Weekend Reading – The Tool Series: Design Your Organisation’s Culture with the Culture Design Canvas

Dear all,

My summer break – and looking out of the window, summer as such – is over. The good news: Weekend Reading is back, as promised. Over the fall we will share a series of helpful tools and methods that we use in our client engagements and workshops in this newsletter.

Organizational cultures, “the way things are done around here” (as Deal & Kennedy put it in their book on the subject) are changing more rapidly than ever due to Covid-accelerated digitalization, work from home, as well as the Millenials’ increasingly influential views on purpose and work-life balance.

When advising organizations on matters relating to Digitalization, Practical Strategy with OKRs, and Agile Working Models, we encourage them to also take a conscious approach to their culture. The days of unrestrained “tough-guy macho” and “work-hard play-hard” cultures are definitively over.

While one cannot “re-design” an organization’s culture in a workshop or two, it is important to take stock of current culture and clarify intentions with respect to its future. If differences turn out to be meaningful, and they usually do, the organization needs to set themselves concrete objectives relating to culture change and follow through on them.

A tool that we found helpful to achieve this is the Culture Design Canvas by Gustavo Razzetti. It aids documenting current culture and facilitates a discussion about where you want to be.

Here are three links to the CDC and related resources:

The PDF Download

Download the Culture Design Canvas from the Liberationist’s web site or use it on-line with Mural

Click to view!

I need to get back to designing a workshop for the “reboot” of a department after reorganization (culture change will play a role there as well!).

Have a great weekend!

Cheers,
Godehard