From insights to impact:
Unlocking the hidden dimension
Optimizing performance, transforming the organization, or creating synergies from cultural integration requires you to manage the cultural dynamics and tap the dormant or hidden potential within the cultural landscape of your organization(s). For this, you will need:
- Clarity about the cultural risk- and success factors associated with your specific objective
- A sound change strategy that minimizes the identified risk-factors and optimizes the success factors
- Readiness of yourself and your leadership team to lead with the requisite mindset, skills and tools
- Calibrated set of metrics and tracking systems to gauge progress
Our projects frequently combine the above elements into a high-impact solution to accomplish the specific and unique change objectives of our clients. We service organizations across industries and geographies with our specialization in applying anthropology to a wide variety of challenges. These challenges range from supporting the strategy implementation, improving joint venture performance, enhancing global account management, addressing global talent challenges, advancing diversity & inclusion objectives, developing global leadership development solutions, and others.
Our experience suggests that an anthropologically focused perspectives provides powerful and actionable insights in contrast to the dominant “cultural management” perspective that is too often insufficient to deliver sustainable optimization, transformation, integration or alignment. Our projects apply an anthropologically based perspective that is summarize in our seven basic insights on culture:
1. Culture is not an end in itself, but rather a means to an end; i.e., it is a basic mechanism and dominant strategy for human organizations to adapt to changing external conditions and master new challenges to sustainability
2. The health of a culture is determined by how well it enables a group or organization to sustainably respond to shifting external conditions and emerging challenges
3. Culture is best understood, mapped and assessed as specific patterns of behavior, beliefs (mental models and implicit associations) and emotions that are “expected, reinforced, and rewarded by and within a particular group to produce and re-produce specific outcomes
4. Culture is a ground-level phenomenon, residing in observable patterns of interaction through which members reconcile formal (ideal) and informal (real) dimensions of behavior
5. Leaders - formal and informal - create, transmit, and change culture by what they expect, reinforce, and reward as role models with their decisions and actions; i.e., they are the vector for cultural health and adaptability
6. Accountability for cultural change needs to be established and anchored at personal, group/team, and organizational levels simultaneously
7. The development of cultural competence at all levels of human organization (i.e., the integrated and sustained ability to reduce the cultural risk factors and maximize success factors) of cultural differences and similarities is a developmental and evolutionary process
To learn more about our Basic Insights, the difference with the dominant cultural management perspective, or explore how our approach can assist you in achieving your objectives contact us.
