Do you need to get to grip with your company’s culture?
- Because you’re planning a next-gen internal communications campaign?
- Because you’re leading the integration of a new business unit or company?
- Because you know you need to align the new strategy to the here-and-now?
How can you learn about typical behaviours, and the work values, attitudes and beliefs that underpin and influence them?
You can start by looking at legacy training materials and existing process manuals for evidence of practices. (We can do this together or simply help crystallise your findings.)
But we encourage you to remember: there’s always a gap between the theory and the practice.
We find conversational interviews, Sense-making story aggregation, role plays and shadowing are tools to apply if legacy process manuals and training materials no longer exist, or don’t reveal enough about legacy practices.
Interviews: In-depth conversations by interested, informed third-parties provide a powerful supplement to survey-based findings. Well-documented interviews – in prose or on camera – give real weight to anecdotes about
- where corners are cut and trade-offs made
- who can be trusted and relied upon
- where management isn’t walking the talk
- poor support or inadequate training
- gaps and fault-lines that pinpoint opportunities to innovate
Sense-Making: Using sophisticated software called the Sense-Maker™ Suite, we can rapidly analyse stories collected from 1000′s of people in order to patterns in actual thoughts and beliefs. Tapping into the true experience of so many people is a powerful tool when the gap between culture “theory” and day-to-day “practice” is proving hard to close.
Role-plays: With our theatre associate The Big Wheel, we work with teams and change catalysts to spot the situations that are representative and spotlight them using theatre role-plays. From that point, it’s hard to stop the group’s interrogation and “what-if” discussions that drive meaningful change…!
Shadowing: This is an ethnographic process that is often the kernel for other Throughline workplace services. In shadowing, we spent part or all of a day with team members at the sharp end of a business process or change phase. Shadowing gives us practical, real-world exposure to working reality, off the back of which we can build trust, credibility, incisive question frameworks, compelling role-play scripts and chart the journey for our offering called Imbibe.