We have all heard how important an organization’s culture is and yet the essence of the culture of any given organization often defies accurate description. Charles W. L. Hill and Gareth R. Jones have defined the concept as: "The specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization."
An organization’s culture is always at work, always in force — pulling, influencing and shaping attitudes and actions. The culture can be likened to gravity, constantly tugging us back to the reality of earth.
A culture of planning has many facets. One of those facets is how the organization views and executes the task of planning. There are many types of planning, and all may not be equally valued or performed in all organizations. For example, an organization that fully embraces and values strategic planning may fail to commit the same level of collective effort to continuity planning. For the purposes of this writing/audience, I refer to the genre of emergency or continuity planning.
There’s a qualitative difference between an organization that usually, frequently or occasionally plans, and one that has planning endemic to its culture. How does one know if one’s organization has its affiliation in the former or the latter? I propose 10 characteristics of a culture of planning (CoP) and a brief description of each that can help with the distinction.
1. A CoP emphasizes resilience and understands the difference between it and recovery. The differences can best be understood if one realizes that resilience is an adjective, and recovery is usually a verb or noun in the emergency management context. Resilience is a quality applied to materials when they have the ability to resume their normal shape after being stressed. It is an innate quality rather than an after-the-fact campaign. Both may be necessary, but resilience is qualitatively better because it implies that the ability to recover is woven into the fabric of the organization.
2. Values planning and understands the appropriate level of detail — strategic, operational and tactical. It is common to over-plan or under-plan, each caused by a different organizational trait/characteristic. Under-valuing planning reveals the deeper problem of apathy; over-planning (in terms of detail) runs the risk of assembling a collection of manuals that gather dust on the shelf but are of little practical value. The major value of the planning exercise is that it teaches us how to think about the problem; then, and only then, can we know what to do about it.
3. Has the ability to psychologically embrace the possibility of bad things happening. Some organizations, like some people, think that if they ignore a potential issue or incident, it will either go away or never manifest. A mature organization — a CoP organization — seeks out and engages the environmental hazards before they occur for planning purposes. While engaged in the battle is not the best time to be thinking about how to fight for the first time.
4. They compile an extensive experience bank by a multiplicity of methods. In his book, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions author Gary Klein discusses a model for understanding the human decision process. He reports that experienced decision-makers improve their skills by:
- engaging in deliberate practice;
- compiling an extensive experience bank;
- obtaining accurate, timely and diagnostic feedback; and
- reviewing experiences to derive new insights and learning.
5. Anticipates and mitigates “hidden variables;” prevents “ignorant variables.” There are consequences to events and actions that occur despite our best efforts at due diligence. The threat of these “hidden variables” may be lessened by a disciplined approach and systematic analysis, but seldom can they be completely eradicated. There is no shame in being bitten by a hidden variable; the same cannot be said about its ignorant cousin.
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