Culture scan: corporate anthropology

Virtually all organisations these days talk about essential organisational culture change. Often in terms of 'we must get rid of this culture of eternal complaining'; 'we want more pro-activity' and 'greater accountability!' The management often opts for structural change, in the hope that this will lead to a change of culture. Or, following an enthusiastic start, the priorities change, leading to one change after another.

It is a shocking realisation that three-quarters of reorganisations, mergers and change projects fail. One major reason for this is that a 'culture change' all too often gets stuck in general formulations. Often, the translation of values and corporate values into real, concrete, desired behaviour is not clear enough, and a great deal of attention is devoted to advocacy, rather than doing.

 

In addition, the most important diagnostic question often remains unanswered: what are the basic assumptions of the current culture? People don’t behave the way they do for no reason. The behaviour patterns that have developed serve (or have served) a purpose and are anchored in the context within which people work and live. So: what benefits are there for each individual and what does the organisation as a whole gain from the current behaviour, the current culture? What are the implicit ‘rules’ of the group?

 

A culture scan can answer these questions. The starting point for this is to map out the current and the desired cultures (i.e.: the beliefs and behaviour patterns in relation to the environment). During the analysis, we will answer the strategic question: how can we best manage the change(s) in culture, in order that the desired vision and strategy can be realised in practice and reflected by the organisation’s culture?

There are many suppliers of online culture scans who claim that they can draw up a thorough culture profile on the basis of just a few questions. HumanDimensions sees any such online questionnaire more as an optional extra, in addition to the real data: the unwritten rules and behaviour patterns as these can be observed on the shop floor, during meetings and in the canteen. HumanDimensions carries out a live culture scan and describes your organisation culture from an anthropological perspective.

Cultural anthropologists are superbly qualified to draw up a thorough and penetrating analysis of your organisation’s culture. After all, they have been trained to be professional culture detectives.

Anthropology is a scientific discipline that studies people and their cultures from the perspective of those people themselves. Culture is seen as dynamic and constantly changing. Questions anthropologists ask include: What motivates people to do what they do? To live how they live and to think how they think? What behaviour can we observe and where does this behaviour come from? The methods used for this are called participating observation: click here for further information on corporate anthropology.

A culture scan is carried out by one of our cultural anthropologists, using the research method participatory observation: sit in with  meetings, observe, have lunch in the canteen, wait at reception as a customer, have coffee with colleagues and conduct interviews with a cross-section of the organisation. The observations and findings from this 'field work' are then ordered and act as input for more detailed questions based on observation, aimed at identifying the forces that feed and maintain the current behaviour. In more technical terms, you could call this a root cause analysis into dysfunctional behaviour at organisation / team level.

We will determine how many days we will need to draw up this ethnography of the workplace, depending on the assignment and the size of the organisation.

A culture scan gives insight into the forces that stimulate the current (old) behaviour: the unconscious motivating forces, habits, unwritten rules, routines and patterns of behaviour. It exposes the dilemmas within the organisation and in doing so offers handles on better managing these dilemmas and on formulating and implementing the desired behaviour.

If appropriate, we can present the results of the culture scan to your employees in the form of a theatershow.

In order to arrive at a real implementation of new behaviour, we will challenge you to link the desired culture to your corporate strategy, and then translate this into very concrete behaviour. HumanDimensions can then support you in 'injecting' the desired behaviour into the organisation and then spreading this 'desired behaviour virus' through informal networks. To do so, we use the Viral Change™ method.