"Culture eats strategy for breakfast." Peter Drucker. Apparently. First things first: Drucker didn't say it. Looks like it got pinned on him after he died. But that's not the point. The point is the phrase isn't quite right. The cleaner version comes from Edgar Schein (shout out to Dr Kathryn Taylor for synthesising his work in our latest Work Collaborative paper). Culture doesn't eat strategy. It contains it. Contains. Your strategy doesn't sit next to your culture, competing with it for breakfast. It lives inside it. The culture is the container. The strategy is what you're carrying. So a strong strategy in a poor culture has nowhere to live. It leaks out. That's why it fails. But a strong culture on its own isn't enough either. A container with nothing in it just sits there. Good people, good values, no direction. The culture holds the strategy. The strategy gives the culture somewhere to go. Sometimes I reckon we can spend so much time on culture, on what makes a good one, that we forget to put anything in it.
Senior teachers would rather get involved in the weeds than do the difficult work of strategic thinking. Because it's more tangible.
I understand the sentiment here, Shane but the ‘contain’ word sticks with me a bit. Because often the culture doesn’t contain the strategy, often the strategy lands from other planets like Ofsted or the IB or Pearson or CIS etc…and cultures are bent out of shape by iron clad frameworks that demand uniformity and allegiance. If I can offer an alternative wording it would that ‘culture grows strategy’ - or it should do unless school leaders simply sub contract compliance to do all the gardening for them. A rich, fertile culture is the soil from which beautiful plants should grow - strategy is the sun towards which the flowers turn their faces. Not an original metaphor but one that feels more organic to me than culture as a container (but perhaps it’s a semantic difference). Best wishes.
When I was in management consulting ages ago in my previous professional life the meaning of this phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast” was not about competing interests for breakfast. It was that strategies are conceived, discussed, iterated, documented in every detail, but the people who deal with strategic thinking often forget or ignore cultural aspects of the organisations which are meant to implement those strategies. So if the culture is not cultivated like a precious plant, nurtured and cared for, the dominant culture can very quickly derail the best strategies and they end up in a drawer. In the end the meaning is the same - culture is a pre-determinant if the strategy will be successful or not. You cannot have a successful strategy without the right culture
Culture can contain or constrain. Both are interdependent and it’s when we try and think of them as separate that things go wrong. I agree that a great culture, without a strategy, is pointless as there is no purpose that fulfills a wider need. Without a wider need organisaitons will fail. Similarly a great strategy, without a culture that will allow it to emerge, will ‘get eaten’. They are co-dependent and need to evolve and emerge together. Great teams ask both questions at the same time.
I have indeed witnessed strategies being « eaten » by culture, and that was not only for breakfast but also for brunch, lunch and dinner 😉 I am referring to strategies which were created without collaborating first with all stakeholders to create a shared purpose and understanding; the school community did not feel involved in the change process and got disengaged. In your book Shane Leaning, it is clear that all the questions and solutions of challenges or opportunities for growth for a school sit within the organisation. If senior leaders skip the first two stages (Connect and Discover) of your adapted model of the double diamond design for sustainable change, then the lack of culture can kill the strategy. In my opinion, culture and strategy are interdependent and interconnected. Senior leaders need to first build a culture where all staff feel seen and heard, and that their different perspectives and contributions matter, where they feel the psychological safety to express their concerns and thoughts openly without the fear of ramifications. Once this is done, when a challenge appears, they can use the power coming from within this culture to work together and create a strategy with shared vision, goals and purpose.
In episode 5 of The Culture 360 Podcast we look at Educational Culture and Climate in UK secondary schools. More education podcasts in the pipeline: https://youtu.be/fRv2SMwuzL4?si=6dTFmGQ7FRXZgz78
Thanks for the shout out, Shane Leaning. I'm a big fan of Schein's work, and also Anthony Gidden's structuration theory which gives an account of the processes that occur in cultural evolution (and how they can be curated and steered). The thing is, these processes occur whether you steer them or not, so it is helpful to understand them. Otherwise you get all kinds of vicious cycles, cliques, workload and other unintended consequences.
We could discuss organizational culture extensively, but if there is limited interest in integrating the two distinct cultures within the school, namely education and operations, then the perception of culture will remain subjective.
There are many quite daft, vacuous and misquoted phrases and terms that people throw into leadership circles, Shane Leaning. “Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast” is one such example.. (Why only at breakfast? Whose strategy? Which Culture? Brown or Red Sauce? When’s lunch?) Others include: 🔹Think outside the box (Groan - you need convergent and divergent thought to leverage ideation). 🔹There is no ‘I’ in team (Groan, again. “But there’s me”…go away…) 🔹Fail fast, fail often (We didn’t plan so let’s rebrand the chaos as innovation). 🔹Move fast and break things (Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner) 🔹We’re a family here (a classic - usually used just before asking people to work weekends…) 🔹Let’s circle back (school leadership putting something into a magical holding pattern where it quietly dies) 🔹Leverage synergies (when nobody is really sure what’s being leveraged, but it sounds cool). 🔹Low-hanging fruit (Tasty?) 🔹Disruptive innovation (should be supportive and not just changing a school logo and hoping no one notices). 🔹We need to boil the ocean (A dumb way to describe impossible workloads while sounding oddly calm about physics). 🔹💯percent (Shoot me now…why not 72% 0r 33%?) I’m sure there are plenty of others…🤔🫣🤷🏻♂️