Picture the scene: your leadership team announces to the whole staff body of your purpose-driven organisation that they are going to introduce a performance related pay scheme to ensure that the top performers are rewarded for being the organisational stars and and to offer a route to career progression. You’re about to move from purposeful work that doesn’t have a financial bonus attached to what you do, to work that does, if you can prove you have met your set of targets. Now imagine this is your organisation. Take a moment to reflect on how this makes you feel. What is your instinctive reaction? 

Perhaps you like rules and procedures and the clarity they offer you; you hope that there is clear guidance and training to implement the new policy, and that the processes, deadlines and tasks are clear. If the CEO is implementing this, it must be a good thing, since they are in charge. This is a hierarchical perspective on change and you’ll probably seek to implement the scheme with maximum efficiency and effectiveness. The task, viewed from the perspective of the bureaucrat, is to mandate its adoption, ensure it’s efficacy and monitor and enforce compliance. The policy is agreed and all that is left is to implement it. After all, why would anyone have a problem with a well crafted policy that has been through the necessary adoption process within the organisation. It’s now in our policy library of Institutional Rules and Regulations, to be slavishly followed at all costs. Those charged with its implementation assume staff recognise that the scheme has been designed for their benefit, to offer an evidenced route to progress within the organisation. No, of course it can’t be gamed or used for leverage, our staff are better than that, and in any case, that’s why we’ve produced guidance, offered training, and ensured our managers are ready to enforce the scheme. We can’t be held to account if staff wilfully decide to ignore the rules. If that’s the case, we may have to put the offending staff members on a performance improvement plan to reiterate the importance of following company policy, which after all exists only for their own good. The bureaucrat implores, get with the programme!

Perhaps deep down you like financial motivation and see it as legitimising your entrepreneurial instincts and rewarding your high performance. This is the individualistic response to change, and you are largely delighted. Of course, rewards should go to the best, those who can prove their worth by exceeding all their targets – by whatever means – and evidencing they perform the best. Why should anyone who is a jobsworth, lazy or doesn’t go the extra mile or who isn’t driven to succeed just collect the same pay check as us high achievers? Individualists will seek to be winners in the new competition for resources, regardless of the impact on the organisation. Achieving the targets are all that matters, after all, never mind what that means for anything, or anyone, else, collaboration be damned. And as for the scheme itself, well those bureaucrats don’t know the reality of work if it bites them, so rules are just their largely arbitrary guidelines. I won’t let them get in the way of achieving my targets, whatever it takes. The individualist implores, let me at it!

Perhaps you like collaboration and teamwork, to feel part of a collective and shared purposeful effort. This is an egalitarian approach to change, and you naturally fear that the imposition of individual targets will undermine teamwork and collaboration and take no account of the work we do in complex and ambiguous situations. Plus, don’t these bureaucrats realise that we can’t set an individual target when the work requires other people’s input and its success is down to a whole range of factors many of which are outside of our individual control? The egalitarian is further concerned for the fairness of the scheme and how it will be adopted by teams and staff. What’s the word on the staff grapevine, how are people feeling and responding? Are we all in this together? What will happen when the individualists reveal their true colours, having been hiding in our purpose-driven organisation in plain sight? They should be working with us to improve things for those we serve, focusing on the good we are doing in the world, not on maximising their own income. What kind of immoral people have we inadvertently recruited? The egalitarian implores, let’s talk about this!

Perhaps you sit back, watching all this play out, determined not to waste too much effort on what you see as a whole new level of bureaucracy that adds precisely zero value to the bottom line, just like other schemes before it. This is the fatalist’s approach to change. Perhaps you tend to think it’s all a game and whatever you try and do it’s rigged anyway. You might as well just do the bare minimum to get by and see what happens. Whether I work hard or not will have little impact on the rewards I get; it’s a botched process in that regard. We all know that this will be a game that rewards the usual suspects and those who know how to court favour. Just as we see those least deserving of promotion get promoted, so those who really deserve the performance rewards are unlikely to receive them. And so, the fatalist watches. There go the bureaucrats insisting they are doing the right thing by implementing the scheme to reward the best performers; there go the individualists competing hard for maximum gain; there go the egalitarians questioning how this supports collaboration and demanding fairness in implementation. Me? Well, let’s be honest –  what will be will be. 

Mary Douglas’s Cultural Theory posits that there are four distinct ways of responding to any given situation, dependent on the extent to which you see the world as needing structure and regulation, and effective action as individual or collective. This results in the bureaucrat, seeking to apply hierarchical rules and policies to govern a situation; the egalitarian, seeking collaboration to identify a common approach; the individualist, seeking to find the entrepreneurial opportunity in the situation, and the fatalist, hoping for it all to end soon. 

In a world in which we so often seek certainty and consensus, cultural theory illustrates there is no right or wrong, black or white solution to be found. Just four perspectives on change that are hard to reconcile, each a response to the weaknesses of the others. No one perspective is right or wrong; but navigating a way forward requires, at the very least, an acceptance that these perspectives exist, however incompatible they may seem to be. It’s a theory that can help us make sense of how people might act in any given context, including how a new performance scheme will play out in practice. 

Perhaps you feel that each perspective has a degree of merit in its position. As each helps address the challenges of the others, we might conclude that it is best to seek a balance of policy, competition, collaboration and fatalism when we are addressing a particular challenge. Too many rules and policies can ossify an organisation, which the fatalist points out and the individualist fights against. Too much individualism and the egalitarians point out that we are actually an organisation with a common endeavour. Too much collaboration and talk and the bureaucrats invoke hierarchy to get to a decision. And so on. 

Too often we don’t explore an issue from these perspectives and, I think, accordingly lose some of the nuance of the situation. Implementing a new performance reward scheme, for example, is ultimately introducing competition for scarce resources. This fundamentally shifts the cultural balance of power firmly into the individualist’s domain, for they are temperamentally predisposed to compete and bargain to maximise reward. Over time the organisation will attract more new hires who are competitive and, without negative feedback loops, the institutional culture will tilt away from the purpose-driven egalitarians and towards the extrinsic motivation of the individualists. Can this be balanced by the other perspectives and thus negate the worst excesses of these results?

The bureaucrats will be pleased to see the scheme taken up with vigour by the individualists, publicly calling out the exemplary adoption of policy. But, oh! the egalitarians. Sooner or later they must simply stop their endless talking, and it’s about time we direct them to do so. The fatalists must really just get with the programme, enough of their ‘computer says no’ attitude, their quiet reticence to complete the paperwork on time (if at all).  

And so the bureaucrats get busy strengthening the policies and processes, adding in new rules, and establishing some enforcement mechanisms for the worst transgressors. The egalitarians continue to seek solace together, organising, meeting, perhaps unionising, lobbying unsuccessfully for change, for by now the horse has well and truly bolted. Ironically each egalitarian eventually reaches their own game-theory decision point: do I stay or leave? 

And the fatalist still watches: Are you not all mad? What did I tell you! This adds no value to those we serve through our work?