The conversation about the need for organizations to change their culture is not new. For a change in culture to take place there must be three elements present - opportunity, standards and performance.
Opportunity: to change organizational culture there must be an opportunity for change. While this may seem obvious the difficulty, it gaining agreement that an opportunity does exist. One of the most significant reasons why organizations don't change is that leaders fail to recognize opportunities for change.
Standards: to change culture, operational standards, (norms if you will) must be redefined. Standards must be redefined bring about change. Old standards must be replaced with ones that reflect a new culture. In essence the old rules no longer apply and new rules must be implemented.
Performance: Beyond missed opportunity, personnel performance can block culture change. Performance is defined as behavior and accomplishments. For cultural change to take place, behavior and accomplishments of people must change. Organizational structures can be changes, people reassigned responsibilities, but if existing behaviors and accomplishments are not changed then organizations do not change.
Intentions are not good enough. Organizational cultural change does not occur unless leaders facilitate the change.