In many of the discussions we have about how organizations perform, the theme of culture comes up. Culture seems to be a key driver of success in organizations, for example in the area of customer focus. This immediately raises the question: can culture be created?
Opinions on whether you can seem to be strongly divided, so we generally choose a pragmatic starting point. When looking at culture from this pragmatic perspective, it also helps to have a practical definition that you can work with. We often use the following working definition:
"Culture is how organizations solve problems."
This definition is far from perfect, but it helps us ask the following questions that tell us a lot about the culture in an organization (and how to change it).
What do they see as a problem in this organization?
How do they solve these problems?
The first question gives us a lot of information about the practiced (unwritten) values in an organization. For example, are people called out if they are late for a meeting? Is that a problem or not?
The second question helps us to place interventions. For example, if people are not called out but there were complaints afterwards, you can break this through with an intervention to see if that breaks the culture.
Of course, this is a bit of a simplification, as you still have to find out whether there is a pattern. Whether this pattern is in the team or in the organization (many cultural characteristics are stronger at team level and linked to the task of the team).And whether the change will stick.
But it is a good start to a practical cultural research that also directly gives rise to interventions that you can best carry out together with culture bearers. If these interventions have a positive effect, we can at least pretend that we are working on changing the culture.
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