Service Snapshot: Diagnose and refine culture

Enables organisations to get their culture to evolve to meet the needs of a changing environment.

Challenge

The world around us is constantly changing at a rapid rate.  This makes it more complicated for managers to keep abreast of developments, accurately predict the future and to chart a strategic course to ensure a favourable outcome for their organisation. The failure rate of most organisational change programmes is alarming. Very often the reason for failure is because whilst strategies changed the culture did not. 

Few people dispute that highly successful organisations like Wal Mart, Microsoft, Disney, Coca Cola and Toyota owe much of their success to a strong culture.

Powerful cultures drive benefits both at an organisational level and at an individual level.  At the organisation level, for example, it makes clear what is expected, creates a common language and binds people together.  At the individual level it impacts morale, commitment and productivity for example.

To help managers get the benefit of a strong and adaptive culture they need a framework that enables them to diagnose and refine their culture to meet the needs of a changing environment.

Solution

We use a method designed to identify current organisational culture versus an ideal future state and is based on a model known as The Competing Values Framework developed by Cameron & Quinn.

Their model identifies the key characteristics of your organisation’s culture and assumes that there are four different "models" of organisational culture – clan, market, adhocracy and hierarchical and six essential dimensions of culture - Organisational characteristics, Leadership characteristics, Management style, Organisational glue, Strategic emphasis and Criteria for (judging) success.

The model was born out of studying organisational effectiveness.  Thirty nine factors of effectiveness were statistically analysed and this identified two major dimensions that organised factors into four main clusters:

• flexibility vs. stability and internal vs. external

• Each quadrant is given a label to distinguish its most notable cultural characteristics

The process involves completing a short questionnaire and attending a series of workshops.

Benefits

• Widely used around the world

• Easy to use

• Allows you to measure and map where your organisation stands today and where you want to be

• Enables you to match action to specific measures of culture

• Helps you structure and formulate an action programme

• Inclusive process that drives buy-in across organisation