Creating Culture That Drives Better Outcomes To Scale and Transform Your Business Featuring Jason Korman - I Love Marketing Episode #402

Semiotics are really about attaching meaning to an object and using that object to spread the idea. So when we look at making change happen, when we look at how you design getting ideas to spread, what we're looking at is how you design a device to make the idea spread. So we use a visual tool and you could look at it and say, oh, it's art, it's artful. But what differentiates what we do from art is its purpose.

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When you put the right messages and ideas in the hands of folks within large organizations, you give them the power and influence to shift at scale, shift what goes on there. And so we built a business which is really based upon designing cultures and executing in all sorts of organizations, from big tech to the Air Force and Department of Defense, to health care for entrepreneurs. And it's really about designing culture as an operating system for businesses and giving entrepreneurs and CEOs of large companies the ability to influence people at scale and use culture really as a management system. One of the challenges that we have as leaders is having the tools that we need in order to articulate what our vision is and what the norms are that we want people to follow and that will deliver our vision. So in our work. And Joe, the work we've done for you over the years has been a little bit different, but in most of the work we do, we go in and solve very particular problems around culture, around innovation, around problems like digital transformation, diversity, inclusion. And inclusion is a big subject these days. And so we go in, determine current state, map that to an ideal state, and then it's about designing the narrative that will get the organization to where it wants to go. So the fundamentals of that are about language, because all transformation is linguistic. Attaching language to visuals, then using those visuals to spread the ideas, because the ideas that spread win. So it's really around crafting a vision for the future, delivering the norms and language that will make that happen, and then spreading it in a sustainable way.

Is this marketing? Are you a marketing company? I know that's part of it, but I'm sort of asking it in a way for someone listening, what would they be hearing this for the first time? How would they think about this?

What we do is we wrap change management up in marketing to make it irresistible. And for a lot of people. When you look at typical change projects, they're usually driven by new processes, new procedures, and people are just told to go do them. What we do is we take those processes and procedures, we socialize them, we create language around it, and then we wrap it up in marketing to make the change irresistible. And that's why it works. And so it's really what we do is a new and different form of change management, but we're solving problems that traditionally 70% of the time plus, are not successful because the people doing the change really don't understand what it is that humans want when it comes to making change happen. And that is it's got to be emotional or it's not going to happen. So we wrap up all sorts of change management challenges around emotion and connection to a better outcome, better future.

So when you have something in a society, in a culture, and the languaging where they're so used to identifying, oh, this is art, and you're trying to shift that or change that, I mean, look, I don't live in your perspective. My perspective, though, is even to this day, when I see it in as many different ways as I've heard you describe it, my brain still defaults to thinking of visuals and be it animation or be it paintings or be it cartoons, sketches, as still as a form of art. So is there a danger in your mind if you start referring to this as art, or does it just somehow commoditize what you're doing? I'm trying to figure out how you think about it.

So we've developed something called semiotic management systems. So semiotics, we're all used to those things. It's things like the golden arches, things like flags, banners, the Make America Great Again hat, probably one of the most powerful semiotics created in the last 10 or 20 years. So semiotics are really about attaching meaning to an object and using that object to spread the idea. So when we look at making change happen, when we look at how you design getting ideas to spread, what we're looking at is how you design a device to make the idea spread. So we use a visual tool. And you could look at it and say, oh, it's art, it's artful. But what differentiates what we do from art is its purpose. So it's not art for art's sake. And I have a little exercise that we'll run through sometime about clearly differentiating art from semiotics. But art is really subjective. It's, you know, people look at it and they Imagine what they might about it. It's completely personal experience, semiotics. And what we do are objects are designed in a very specific way to achieve a very specific way of thinking about whatever the idea is you're attaching it to. So they're just different things. And it looks artful. It certainly does. And that's part of why it works. It's a lot of why it works. But it's not art. It's created with a purpose in mind for Hugh. Hugh has always been an artist. He thinks of himself as an artist, and his art is cartooning. And cartooning is a really interesting form of art in that by its intent, it's made to disrupt and do things right. So Hugh's amazing skill is really two things. One is linguistic. One is language. How do you create language that gets a point across in a really economic way, really simply? And then the other is simple drawings that reinforce the delivery of the message. So for him, that's his art. That's what he does.

Define culture, because it's one of these fluffy words used a lot of times, like, what the hell does that mean? How do you actually create it?

There were two questions in that. So first is, what is culture? And it's really the set of norms, behaviors that a community has, whether that community is a company or whether that community is a social group. So it's what people agree that is the accepted practice. And there's a difference. And it's about norms, right? And norms are different than, say, laws or rules, and that laws and rules are made by a small group of people that other folks have to follow. But norms are things that evolve over time that are accepted to be true and accepted to be. Be the way that we act in a certain environment. So what we all think about in our business life is that our organizations run on rules, but they don't. They actually run on norms. So what we do is design norms and a series of frameworks around that to get clarity. We replace the bad norms with those norms that will drive the outcomes that you need to have. So it could be solving problems around patient experience. For example, how do you get people in a healthcare environment to give better patient experience? That's not about protocols. That's about norms. It's about how we act, how we treat each other, how we treat patients, what our expectations are, what our beliefs and mindsets are that will drive a better outcome. And it's really that collection of beliefs and mindsets and mental models and values and principles that really make up the culture. And the design piece is really pulling that apart, understanding it, creating new language, creating ways to spread the language, and then integrating into the organization.

So what advice would you have for the entrepreneur out there? That's either a single person to 10, 20 employees, that sort of size.

So the world of work has changed. People are seeking and need to find more meaning and deeper emotional connection to what they do every day. And there's a lot of reasons why that's happened. But let's, for the purpose of this conversation, let's accept that as true. So if you believe that people are looking for more meaning in their work, then as an employer, you actually have an obligation to give that to them. And if you don't, you will never attract and retain the best people, because people will be looking for a place where they get deeper connection to doing something that's meaningful every day. It really doesn't matter whether you have, whether you're a solopreneur or whether you've got a small team of people. You've got to think about meaning, purpose, connection, how you get people to be motivated. So you've got to create motivation in people, what we call a future motivated state that gets people excited about turning up every day. You then have to create a set of articulated beliefs, which is really the norms. What we would call norms some people call values. But it's not just values. It's a really detailed understanding of what it means to be in the business and the worldview that you want folks to have. And then what you have to do is take those two components and socialize the heck out of it. And you've got to relentlessly integrate it into the work experience. And that's where the culture design comes from, the combination of those three things. But anybody can do it. You don't have to have a big company. When you normally think about operational excellence and making money, you think about better marketing, better sales, more efficient production. But the answer actually is around culture. There's this flywheel that drives the optimization of your operations, and you wind up having a more successful business. And you could point to, you think about the CEOs who are household names. Just make the list and then check out the cultures, and you'll see it's driven by culture. The business you're actually in might be very different from the business that you think you're in. So you've got to establish that. You got to understand what are you really doing for customers. What's the best version of that look like? You have to understand what the nature of your employees are and and when you're doing your best, what does that look like? What does that feel like? What's the language that would describe that? And then you've got to really go through a process of creating the language around how you get people to do the things that need to be done that will deliver great customer experience, that will allow you to execute better than competitors, and that describes the things that happen when you are doing your best work. You've got to decide what it is that's unique and special and different. It's going to drive your best outcomes for your customers and your people.

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