ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

324 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPdisconfirming information. One might speculate that the reason whywe have had so many books on transformational visionary leadershipin the last decade is because the United States, as a society, is hurtingand the need for some psychological safety through new visionsis particularly acute.Does disconfirmation always have to be present to start thechange process? Is there not a natural instinct to learn and improve?Isn’t natural curiosity enough of a motive to try new things andovercome old habits of thought? New learning that does not requireunlearning probably occurs, though even then one could argue thatcuriosity is driven to some degree by dissatisfaction with one’s presentstate of perception and thought. The organizational question isthis: can a successful organization make transformational changes ormust there be some threat or sense of failure or crisis before peoplewill be motivated to make such changes? Does there have to be a“wake-up call” or “burning platform” before the need for real changeis accepted? In other words, must the process of organizationaltransformation always start with some form of survival anxiety? Myown experience convinces me that some sense of threat, crisis, ordissatisfaction must be present before enough motivation is presentto start the process of unlearning and relearning.The disconfirming data are only symptoms, which should triggersome diagnostic work, focusing on the underlying problem or issuethat needs to be addressed. Before one even starts to think about culture,one needs to (1) have a clear definition of the operational problemor issue that started the change process and (2) formulate specificnew behavioral goals. It is in this analysis that one may first encounterthe need for some culture assessment in order to determine to whatdegree cultural elements are involved in the problem situation. It isat this point that an assessment of the kind I will describe in the nextchapter first becomes relevant. This should not be undertaken, however,until some effort has been made to identify which changes aregoing to be made and which “new way of working” will fix the problem,and some assessment has been made of how difficult and anxiety-provokingthe learning of the new way will be (Schein, 1999b).