We’ve all been there – your organisation needs to take on a new contract; there is a direct competitor and you need to differentiate; you’ve merged or you are taking on a new team.
What do you do? You enter strategy development mode of course.
At Then Somehow… we’ve all run companies as founders, managing directors or senior mangers. We’ve worked in media, research and design. We’ve worked for big companies and small companies and importantly we have all experienced the highs and the lows, the pressures and the pleasures of work.
What we have all observed is that leaders love a strategy. Love a big idea and love creating a plan for how they might deliver it.
The less love-able bit, the process of ensuring the strategy will have buy-in, will be understood, adopted by everyone in the organisation and guaranteed to be deliver is too often neglected. That’s the messy bit.
That is the bit that we love.
Making strategy land
How do you ensure a strategy is not just a piece of paper? If they think of doing so at all, leaders rely all too readily on the operating system of their organisation for success, how the HR or finance systems are run, what the cash flow and budgets look like, tinkering around the edges. Their problem is that they are looking at the wrong operating system.
The operating system they should be looking at is the one that shapes and defines every input and output the organisation touches — company culture. That culture is the sum of what we feel, believe, and do in our organisation.
Only by understanding that culturecan you consciously shape the direction of your organisation, write a strategy that will work, that will enact the change you need. When you know where you’re starting from, you know where you can go next.
The muddle of metrics
The stock response to the need to understand where we are at is the employee survey. Leaders get the idea that they need to hear what people are experiencing as part of making a change. They want a benchmark, evidence that what they do next has worked when they measure again.
So out goes the survey with 50 or more questions in various shades. And back comes metrics: black and white, hard reassuring proof. This is where we are. This is what people experience. Then when we tinker with process and systems and we measure again, we can see how far we have moved. Evidence of success.
But do the metrics really tell us anything useful? Lot’s of charts over lots of pages, often showing the same data cut in various ways. (Why are these reports so ugly?) But does it tell us what to do? Does it tell us why? Does it tell us how?
How often are we beguiled by a nice round score? Like the client-who-shall-remain-nameless, who was pleased that 80 percent of their staff agreed with the statement “I have not experienced bullying at work.” That’s a great score, no problem here. Except that in an organisation of 400 people 80 did not agree with that statement. 80 people may be feeling bullied.
Metrics can camouflage the real issues. They also impose a framework of value that is not always helpful. Once we measure a thing we want, our scores go up. There may be unintended consequences of pursuing a rising number. What else gets overlooked? What other things that aren’t being measured get distorted? We want to compare ourselves to others. But who’s to say that what is right for one organisation is right for another? The form of a fox is of no better or worse than that of a bat. Actually what matters is what is right for this specific context, cold numbers may not be helpful here.
Then there are the questions that you can’t answer. Happy Melly’s Jurgen Appelo in a podcast with Ricardo Semler (10mins in) acknowledged: ‘Frankly I have no idea how to measure happiness.’
That may be an issue for an organisation that seeks to increase happiness at work. Happiness and culture are intangible things: will-o’-the-wisp. So how as leaders can we usefully measure, identify and evidence it – so we might be able to shape and improve it? How do we make the invisible visible?
A catalyst for culture change
That’s the kind of problem we enjoy at Then Somehow… after all, we make tools for the messy stuff, so we developed a tool we called Culture Catalyst.
It has been designed by us — leaders and owners of organisations — to help people like us. People who want to learn what is happening within their culture, so they can implement a strategy that they know will work, so they can test and iterate their efforts to effect change.
We believe that if you can understand your company culture you can:
- talk about what needs to change
- focus your attention
- benchmark and measure progress
- design strategy you know will work
If you can’t talk about your culture, your context, you can’t act with intention and can only respond in a reflexive or conditioned way.
Metrics don’t capture culture. Stories do.
Culture Catalyst maps your organisation’s strengths and weaknesses, not from the traditional lenses of profit and loss, but through the beliefs, feelings and behaviours your people experience and the symbols and stories they share.
But we do have metrics. You have to have metrics. Without metrics you free yourself too much from the conversation. Organisations need to measure. Leaders need to understand and metrics do give value. So we use a combination of data and stories. These are blended together to form a single narrative, helping make your culture visible, tangible, measurable and changeable.
This narrative consists of two parts:
- A digital quantitative survey, customised and normative.
- Qualitative listening activities, informed by the quantitative data.
We measure and map against seven dimensions of culture culture, which are:
- basic functions
- autonomy
- personal relationships
- corporate relationships
- innovation
- alignment
- higher purpose
You can read an example of these seven different variables here. But each programme is bespoke and there are always other components keyed in so we can look specifically at particular areas of interest.
A Culture Catalyst Case Study
So who has used it and what effect have they seen?
Propellernet are a search marketing agency, regularly judged to be one of Europe’s best places to work. They are interested in continuous improvement and finding that ‘extra ten percent’ that helps fulfil their purpose of ‘making life better’.
The whole company of 50 people took part in the Culture Catalyst programme including the leadership, team members, and a new product division. Everyone completed a customised online survey and had follow up one-to-one interviews. Those conversations ranged wide and far, delving into individual background, aspirations for the future, life as it is now. We went on to produce posters that represented individuals’ experience and expectations of being there. It was messy, fun and the posters stayed around for weeks: a symbol of the intention behind the programme.
We were able to share a narrative that revealed, among many things, the different experience of work at various levels in the organisation. Understanding that helped managers find ways to adapt their behaviours, reset their assumptions and ultimately reduce that experience gap. Importantly it helped the leadership team understand that even in the most happy of companies, there actually was room for improvement. And that was OK because we were also able to identify things they could do to become even better.
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