What's Your Cultural Strategy?
Drew Jones
Culture & Workplace Consultant // Author of The Open Culture Handbook: Five questions to drive engagement and innovation
In my forthcoming book, Humans @Work, I go to great lengths to point out that standard models of corporate culture consulting leave a lot to be desired. There is no shortage of 'culture experts' who suggest that there are a fixed number of culture types, and there are countless culture 'tools' that will tell you what your 'culture score' is. But we also know that corporate change programs (culture programs in particular) are unsuccessful about 75% of the time.
After Corporate Culture
There's a reason for this lack of success. Too often, companies (and their consultants) approach company culture as a coherent, definable, internal thing, as if it is not part of the broader cultural environments in which people live the rest of their lives (outside of work). Treating corporate culture in this way is what I call the Disneyesque approach to company culture because it is fantastical. Chasing the generic 'gap analysis,' where you say 'today we have a blue culture but what we really want is a green culture,' is a recipe for failure. Furthermore, the Disney model of company culture trivializes Culture (with a capital 'C'). But how to reconcile the two domains of culture?
Companies are subsets of larger cultural realities. That is, most of the cultural action in the world takes place outside of the context of your company. Marketing and advertising professionals know this all too well. Douglas Holt, of the Cultural Strategy Group, has written prolifically about how crowd cultures frame and guide social behavior in ways that are often difficult to predict and/or manage. I think he is onto something.
Developing a Cultural Strategy
A new way forward is for companies to develop a comprehensive outside-in approach to understanding and managing culture. That is, how is your organization (its people, processes, behaviors, etc) situated within the broader and most relevant cultural context in which the business operates? What value do customers find in the product or service? What crowd cultures are drawn to your offerings, and why? Even in the value chain of a B2B business, somewhere along the value-chain there are individual customers, so this is applicable to all sorts of businesses.
What consumer culture trend(s) is the business capitalizing on?
- Big C Culture trends
- Generational trends
- Technology Trends
- Pop Culture Trends
- Lifestyle Trends
Any comprehensive cultural strategy should start with this question. Answering that question and working to fulfill those user needs will orient your company in the right direction. Anthropologist Grant McCracken has done a brilliant job of helping companies orient in this way for years. Think of it as a culture compass. Navigating the cultural world that surrounds your firm is a form of cultural intelligence that is missing from the management of company culture and the development of corporate strategy itself. Typically the notion of cultural intelligence is invoked to talk about cross-cultural insight, but that is far too limiting. All businesses reside within cultures, at home and abroad.
From an anthropological perspective, in order for a company (or its consultants) to have credibility in the domain of culture, it first needs to develop a basic level of cultural intelligence. Once that is established, the challenge of more effectively managing people internally (company 'culture') will be more strategic. It will help you identify the talent that is most relevant to the value proposition, and over time the external positioning (and messaging) of the company will align with internal values and messaging. At that point you have a cultural strategy.