The Paradigm Trap – Part 2: Building a Celtic Organization

What does the word “Celtic” mean to you? An art form?  A culture? A language. A particular period in history? There are many ways of interpreting the word and its meaning for you comes from a combination of your knowledge and your interests.

What does the term mean academically, though? As Borja Pelegero (2021) wrote, historians now generally recognize the Celts as less an integrated entity or unified people and more “a culture with shared belief systems and a common language”. That culture is “a bundle of shared linguistic and cultural traits” that linked a wide range of Iron Age people from what are now Ireland and Spain in the west to Turkey in the east.

Organizations are like this. We often speak of organizational culture as though an organization is a single, unified group of people with a single culture. While that may be true of a tiny organization that is basically a single team, it’s rarely true of one in which there is more than one team. Each team will have its own culture based on various factors such as leadership, operating environment, work focus, relationship with customers, technical jargon, and more, not to mention the unique blend of characteristics, temperaments, interests, and abilities of team members.

While each team in an organization is unique, there are, just as with the Celts, shared cultural traits such as overall values and shared linguistic traits—the language in a hospital will differ greatly from that in a retail or engineering organization, for example. Even within closer proximity (i.e the same industry), such traits differ from other organizations. Organization A may put significant emphasis on safety, while Organization B may see customer service as the primary value that drives culture.

Why does this matter? Leading change in an organization—which is a continual process in today’s world—requires recognizing that an organization’s culture is multi-dimensional, multi-faceted, and dynamic, albeit with some shared belief systems and linguistic and cultural traits. The organization is, and operates as, a system with many elements working in unison, even if not always coherently. Attempting to lead culture or organizational change without recognizing the nature of an organizational system—an open, social, and complex adaptive system—often happens when leaders are trapped in the paradigm of the organization as a single culture, setting the stage for change failure at worst, ineffective change at best.

To lead change in a complex, adaptive system requires not only understanding what such a system means and the innumerable, constantly changing internal and external factors and variables that influence system behaviour, but also knowing what the shared traits are across the organization. For it is in those shared elements that effective change lies. Leaders cannot simply say every unit in the organization must now have “this” culture.

To illustrate this concept, let’s focus for a moment on the strengths paradigm. Many organizations operate within the deficit paradigm, where leaders ask questions about, and thus focus attention on, what isn’t working, what’s broken and needs fixing, what problems need solving. In a deficit-driven culture, people pay attention to weaknesses and spend inordinate (and mostly wasted) effort trying to improve employee, team, and organizational performance by fixing weaknesses. It’s hard to see the strengths paradigm when you’re trapped in the deficit paradigm.

To shift from a deficit culture to a strengths culture requires focusing on three key traits—values, strengths, and language. Of course, if the values that drive how people work, interact, behave, etc., differ wildly across teams, then there is much work to do before attempting to lead cultural change. Assuming, though, that reasonable similarity exists across team cultures, it will require working at a system level and take multiple people changing from a deficit to a strengths paradigm AND from a single organizational culture to multiple cultures paradigm AND from an organization as a mechanistic entity to an organic one AND from reductionist thinking used to solve individual problems to systems thinking. That’s four paradigm shifts wrapped into one change initiative.

That is one of the primary reasons that culture change doesn’t happen in a few weeks and cannot be imposed. Many people need to change their worldviews of the organization first.

I’ll explore this more on the final part of this series on paradigm shifts, sharing some ideas about how to lead culture change.

Ref: The Celts: Trade, Art, and War.  National Geographic History, March/April 2021.

For Part 1 in this 3-part series, see

The Paradigm Trap – Part 1