workshops&certification

Culture by Design (not default)

As organizations face new economic, geographic, environmental and business challenges, the complexity of knowledge sharing, collaboration, innovation and productivity improvement is escalating, making it more important to understand and proactively shape behaviors, patterns and dynamics within organizations. Those organizations that seek out engaging, innovative and self-sustaining approaches for building positive dynamics that will take performance to the next level and, as well, root out negative dynamics that hold back strategy execution, will break through to new performance levels as the economy recovers.

Culture-Strategy Fit provides leading-edge methods for understanding and acting on the dynamics in organizations that are producing positive and negative outcomes. This includes techniques for bringing out the unique cultural characteristics of each organization and helping groups make high impact plans for shaping management and group behavior and shifting operating practices, structures and systems. Importantly, it transfers self-renewing approaches to people and culture change that allow continuous learning, adaptation and organizational renewal.

Theory Base and Methods

Leaders and practitioners focused on organizational change need an up-to-date theory base, methods and tools that enable you to work effectively on shaping culture across organizations and within units. Too often culture change work is locked in outdated myths and practices that do not change the system and fail to sustain change, deflecting productive time and increasing employee skepticism.  We’ll share our deep research and robust methods so that a powerful culture vision and roadmap can emerge to take the organization and its people to the next level of performance.

Leaders and practitioners need powerful methods and tools to shape
practices and behaviors to fit strategy

Who Should Attend

We offer intensive, experiential workshops focused on culture, culture alignment to strategy and culture change. These workshops are tailored to two audiences, leaders and practitioners in roles such as:

§         Executives and management

§         Change manager and business transformation leaders

§         Senior project managers

§         Human Resources

§         Organizational Development

§         Communications

§         Strategy

The knowledge and skills will be of particular interest to people working with organizations that want to:

§         Clarify a future state culture vision that supports new directions, business models or goals

§         Build advantage through distinctive dynamics that lead to break through performance

§         Minimize productivity and execution blockages that drain energy and time

§         Enhance organizational ability to adapt and innovate

§         Strengthen organizational agility to deal with emerging challenges and complex problems

§         Establish cohesion around a roadmap to shape culture to deliver strategic outcomes

Our workshops are held throughout 2010 in Toronto, Dallas, Atlanta, Brussels and London. Check our web-site for additional offerings.

Culture By Design: Leading Culture

The Leading Culture course is designed for leaders who want to learn how to shape the culture of their organization to support their goals and execution of their strategy. Its focus is on strategies and techniques that leaders can use to achieve sustainable culture change. It is an intensive, hands-on learning experience that provides practical approaches and tools, supported by theory and ongoing, leading-edge research. Using the results of a Culture Health Check (mini-survey) and Leading Culture 360 Feedback Survey, leaders develop a culture change strategy for their team, department or organization.

Culture By Design for Practitioners

The Culture By Design Program for Practitioners is an intensive, hands-on learning experience that provides practical approaches and tools, supported by theory and ongoing research, that are used to:

§         envision a future state culture,

§         examine culture and culture fit to strategy,

§         explore opportunities to strengthen culture and culture-strategy alignment,

§         expand the adoption of new values, practices and behaviors and

§         embrace the new culture of the organization.

The Program consists of three workshops that cover the five phases of the Culture-Strategy Fit Culture Roadmap. These workshops are: Foundations, Advanced Diagnostics and Culture Change. The Culture Roadmap is a robust framework and approach developed, refined and tested over many years working in organizations from a wide range of sectors, industries, geographies and other demographics.

Culture By Design: Foundations

In the two day Foundations workshop you develop a deep understanding of your personal perspective on culture including its biases, potential blind spots and the insights to be gained by considering other perspectives. This is constantly revisited as you learn how to use three approaches to envision future cultures and four approaches to examine current culture and culture fit to strategy in organizations.

Culture By Design: Advanced Diagnostics

The 2.5 day Advanced Diagnostics course begins where Foundations leaves off as you learn four more methods for examining culture in organizations and experiment with the design of multi-method approaches in a variety of situations ranging from the simple to the complex. A key component of this course is the analysis and interpretation of data using a variety of methods such as grounded theory, narrative analysis, systems dynamic mapping, dynamic evaluation and social network analysis.

Culture By Design: Culture Change

At the 4.5 day Culture Change course you will learn approaches and techniques that help to shape organizational culture to support achievement of goals and execution of strategy. This involves exploring leading-edge theory and practice in the area of culture change that includes: defining the field of play for culture change; using an organization's network of practices to accelerate change; engaging people in positive, future-focused interventions; using a viral approach to change behaviors; using action research to achieve change in complex systems; and leveraging the amplifying effect of leader behaviors. A key component of this course is the development of a change strategy and plan to engage the organization, accelerate adoption of the desired practices and behaviors, ensure sustainability of the change, and strengthen culture alignment to strategy and goals.

Certification Programs

To be certified requires that you demonstrate your understanding of and ability to apply the concepts, approaches and tools that you learned in the Culture By Design Program at an acceptable standard of performance.  During the Certification Program you will work one-on-one with our Chief Culture Scientist, Dr. Nancie Evans, who will provide you with guidance, feedback and coaching through the certification process. This is an intensive process that is only available to a limited number of pre-qualified people at any one time.

There are two levels of certification available for practitioners:

Certified Culture Practitioner - available to people who have completed the Foundations and Culture Change courses

Certified Culture Master Practitioner - available to people who have completed the Foundations, Advanced Diagnostics and Culture Change courses

In-House Programs

Culture By Design: Leading Culture - This course is available to organizations who want to offer it as part of their in-house management and leadership development curriculum.

Culture By Design Modules  - Organizations can also choose from a list of modules to design their own course and/or train their leaders and/or internal consultants.

Customized Programs - We also are happy to work with you to design and develop customized workshops tailored to the specific needs of your organization.