Management Perspectives

An organisation’s culture is its DNA. It dictates every action. Given this, what can we learn from biological DNA editing about how to engineer the desired organisational culture changes? Based on research on organisational DNA and our collective seven decades of managing large global organisations in a Fortune 20 company, we believe there are clear lessons for executives derived from biological DNA-editing on creating a culture of change.

Let us back up a bit to examine the underlying issues in change management.

Organisations create value via business models, and then translate these conceptual business models into day-to-day activities via operating models. Within the operating models, business processes—activities within sales, finance, product development, IT, etc.—structure these business operations into tasks. Business processes tend to be regimented and standardised, making up disciplined steps and systems to record sales or expenses. However, creating a culture of change within a company requires balancing the necessary rigour of business processes with an openness to changing them when market forces dictate it. That is tricky. It explains why culture change is slow and difficult.

Biological DNA as a metaphor for organisational DNA editing

Because organisational culture is the DNA driving the internal foundation that influences every activity in the organisation, it is widespread, long-lasting, and it guides the behaviour of every person. Consequently, metaphors based on biological DNA, such as Corporate DNA or Organisational DNA, have become popular over the past few decades.

Booz & Company went as far as identifying the four bases of Organisational DNA— Structure, Decision Rights, Motivators, and Information—deriving them from the four biological DNA bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). In living organisms, the DNA informs and directs everything that happens to each cell in the body. In just the same way, Organisational DNA dictates every action in an organisation.

But DNA change is extremely difficult. Biological DNA change happens slowly, either through environmental factors or from progenitor to offspring. This leads us to the question: can we really accelerate changing the DNA of an organisation? The answer can also draw from the biological DNA metaphor: we can change the Organisational DNA quite deliberately by changing the environmental factors and/or the leadership heredity.

The story of gene editing on a living person

In February 2020, the Casey Eye Institute in Portland, Oregon, performed the first gene editing surgical procedure inside a living human being to prevent blindness from a known genetic mutation. The technology used was CRISPR, which after a decade of research is now being used in myriad applications to edit DNA. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat, and refers to the organisation of certain DNA sequences. The technology is designed to locate a specific piece of DNA inside a cell and replace it, in much the same way that you might cut and paste text in, say, Microsoft Word.

CRISPR had been used several times to edit human DNA. What made this a unique moment in history was that this was the first gene editing procedure carried out inside a living person. The genetic disease that was treated this way is called retinal dystrophy. It manifests itself over time with side effects such as colour blindness or tunnel vision, and can lead to complete blindness. Attacking the disease via DNA editing inside the human body was a big breakthrough.

Various ways that biological DNA can change

This procedure was a first, but it’s hardly the only example of DNA change. In daily life, changes to DNA happen every time an organism gives birth. The result is referred to as germline DNA because it comes from the parent DNA and can be passed on to the child.

There’s also somatic or acquired DNA mutation. That’s caused by environmental factors ranging from ultraviolet radiation from the sun to smoke from cigarettes, diseases like cancer, or simply errors in copying DNA during cell division.

The third way to change DNA is the genome-editing technique CRISPR—more accurately, CRISPR-Cas9 (Cas9 stands for “CRISPR-associated protein 9”). The Cas9 protein sniffs out the exact genes, then the CRISPR makes the change.

The point is that biological DNA change was once considered to be slow-moving and not controllable. But today, it is viewed as fair game for rapid CRISPR-Cas9 modifications.

Is there an equivalent engineered-change mechanism for Corporate DNA? The existing dogma has been that corporate culture is slow to change. However, we believe we can take lessons from how biological DNA editing has been accelerated.

Learning from biological DNA editing

Some key factors can be reapplied to organisational DNA. We mentioned the study that identified the four bases of Organisational DNA (Structure, Decision Rights, Motivators, and Information), which were metaphorically built on the four biological DNA bases.

Let’s go deeper for lessons on how to edit Organisational DNA.

The work on CRISPR-Cas9 offers three organisational insights:

1. DNA is an outcome of design and environmental forces. Biological DNA is made up of chemical elements (called nucleotides), which include the bases adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine (A-G-C-T). It can be inherited or modified by the environment. The biological DNA itself is an outcome of these forces of design and the environment. That is true of Organisational DNA too. Since we can only build it based the environment. That is true of Organisational DNA too. Since we can only build it based on inherited traits and environmental factors, we can ‘edit’ Organisational DNA by changing these factors of design and the environment.
2. We need different DNA edits for different purposes. The CRISPR edits needed for retinal dystrophy are very different from those related to sickle cell disease. Similarly, the Organisational DNA changes needed for dynamic business process transformation will be different from those needed for, say, effective product innovation.
3. The use cases are many, but the base units of DNA are few. Finally, the most exciting insight: while DNA edit uses are plentiful, the bases always come back to the A-G-C-T sequence. The implication, if we use the Booz and Company bases of Structure, Decision Rights, Motivators, and Information, is that we can act on these to create our individual DNA for dynamic business process transformation by editing these four. The challenge then becomes to identify the specific modifications to these four bases.

Our experience of helping dozens of organisations change their Organisation DNA tells us that these three simple principles can help us modify the Organisation DNA bases: Structure, Decision Rights, Motivators, and Information. Yes, company culture will evolve slowly if we do not take on the challenge of organisational DNA editing. But, as with CRISPR-Cas9, we can edit business processes systemically.

Changing business processes creates new organisational rituals, which leads to a changed culture. The exciting result of this approach is to create the ultimate, self-perpetuating business process design.