Culture can stall and kill a change programme with hardly the blink of an eye. Where this might happen then it can help to undertake a cultural audit to offer a clearer view of the culture you are dealing with. This knowledge is used to aid the diagnostics process, ensure that an appropriate change methodology is applied and test the viability of any solutions.
This is clearly an art as opposed to a science. An organisation’s culture is simply an approximate description of the preferred style that the people choose to use. As you deconstruct the organisation, so the approximation becomes less accurate because individual personalities and tendencies will emerge. At best, the outcome of any audit must be treated with some skepticism and at worse treated on a par with a daily horoscope. However, it is fair to say that, in general, it is possible to get a feel for a culture even if it cannot be specifically calibrated. A simple test is to walk into the foyer of three different hotels. There is every chance that within a few minutes, you will have an intuitive grasp of the culture of the organisation. You will be able to guess what is acceptable to the staff, who wields the power and the extent to which the organisation has verve and energy. Although you would not invest your money on the strength of this, it can offer enough data on which to make a number of broad suppositions about an organisation’s operating style.
It can help to think of an organisation as an empty canvass that has been painted with a varied mix of different attributes. Like the artist who slowly builds up a picture, often not knowing quite how it will end up, as an organisation grows it adopts a range of different cultural attributes. When investigating the make-up of the picture, the consultant’s role is to deconstruct the colour base and understand how the way they have been mixed contributes to the end picture. Just consider what a varied mix of pictures an artist can create from a simple range of colours. In the same way, although each organisation will be unique, it is essentially made up from the same set of cultural attributes explained in more detail below:
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Artefacts - Physical evidence left in the wake of human interaction that can help to indicate a particular cultural bias. This can include rituals, behavioural norms, shared language, reward systems, logos and office design. |
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Beliefs - What does the organisation value and regard as being important? This is seen in the moral and ethical codes offered by the business. The difficulty is that beliefs are deeply personal things, so in trying to define them at a global level, averaging or levelling will occur and some degree of compromise can take place. |
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Control - Is power based around the structure of the organisation or capability of the individual? To what extent does this leverage negative or positive political action within the organisation? |
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Discourse - What is the balance between the open and hidden elements within the business? To what extent will people open up and talk about issues in a shared environment and to what extent are issues held for debate in private, closed and secure groups? This gap between the open and hidden levels of discourse can be used to understand the difference between the espoused and actual cultural factors. |
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Energy - Where is the energy expended? Is it on issues that are concerned with internal processes or is it externally orientated, where the primary focus is on the customers, suppliers and stakeholders? |
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Flow - How do people move in, out and within the organisation? What is the accepted churn rate, what is the balance between formal and informal recruitment processes and why do people leave the business? |
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Generative - To what extent does the organisation understand and drive its capability to innovate and learn? Do individuals feel that they are empowered to develop themselves? To what extent is knowledge shared between individuals and what infrastructure exists to facilitate the sharing of knowledge? |
However, culture is dynamic and unpredictable, hence dissecting an organisation at any time, region or level will produce a range of varying ideas and themes, some of which align while others conflict. Any cultural analysis can only offer a subjective snapshot and should never be treated as the definitive model of an organisation’s style of interaction.
(c) Mick Cope