Culture Change
An organisation cannot change without culture work. This is not new news, and yet culture change remains hard to get hold of in a world where organisations are being held to account more than ever not just for what they do but also how they do it.
An organisation’s culture exists in the patterns of thinking, feeling and relating that are complex and continuously evolving. In the context of what you are trying to achieve, some of these patterns will be helpful, some will not, and they can be hard to identify if you are ‘in it’.
Change imposed from top-down in the form of prescribed ‘from – to’ shifts and conventionally managed programmes of work are rarely successful in our experience. This is because they allow individuals to separate themselves from the organisation’s culture and believe that culture change is being taken care of ‘over there’, rather than inviting everyone to think about their part in shaping the culture and, therefore, how they can contribute to its positive evolution.
Our approach to culture change is based on principles of collaborative inquiry to:
Surface and build collective wisdom of existing cultural patterns
identify which are serving you and which are not, in the context of your organisational purpose and goals
provide a supportive process that enables awareness to be translated into accountability and action, allowing healthier cultural patterns and stories to emerge
In this way, culture change comes from within through system-wide engagement at all levels, rather than mandated from above and lived by few, if any.
