CultureByDesign, not Default
“It’s not the strongest, swiftest, most ferocious who survive. It is the most adaptable.” Charles Darwin
It has never been more important for organizations to adapt, collaborate, innovate and learn amidst significant external change. It has long been proven (Kotter and Heskitt, 1992) that strong cultures support performance by creating reliability that customers, suppliers, employees and stock analysts embrace – delivering what’s promised, upholding quality standards and being consistent. But strong cultures often impede responsiveness to change, to dealing with complexity and learning faster than the competition (Sorenson, 2002). Especially during discontinuous change, such as we face now, strong organizations are most often crippled by their own organizational DNA.
It’s now vital for organizations to understand not just their culture strengths and opportunity areas, but also the culture dynamics these create to support or impede future success. From the board to the lowest level of the organization, across customers, suppliers and business partners, understanding culture and shaping it more deliberately is the new competitive edge.
Your culture roadmap
Our goal is to help you leverage your organizational culture to drive your strategy and achieve new levels of performance while shaping the mindsets, beliefs, norms of behavior and operating practices required for strategic change. We help organizations recognize priority areas for attention so they can craft high impact, practical culture roadmaps that accelerate learning and adoption of the kinds of behaviors needed for the new world. A culture roadmap prepares leaders for their role as amplifiers of the culture, focuses attention and resources on a small set of priority areas and brings groups together to co-create new ways of getting things done. Importantly, it respects and builds on the culture strengths of the past and present while creating agility for the future. And that’s what organizations need to survive and thrive amidst discontinuous change.
Assess your current cultureroadmap Click the filefolder for a Culture Roadmap Assessment. Make copies and explore with your colleagues where your organization's culture roadmap can be strengthened - or where to start!
