Business Book Review: counting The Dance Steps

The author, Andrew Cocks, is an organisational psychologist and thought leader in the areas of culture and employee engagement. He has worked with some of the world's biggest employers over a 25-year career, including large financial organisations, NHS employers and many government departments and police constabularies, and has been Group Head of Engagement and Employer Brand at HSBC and European Head of Employee Engagement for management consultants Towers Watson. This is his first book.

The book aims to address the need to understand and manage organisational culture, which is one of the most pressing business priorities of our time. The growing litany of scandals across political, public and commercial institutions illustrates how we are continuing to fall well short in this regard. Counting the Dance Steps explores the reasons behind these collective failures and challenges many of the myths that are perpetuated about organisational culture, how it works, how to measure it and how to change it.

The author starts by recounting his first-hand experience of a failure of corporate governance at HSBC which started him down the road to question the accepted understanding of culture, what it means and how it should be experienced.

Throughout, he gives a depressingly enormous number of examples of corporate failure and describes how poorly understood or badly interpreted organisational culture was being held as, at least, part of the problem and yet culture is a catch all term which has come to mean anything and nothing.

The examples go across the full gamut of enterprise, including private, public and thirdsectors and the third sector (charities) and involved small enterprises through to substantial international and governmental organisations.

The examples throughout the book catalogue failures of many kinds, from corruption to discrimination, from complacency to collaboration and to be ignored, condoned or even encouraged. All in the name of culture.

The examples starkly reveal that most of us have a vague, ambiguous or disinterested interpretation of culture. There is even, ironically, a culture of organisational culture change initiatives which are universally supported without a clear definition of what is meant by culture and what good looks like!

The author is quite dismissive of the most commonly applied assessment tools to measure organisational culture. He describes the processes used and the complex analysis produced but considers they miss the point and fail to deliver actionable insight. He backs up his assertions throughout the book with a multitude of quotes and references that sent my head in a spin. He makes many good points.

This is a massive topic, dealt with in great detail, but I found it a challenging read, with an enormous amount to think about and no simple conclusions.

If you are unhappy with the culture of your organisation and seek to change it to the best it can be, you face a mountain to climb and no real roadmap to follow.

I can understand why it often finds its way to the ‘too hard basket’ or launching another programme that addresses some of the symptoms without tackling the holistic problem.

However, if we want to stem the tide of corporate scandals and failures, many with tragic consequences, society needs to get a grasp of the problem and ensure organisational culture is a power for good. No small task.

I enjoyed reading this book, it made me think, it made me challenge my own thinking and it made me nervous that we’re doomed to repeat these tragic events until we find the solution to what appears an insoluble dilemma.

Not one for reading on your holidays but a challenging, thought-provoking missive if you have an interest in the topic.