Management Innovation Explored: Tools for Analyzing Culture
In the quest for on-demand innovation, companies seek to better understand the invisible and intangible aspects that are keeping the enterprise from changing.
“There’s an incredible amount of inertia and basically, energy and momentum that protects the status quo of the organization,” says Dave Gray, Founder of XPLANE and author of The Connected Company and Gamestorming. Gray knows that in order to continue evolving, organizations must be a “connected company.”
Gray defines a connected company as one that is deeply engaged with its workers, partners, and customers. It’s a workplace that is less about control and more about a complex, dynamic system that can learn, adapt and reinvent itself.
Some of those things are visible through behavior, outcomes or results. “Some of them are hidden in terms of just habits and behaviors, and routines that have been so embedded in the work that people don’t even notice them anymore,” Gray adds.
In the ongoing quest for innovation, and the increasing demand for deep engagement with customers, how can a company analyze its own culture?
Gray says there are 3 broad questions that companies can ask to begin to assess their habits:
- What are the barriers in our culture?
- What can we do to make our culture more successful?
- What changes do we need to enable shifts and changes in our culture?
In order to conceptualize these kinds of questions among others, Gray has created the Culture Map to better pinpoint issues or factors that are normally fuzzy, vague, and altogether hard to define. He’s also created the Empathy Map, both a framework and a technique that is one of XPLANE’s most popular methods for understanding user, customers, partners, workers, and other key players.
Harnessing our empathetic skills accelerates product development, consumer insights, innovation, and marketing, but it can also help in culture assessment efforts so we can better “pick apart” and see the gaps between various stakeholders that make up an organization’s ecosystem.
Questions for the Company Striving to Be More ‘Connected’
A visual map of human interactions can be created to show a foundational snapshot of common goals, as well as relationships and accountabilities that exist between workers, adds Rubi Gemmell, Principal at InterarchyIQ LLC.
Gemmell has helped dozens of organizations re-examine their interarchy, or the web of interactions and accountabilities that make up any given group and the work they do.
Her visual tool starts by asking three deceptively simple questions:
- What is the core promise of your organization?
- Who is your real customer?
- Who does that customer feel is accountable to them? Hint: this is usually someone from the lower ranges of the org chart, seldom is it an executive.
In other words, “What is the common goal around which everyone is doing their work?” says Gemmell, describing the underlying question being answered. “It’s an accountability visual, showing how the accountabilities of people connect to each other.” Through such a visual, companies can better capture the ways the different networks of a company work, and are accountable to one another.
Gemmell says it is the frontline where she spends the most time mapping.
“They are the people that don’t get asked. I think they’re undervalued, and they have so much more to offer than they are typically given a chance to do.” She looks to answer: what is it like to really do your job? Who are you accountable to? Who is accountable to you? Again, it is less about an organizational chart and more about how work “really gets done.”
Gemmell says she typically has about 15 cross-functional people in the room, and they usually have not spoken to each other.
Mapping out the central promise, the actual customer, and the relationships and accountabilities in an organization results in many ah-ha moments.
