September 7, 2010
Working with Organisations
The genesis of many of the intractible problems facing organisation's and teams today can be tracked back to a lack of understanding of the culture. We see many projects relating to the alignment of behaviour to value statements/brand, development of innovation programmes, encouraging diversity, and collaboration across teams flounder as a result of not fully understanding the base level issues in the first place. Making sense of the cultural landscape today is often one of the most difficult objectives that leaders and people managers have to achieve. A misaligned understanding of the culture landscape today can impact future organisational performance.
"The story - from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace - is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind for the purpose of understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories."
- Ursula K. Le Guin
Although often viewed as ‘fluffy’ by many leaders, cultural misalignment or issues that aren’t addressed can seriously hamper organisational performance. Culture surveys and other tools that are currently employed to gain an understanding of the ‘climate’ within organisations are woefully inadequate to gain insight into people’s deeply held beliefs, perceptions and feelings.
"We know more than we can say, and we say more than we can write down"
For example, interviews and surveys display the following limitations:
• the questions utilised for these techniques assume the validity of a pre-existing hypothesis (it is virtually impossible to develop the survey questions without a hypothesis). The problem is that with the hypothesis visible to the person being surveyed, interviewers tend to find only what they are looking for i.e. they tend to prove their own hypothesis and no novel insights emerge;
• interviewees tend to provide neat (rationalised) answers when asked for their opinions which normally doesn’t resemble their real-world experiences at all
• survey and interview questions provide minimal context—how many times have you answered a survey and found yourself thinking: ‘It depends…’? Further to this knowledge is very contextual – we only know that we know when we find ourselves in a relevant context. During an interview, interviewees provide the answers that are on the top of their minds in the absence of broader context
If in addition you need to discover or uncover things that interviewees believe may land them in trouble or put them in a bad light, these traditional survey techniques are too open to gaming or manipulation to provide any value at all. If interesting patterns are discovered, they often cannot be explained unless further research is commissioned.
Our approach to understanding culture is based on collecting and making sense of large amounts of narrative (stories). People are more likely to disclose sensitive information in story form than when answering direct, questionnaire-type questions.
The genesis of many of the intractible problems facing organisation's and teams today can be tracked back to a lack of understanding of the culture. We see many projects relating to the alignment of behaviour to value statements/brand, development of innovation programmes, encouraging diversity, and collaboration across teams flounder as a result of not fully understanding the base level issues in the first place. Making sense of the cultural landscape today is often one of the most difficult objectives that leaders and people managers have to achieve. A misaligned understanding of the culture landscape today can impact future organisational performance.
"The story - from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace - is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind for the purpose of understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories."
- Ursula K. Le Guin
Although often viewed as ‘fluffy’ by many leaders, cultural misalignment or issues that aren’t addressed can seriously hamper organisational performance. Culture surveys and other tools that are currently employed to gain an understanding of the ‘climate’ within organisations are woefully inadequate to gain insight into people’s deeply held beliefs, perceptions and feelings.
"We know more than we can say, and we say more than we can write down"
For example, interviews and surveys display the following limitations:
• the questions utilised for these techniques assume the validity of a pre-existing hypothesis (it is virtually impossible to develop the survey questions without a hypothesis). The problem is that with the hypothesis visible to the person being surveyed, interviewers tend to find only what they are looking for i.e. they tend to prove their own hypothesis and no novel insights emerge;
• interviewees tend to provide neat (rationalised) answers when asked for their opinions which normally doesn’t resemble their real-world experiences at all
• survey and interview questions provide minimal context—how many times have you answered a survey and found yourself thinking: ‘It depends…’? Further to this knowledge is very contextual – we only know that we know when we find ourselves in a relevant context. During an interview, interviewees provide the answers that are on the top of their minds in the absence of broader context
If in addition you need to discover or uncover things that interviewees believe may land them in trouble or put them in a bad light, these traditional survey techniques are too open to gaming or manipulation to provide any value at all. If interesting patterns are discovered, they often cannot be explained unless further research is commissioned.
Our approach to understanding culture is based on collecting and making sense of large amounts of narrative (stories). People are more likely to disclose sensitive information in story form than when answering direct, questionnaire-type questions.
address:
PO Box 91,
Lorn , NSW 2320
Australia
Phone:
61 2 4930 5698 (Viv)
61 0 402 308 403 (Chris)
PO Box 91,
Lorn , NSW 2320
Australia
Phone:
61 2 4930 5698 (Viv)
61 0 402 308 403 (Chris)
Emerging Options © 2007 All rights reserved. PO Box 2042 Boronia Park NSW 2111 Australia