Conversation is where culture is created, sustained, and takes on a life of its own.  Through dialog, people both learn about and understand the culture and contribute to it.  Having (and creating the environment for) intentional conversations to help shape the culture is critical during times of change.

Ways to encourage intentional conversation include:

1. Nurturing storytelling – shared experiences, collective narratives, collective design, communities of interest, etc.
2. Capture a visual history – use video, photos, animation, graphic facilitation, or motion stories to help communication the culture in a way that helps people connect with the core messages.
3. Enhance group collaboration and communication by providing tools and techniques to participants, including appreciative inquiry, conversational leadership, facilitation tools, gaming options and other ways to help the group identify cultural barriers and move past them.
4. Build relationships among the group (as appropriate for your organizational health objectives).

Groups are where culture emerges for an organization.  Without at least two people talking together, we have only our individual/internal cultural in play – organizational culture is by definition comprised of multiple inputs.  Without group work, you cannot understand your culture or influence it.

1. Strategy articulation tools that are used with groups (not just a handful of executives).
2. Customer service improvement workshops
3. World cafe exercises
4. Future search or other employee engagement techniques
5. Improved knowledge management that includes social network capabilities

Provide a fertile ground for collaboration if culture is a barrier to the change you need to see.

How do you know if your organization is healthy?  Health doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone, so it is tough to just look at the surface.  Consider runners – marathon runners look very different from sprinters, but they are both healthy frames for the purpose at hand.

A highly entreprenurial market, a young company, a utility service, a product company, a service provider, all of these dimentions affect what health will look like for your organization.

There are some good tools on the market to understand culture, including the Denison  model, the competing values framework from Cameron and Quinn, and Lencioni’s Four Discipline’s of organizational health.  First, tho, we recommend you do the following:

1. Understand the cultural dimensions of your strategic plan
2. Use assessment techniques that will measure what’s important to you
3. Assess progress locally as well as enterprise wide – some sub-cultures will evolve more or less quickly, and may have very different needs.

Today I had the pleasure of presenting with three of my colleagues on ‘the Cultural Conundrum’ at the Association for Change Management Professionals (ACMP) conference in Las Vegas (check it out:  www.acmp.info/conference/ ). The cultural conundrum is found in the attempts to apply individual change techniques on cultures that are largely impervious to them.

The conference is full of amazing people who are working on change as a discipline.  We had the opportunity to talk through the ways in which changing culture is different from changing individuals. Most change practices focus on cognitive techniques that are then scaled to work with groups of individuals. So communication plans, change agent networks, etc., are designed with underlying assumptions and commitments to how people change, rather than how cultures change or adopt changed environments.

We propose that culture change requires techniques that incorporate a ‘social constructionist’ perspective on organizations, where communication is at the core of everything that creates the organization. Through organic communication and dialog (read unscripted…. unmanaged…. off plan), the culture emerges continuously, and is shaped, and directed in subtle and overt ways.  Specifically, we suggest the following five approaches to affecting culture:

1. Determine what cultural health means in your organization
2. Create strategies for cultural change that include group work
3. Establish conversation as a core business process
4. Help leaders join the conversation
5. Build infrastructure to support emerging conversations

More on each of these in the coming week.