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• Identifies the implications for strategy implementation
  
  
• Recognizes the importance of context (and the problem with industry norms)
  
  
• Defines the required culture in business terms (and the problem with culture ‘ideals')
  
  
• Uses a four phase approach to data collection
  
  
• Provides practical solutions for complex organizational problems

Many of the culture surveys currently available in the marketplace provide comparisons against industry norms. While this may be interesting and even useful for broad-based academic studies of culture across industries, it does not provide the information needed to accelerate strategy implementation in a specific organization.

Organizational culture is strongly influenced by a wide range of contextual factors including the historical context of the organization (i.e. regulatory history), the geo-political climate in which it operates, the national culture and dominant age of groups of organization members and so on. These contextual factors are what make each organization unique from every other organization even in the same industry and geography. This is why our approach includes a significant investment in researching the contextual factors that influence the culture of client organizations.

Of these factors, the most important is the organization's strategic context . Strategic context refers to the factors that influence the organization's strategy, such as the basis for competitive differentiation, growth strategies, and internal capabilities. It defines the framework within which the organization's strategy is determined. It is future-focused and goal-oriented. This is where organizational culture becomes really interesting.

Culture, because it is deeply embedded, is extremely ‘sticky'. It tends to protect itself from perceived threats and is very resilient to change. As a result, it is very important to understand precisely how an organization's unique culture is going to support or impede the implementation of strategy. Armed with this context-rich information, leaders can implement a targeted approach to culture change that can accelerate strategy implementation.

While most of our competitors provide culture survey results in terms of industry percentiles or quartiles, we believe that this approach fails to deliver the quality of information needed to drive culture change and accelerate strategy implementation.

• Industry norms are broad and include organizations with a wide range of sizes, strategies and contexts; the result is a ‘blended' profile of an industry's culture which has little relevance for most firms

• Industry norms do not take into account internal and external contextual factors that interact to create an organization's unique personality or culture
  
  
• Industry norms do not account for strategies that are different or unique; different strategies often require different cultures
  
  
• Industry norms fail to define the ‘field of play' for culture change – the area where there is the greatest probability of sustained success

Most of the culture surveys available recognize the importance of assessing an organization's current culture against a future state to identify required culture change. The solution most commonly used is to have members of the organization complete an ‘ideal' version of the survey to define the culture that they think the organization needs in order to be successful. Our research shows that this has serious flaws including…

• Organizational members are embedded in the culture. As such, they cannot remove themselves from it sufficiently to be able to identify alternatives especially those that are significantly different from their personal experience
  
  
• Ideal for what purpose? Even if it is defined as ‘required to implement our strategy (which it rarely is!)', people's interpretation of what is ‘ideal' in terms of culture, how culture links to strategy and even what the strategy is are going to vary widely
  
  
• Most people confuse organizational culture with climate (work environment) and as a result frequently define culture ideals in terms of a great place to work, not necessarily what is needed to implement strategy

In contrast, the Culture-Strategy Fit Profile™ surveys executives to determine the strategic context of the organization. This provides the future state benchmark against which the current culture is assessed. For example, if executives indicate that the organization needs to differentiate itself based on its ability to bring innovative products and services to market, the culture data is analyzed to determine how it is supporting or getting in the way of delivering on this promise.

Phase 1: CEO Interview
The CEO interview is used to gain insight into the specific challenges and opportunities facing the client organization. This contextual information is extremely valuable in interpreting the results of the strategic context portion of the survey. It also is used as the baseline for assessing the alignment of the leadership team on the strategic context and is what we use as a base if the leadership team fails to be aligned on a strategic direction for the organization.

Phase 2: External Research
We thoroughly research the sector, industry, organization and leadership team of the client organization in order to build a rich contextual profile that is essential to the interpretation of the results, identification of implicaitons and the development of recommendations.

Phase 3: Organizational Culture Definition
Every member of the client organization is given the opportunity to respond to the 80 statements in the culture portion of the on-line survey. The data collected is analyzed using heuristics and emphasizes the identification of patterns that emerge across the categories and item statements in the context of its fit for the organization's strategic context.

Phase 4: Strategic Context Definition
Members of the organization's leadership team complete an additional set of up to 50 statements that define the organization's strategic context. These statements are selected from a menu of options that address a range of strategic topics. Leaders also have the option to customize the statements to their unique situation. The data gathered from this part of the survey is essential to providing the basis for interpreting the data collected in the culture section of the survey and for assessing the alignment of the leadership team on the strategic direction of the organization.

Most of our competitors provide an option for additional consulting services to help client organizations make sense of the results in the survey, develop recommendations and create action plans to address any culture change initiatives that may be required.

The Culture-Strategy Fit Profile™ Report includes suggestions for action that target a few key changes that, if implemented well, will accelerate the culture change process and strategy implementation. These suggestions are both practical and actionable and are based on our depth and breadth of experience in culture change, strategy implementation and organization development.

We approach the development of recommendations and action plans for culture change as a targeted business initiative. To do this, we clearly define the ‘field of play' where culture change has the highest probability for sustainable success. The ‘field of play' for culture change is an important outcome of the context definition phases of our approach.

For example, people are often attracted to work in organizations such as health care or policing because of vocational career interests; they feel a strong personal desire to contribute by making a difference in the area of their chosen career. In these types of organizations, anything that is perceived to be a threat to the values and beliefs that underlie this will be strongly resisted. In fact, if this happens, the resistance will expand to affect other aspects of the organization thereby effectively shrinking the ‘field of play' within which culture change can occur.


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