. In 2001, executives weren't marching the HP way. But the
idea was solid. Small wins, like an annotated index, are the right place to start.
Alone, each small win stands a good chance of making it past the cultural immune system. To-
gether, multiple small wins create a visible pattern of progress. V.S. Ramachandran explains that
“Culture consists of massive collections of complex skills and knowledge which are transferred
from person to person through two core mediums, language and imitation.” cxxx We can use this
monkey see, monkey do proclivity to our advantage. Once people perceive a trend, they are in-
finitely more likely to adopt a new tool, process, belief, or value. Under certain conditions, after
passing the proverbial tipping point, a culture can change shockingly fast.
So, culture is not an immovable object. If we use multiple ways of changing in concert, we may
be able to move the needle. But we must be ready for curveballs, since people make complex
systems even less predictable. For instance, five years ago, I went bald. I mean, it had been going
on for a while, but one day I finished the job. My wife was out, so I showed our daughters first.
“Claire, I have a surprise for you,” I called, and our ten year old walked into the room. She then
screamed, ran to the corner, curled into a fetal ball, and cried and cried and cried. I hugged her
and told her it was okay, and then I cheered her up by suggesting we surprise her eight year old
sister. But when we found Claudia, she surprised us instead, by staring me in the face and ask-
ing “what's the big surprise?”
When we change, some people totally freak out, while others don't notice or care, and it's only
after you act that you understand who will do what. When Claire played for the maize and blue
volleyball club, she and her teammates were unhappy with the way the coach ran practices. The
girls were too scared to speak up, but I encouraged Claire to talk to her coach. The meeting went
badly. The coach behaved defensively. She expected the players to accept her authority without
question, but that's not the way we raise our girls, so the confrontation escalated, and the next
game Claire was benched. It was a painful but useful lesson, and an illustration of Brigitte
Jordan's insight that “the power of authoritative knowledge is not that it is correct but that it
counts.” Claire learned that in some cultures and contexts, it's best to keep your mouth shut, and
escape as soon as you can.
As an information architect, I think about change on two levels. First, I identify opportunities for
improvement that fit my client's culture. Once I've uncovered the problem and described a solu-
tion, these technical fixes become low-hanging fruit. Second, I explore innovative ways to im-
prove the user experience that may be obstructed by the organizational culture. In this quest, I
proceed very carefully. If I believe that change is possible, and if the cause is worth it, I may
push hard. In the words of Brenda Laurel, I'll try “inserting new material into the cultural or-
ganism without activating its immune system.” cxxxi Otherwise, I'll tactfully tell my client of the
cultural constraints, and let them decide whether to act.