Alberta ministry learns to centralize through culture

centralize crisis – Alberta’s Ministry of Communication and Public Engagement faced a moment when pandemic-speed demands collided with years of decentralization. The leadership team shifted from trying to enforce compliance to changing the ministry’s underlying norms and rituals—

When the pandemic forced Alberta’s Ministry of Communication and Public Engagement to move faster than ever. it exposed a fault line the organization had grown comfortable with. The ministry had built a proud. decentralized model over the years—yet the crisis made clear that resources needed to be centralized for rapid deployment.

The problem was never simply logistical. It was cultural. Centralizing valuable resources meant asking executives and communications professionals to give up control they had cultivated inside client ministries such as Justice. Public Safety and Education. And many resisted—not necessarily through open defiance, but through subtle workarounds that slowed the new strategy.

For the ministry’s leadership team. the warning signs arrived the hard way: colleagues undermined the effort. frustration grew among those who wanted to work in the new way. and calls to return to the old system became louder. Leadership had declared the centralization effort mission-critical, but it was beginning to look like it was running off the rails.

At the heart of the struggle was a history. In the ministry’s earlier structure. key personnel were embedded in each client ministry—an arrangement built on the belief that each client ministry could be best served by communications professionals dedicated to its unique mission and needs. For a long time, that model made sense.

But the pandemic. along with the rapid advancement of technology. political and social instability. and an increasingly volatile social media environment. changed what “timely” could mean. The organization had to surge resources quickly to where they could be most impactful, sometimes within days or even hours.

Leaders began to see that the ministry’s decentralization had produced a fiercely independent culture. Executives took pride in delivering for their clients and fought to secure resources needed to serve them well. Some had dedicated resources completely under their control. and centralizing them required them to surrender to a central authority they felt little kinship with.

Then came the second realization: resistance was not what it seemed. The ministry’s leadership team moved through a day-long strategy session, not to impose a tougher command-and-control plan, but to uncover the cultural triggers behind the conflict.

The findings complicated the leadership’s earlier assumptions. What they had treated as insubordinate behavior turned out to be dedicated professionals trying to do their best.

Over the years, communications professionals within the ministry were encouraged to take a “client first” perspective. Their evaluations were heavily influenced by how their performance was perceived by client ministries. If someone wanted to get ahead. the path was clear: fight for resources so they could serve their client ministry better than anyone else.

When the strategy changed, those norms did not. People continued to do their jobs the way they had learned—working around the new strategy when necessary to secure resources their clients felt they needed and deserved. Even with the best intentions, the desire to live up to the “client first” standards was dooming the centralization effort.

So the ministry shifted its approach again—this time toward rituals, the recurring practices that encode norms into day-to-day culture.

Leadership recognized that even after efforts to implement the new strategy, existing rituals still reinforced the old model. Staff evaluations, for example, continued to be heavily weighted to feedback from client ministries. The insight pushed them to redesign key rituals so they would reinforce the new norms rather than the previous ones.

One of the central moves was the creation of “executive ops” meetings. Those meetings brought centralized teams and client-facing teams together to collaborate, troubleshoot problems, and coordinate resources.

That change, in turn, allowed the ministry to reimagine emergency response communications. In the past. crises were managed largely by one client team. which limited resources. led to burnout. and generated high overtime costs. Under the new ritual, emergency response communications could deploy more resources—faster, cheaper, and more efficiently—with dramatically improved outcomes.

The new approach was tested during a recent teachers strike. The situation demanded strategies targeting multiple constituencies, including parents, students, the general public, and the teachers themselves. Leaders needed to work closely with analysts. social media teams. production people. and other specialists—not only to devise and execute strategies. but to respond as events unfolded at breakneck speed.

That kind of rapid, multi-team coordination would have been nearly impossible in the old decentralized culture. Under the new regime, the increased collaboration and the ability to scale resources quickly proved effective, and helped bring the crisis to a positive conclusion.

Culture is how an enterprise honors its mission. In the ministry’s leadership effort, that principle became a practical guide: if the mission required faster coordination, then the culture had to reward it.

In his book Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance. Lou Gerstner wrote. “Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game. it is the game. In the end. an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value… What does the culture reward and punish – individual achievement or team play. risk taking or consensus building?” The Alberta case offered an answer that was less theoretical and more immediate: when norms and rituals were aligned to the mission. people who believed in that mission could move together.

Leadership also learned why incentives weren’t enough. The traditional playbook for these situations is to design incentives to encourage compliance and punish resistance. potentially even firing transgressors to make an example. But incentives can backfire. especially when they clash with how people want to belong and how they want to see themselves. The communications professionals in Alberta were not trying to sabotage the new strategy; they were trying to live up to the standards their organization had spent years teaching them.

As the ministry concluded, asking people to stop being who they think they are is unlikely to succeed. If the goal is behavior change, rituals have to change—so people can find new ways to honor the mission they already believe in.

Alberta Ministry of Communication and Public Engagement crisis communications executive ops organizational culture decentralization emergency response teachers strike social media incentives