There’s no magic switch an organization can flip to change its culture overnight. Shifting from a culture of, say, self-preservation to empathy or perfectionism to a growth mindset takes a strategic approach that involves employees at all levels building new behaviors and moving in the same direction.
However, that isn’t how organizations typically approach culture change. Often, it’s a fractured and segmented project. Leadership says innovation is a top priority, and so front-line managers learn one set of skills, middle managers learn another, and senior leaders learn something else entirely. There’s scarce overlap in the lessons, no sharing of insights along the way, and no real sense of whether the organization is making any progress toward becoming more innovative.
As a result, things either stay the same or get worse. People are confused about what they should do, and if the organization has tried other approaches before, they’ll feel that familiar change fatigue that comes from getting pulled in multiple directions. In fact, surveys from Gartner show change fatigue is spreading: The average employee experienced 10 enterprise changes in 2022, compared to just two in 2016. In addition, employees’ willingness to engage with these changes fell from 74% in 2016 to 43% in 2022.
To increase the success of their culture-change efforts, organizations can follow certain scientific principles to make their learning stickier and more effective. In particular, the NeuroLeadership Institute has found a successful strategy: a learning pathway. In the pathway approach, people go through two or more learning programs back to back over the course of one or two years, and the presence of recurring concepts is woven throughout, reinforcing knowledge built along the way.
When organizations structure their culture change as a learning pathway, they tend to see greater results in less time compared to a more fractured or segmented approach.
The science of learning pathways
One of the reasons a pathway approach supports culture-change efforts is that our brains have an easier time making sense of information when it’s presented as an interconnected web. This is a concept known as coherence, which we can think of as the structural integrity of ideas.
Unlike a learning program in which each lesson feels disconnected from the others, and it’s hard to make sense of how everything fits together, coherent programs seem to nest together. They all share the same scientific foundation, which reinforces learning and embeds it deeper into people’s memory.
This is a satisfying feeling — and an energizing one. When there’s coherence in a learning program, thinking about one idea or set of concepts activates the entire mental map, similar to how thinking about one item on your to-do list can trigger you to think about all the other things you want to get done. In a program with coherence, remembering one lesson about unconscious bias, say, can trigger many more insights about the brain, the nature of decision-making, and how to mitigate unconscious bias in your interactions with others.
Coherence isn’t the only factor that makes learning pathways brain-friendly. Another is a common language. When front-line managers, middle managers, and senior leaders all go through a program that weaves core concepts throughout, people begin to see — and then use — the same terms over and over with one another. This leads people to share ideas more frequently, which deepens their learning and builds stronger teams.
People who go through more disjointed learning programs have a much harder time developing a common language because everyone’s learning something different at different times, and the material in one change initiative might not reference the same concepts as that in another.
The third and final brain-friendly benefit of a pathway approach is that it layers ideas together, which reinforces learning over time. People can apply foundational concepts, such as growth mindset, to many different situations — for instance, receiving feedback, conducting performance reviews, and staying resilient through failure, thereby strengthening critical habits and shifting the culture as a whole.
Together, these three factors — coherence, common language, and layering — allow a learning program to align with how our brains are wired to work. They make ideas easier to absorb, easier to share with others, and easier to apply in the course of your daily work.
Pathways in action
To consider a real-life example, let’s look at an organization that wants to build a high-performance culture where people are regularly giving and receiving feedback and where people take ownership of their career development.
The learning program might start with building a basic understanding of the NeuroLeadership Institute’s SCARF® Model. This is a foundational model for understanding motivation through the lens of social threat and reward. It will appear in every learning program people go through, and it will inform how they layer new lessons on top of prior ones.
In this case, the organization decides to go through a three-solution pathway of CONNECT: The Neuroscience of Quality Conversations®, followed by IMPROVE: The Neuroscience of Better Feedback®, and finally, DEVELOP: The Neuroscience of Employee Development. These three programs, when linked together over a one- to two-year period, begin with a foundational understanding of The SCARF® Model and then apply that knowledge to a specific context — in this case, high performance, feedback, and career development.
In terms of impact, the result from this pathway approach is deeper learning and greater behavior change in less time and at a lower cost. For example, one healthcare company that went through NLI’s programs DECIDE: The Neuroscience of Breaking Bias® followed by INCLUDE: The Neuroscience of Smarter Teams® saw 97% of the program’s 1,000 participants using the tools after the program’s seven-month period had ended, and 86% of people said they applied the program’s strategies in meetings.
Every learning and development leader is looking for these outcomes: faster and deeper learning, greater behavior change, and results that translate to better business performance. Through a pathway approach, which deploys the science of coherence, common language, and layering, leaders can feel confident that employees will learn more and perform at their fullest potential.
