Systemic, scalable, sustainable: The culture change approach to building resilience

We are all familiar with the opening line that a worrying percentage of businesses aren’t set to be in existence in 20 years’ time. We face an era of unprecedented change and where change is the new normal. Across the energy sector specifically, businesses are fighting for their place in the future. To do that, they need to be resilient—able to lean into the winds of change.

At any pivotal moment of change, people will often talk about the importance of organizational culture in weathering the storm. But how often have you found yourself nodding along to this very idea, yet when it comes to taking action, it feels too big, too complicated, and impossible to know where to start? Nothing gets done, nothing changes.

The energy industry’s approach to culture change needs to adapt. Borrowing from the principles of behavioral science, we can go some way to finding the antidote to the overwhelm.

Building resilience through your people

In a sector where external pressures—whether from the climate crisis, fluctuating oil prices, or regulatory shifts—are constant, resilience is more than just a buzzword. It’s the lifeblood of energy businesses that want to lead in the transition to a sustainable future. And the key to that resilience lies within a culture of innovation. In this world, culture is not an A to B endeavor. It does not assume that we can create a single, perfect set of behaviors, but rather that your culture needs to consistently evolve and adapt.

The energy industry is the perfect training ground for an innovative way of thinking about culture change. Resilience for energy companies takes on a unique form—it’s about the ability to pivot and adapt to emerging technologies and external pressures at extraordinary pace, and with great efficiency. It’s about taking calculated risks and moving mountains with limited resources. The big players are fighting for relevance and a license to operate, while new entrants are moving nimbly to create a more secure future.

With monumental strategic shifts affecting the industry, talent and culture simply must evolve with it. The need to balance a risk-averse, compliance-heavy heritage with a forward-thinking, fast-moving future state is a constant tension for those in the energy industry.

For smaller organizations in their infancy, this approach is a way to streamline the abject chaos. For larger, established organizations, this is an opportunity to build agility and innovation into your cultural DNA without setting fire to the building in the process.

Creating lasting culture change

The discipline of behavioral science has risen in popularity in recent years for good reason. It’s a brilliant, rigorous and experimental approach to understanding why people do what they do, and what levers impact people’s decision-making. More excitingly, organizations are starting to figure out how to use the thinking and the methodologies to drive systemic, scalable and sustainable culture change.

Systemic because it looks to gradually unpick the intricacies of the system and recognizes each part's role in creating the culture and environment in which people are making decisions.

Scalable because you always start small. Be focused: Tackle one problem at a time to build confidence and resilience in the process itself.

Sustainable because it is based on a growing body of evidence unique to your organization, breaking down the shifts you need into manageable chunks.

One of the pitfalls many companies will face when attempting to change their organizational culture is an over-reliance on the “Big Bang” business moments. These include announcing new strategies, leadership overhauls, or even a corporate rebrand. These pivotal moments come with unfair expectation.

Initially, they generate excitement—a phenomenon known as the “Fresh Start” effect where individuals are theoretically more likely to commit to change when in the throes of a new beginning. However, that initial surge of enthusiasm is often short-lived. As the halo of the Big Bang moment fades and business as usual resumes, employees return to old habits. Fatigue sets in when the systemic change hoped for doesn’t materialize. The gap between ambition and reality widens and resilience is compromised.

So, why is change so hard?

Put simply, people will always take the shortcut or the “easy” way out.

As Daniel Kahneman popularized in Thinking, Fast and Slow, we have two modes of decision-making: fast, intuitive choices (system one) and slow, deliberate choices (system two). In most cases, people will default to system one—quick, instinctive responses that are rooted in familiar habits and patterns.

Think of this in the context of behavioral change in organizations. We often forget that our employees are people, overburdened and overwhelmed by near constant decision-making both at work and at home. Add into the mix the fact that the culture in your organization is also deeply complex—contending with norms and values, unwritten rules, written rules, office design, processes, platforms, and policies.

If you want your people to be more creative, to be more innovative, take more risks, be more efficient, give better feedback, take more accountability, be more strategic, this requires a shift in behavior—you’re fighting against both the individual’s predilection to take the shortcut, and the complexity of your organization causing friction with the desired behavior. Even if they did want to change, there are a million and one reasons for them to give up.

The solution isn’t in sweeping culture transformation programs, but in focused, iterative shifts that consider the specific problem, the individual and their context.

The solution

Drawing on the principles of behavioral science, the TESTS methodology—standing for Target, Explore, Solution, Trial, and Scale—developed by the Behavioural Insights Team is a step-by-step process for implementing a more robust, experimental approach to culture change in your organization.

Start with a hypothesis
Every good experiment begins with a hypothesis, a theory or assumption to be tested.

1. Target: Start with specific behaviors in a targeted group that you want to change. Whether it’s boosting employee innovation or fostering better decision-making, set clear, measurable outcomes that reflect the behaviors you want to encourage.
- For example: We need to improve our Operations team in Europe’s efficiency so that they have more time to be creative and solve customer problems

2. Explore: Get under the skin of current context. Through observation, surveys, or interviews, you can identify what’s preventing change and influencing behaviors. It’s about understanding the context of employees' decisions—what are the processes, policies, environmental factors, unwritten rules and cultural codes that are stopping them from achieving the desired behavior?

3. Solution: Design interventions targeting the behaviors you want to change. The key is to start small, with a laser-focused group, rather than overhauling entire system. For example, default meeting invites to 25 or 50 minutes or limit cc’s in emails

4. Trial: Pilot an intervention with your chosen group and measure with rigor. Test the solutions in small, controlled environment before scaling, using both data and anecdotal feedback to gauge success.

5. Scale: Once successful interventions have been identified, scale them across the organization, tweaking as necessary for different teams or cultural contexts.

The lesson is clear: Resilience is about adaptability and agility. And the key to that resilience lies within the people and the culture they create together.

Adaptability and agility can be hardwired into your culture—and it doesn’t have to be complex or overwhelming. It’s about treating the changes and shifts of the energy industry as an ongoing process of experimentation, adaptation and learning, and not a one-off Big Bang event.

If you’d like to run a T.E.S.T.S workshop in your business, get in touch with Lucy Maber at lucy.maber@brandpie.com.