Organizational Culture.
I’ve watched the understanding and application of organizational culture go from relatively unknown and novel to an acknowledged and necessary element of organizational functioning and advantage. We’ve worked hard with our clients to help them understand culture, why it is important, how to work with it, manage it and transform it. After all these years it is still a very stimulating topic to discuss, define, operationalize or apply.

Just because organizational culture is a powerful force, and it is, does not mean it’s easy to define or apply as a construct for change. One technique to better understanding the dynamics and nature of organization culture is to compare it with other powerful forces, like Weather or Gravity.

We use this technique in our LEAD program, Culture Change Workshop and Culture Kaizen events. Weather and gravity work well because they are powerful forces which, like culture, we tend to take for granted... until they can no longer be ignored. Admittedly, these two forces also work because most of the leaders we work with are not physicist of meteorologists. This comparative technique helps make organizational culture accessible and relevant to leaders.

When we challenge leaders to compare the dynamics and nature of organizational culture to the dynamics and nature of gravity and weather we get some wonderfully insightful responses.

The shared spaces between Culture and weather tend to be:
• Both weather and culture influence our behaviors and habits.
• Both weather and culture are the result of many different elements interacting dynamically.
• Both weather and culture are attractive to and affect people differently.
• Overtime, most will adapt to both.
• Both weather and culture affect our moods and how we feel about the things we do.
• Both get talked about a great deal around the water cooler.
• Neither are universal and both can vary from location to location.
• With a focus on the immediate and near term, both can feel unpredictable and chaotic.
• With a historical and long term view both have definite and predictable trends, ebbs and flows.
• Transformative change in either is often precipitated by significant events which emerge rapidly,    exponentially and sometimes out of the “blue”.
• And finally, to position oneself as a credible expert in either is just plain asking for it.

I am most interested in your comments and additions to the list above.

I also ask you to help finish this “around about” way of defining and understanding organizational culture by contributing your ideas on how the nature and dynamics of Organizational Culture and gravity are similar. Please post a comment, question or idea.

I will continue to write on this topic, further defining culture, providing case studies and guidance on culture change.