What are you doing to make culture tangible in your organization?
To show you, I am filling out this simple Culture Map.
If you want to change or transform culture, be it in your whole organization or in your team, then you have to go beyond vague values and be very specific about the actual behaviors that make up those values.
For this you need to run a cultural assessment - I have my own that I provide to my clients. This assessment helps you gain nuanced insights into perceptions of the culture and where the main tensions exist.
Once you have those tensions, you can decide which ones you want to work on and how you are going to end up removing barriers be those individual or systemic.
The culture map here helps you by mappin these influences (barriers) and can be used to align stakeholders, however it is not enough to just put them down on a map, you need to of course find the right strategies for implementation and change.
By leveraging the science of behavior change you can address the things that need to change, not from gut or luck, but from an evidence based that is more solid and less risky.
If you don't do this, then you are just blindly throwing time, resources and good will down the drain.
I used to ignore this in my early years of working in change and transformation, because I didn't know any better... but it is learnable and you can get better outcomes for the people and the organization.
In the end, change cannot happen if we don't know what we need to change and how to change it, and if we keep leaving culture as non tangible and fluffy.
Culture Map Template by Dave Gray and adapted by Strategyzer.