Engineering Organisational Culture with an Integrated Framework

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

Matt Collier is a Senior Industry Fellow at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with Director Peter Thomas — on how to construct an integrated framework that stitches together an organisation’s business, culture, and sustainability ambitions in a way that tells a clear and compelling story and that facilitates embedment across a range of people policies, programmes, and initiatives.

Todd McLellan, a Canadian photographer, is an interesting fellow. He is known for his series “Things Come Apart”, where he meticulously disassembles various objects, arranging and photographing their parts in an organised and visually captivating manner. McLellan’s work highlights the beauty and complexity found within everyday objects by showcasing their inner mechanisms and intricate details.

Of course, to the user, the camera can be as simple as point and click, although sophisticated photographers may prefer to adjust the settings. Similarly, those who know how to drive a car can simply hop in and get going, performing the tasks instinctively. How many of us pause to contemplate the nitty gritty that goes into snapping a photo or driving around the corner? Not many. That is because the instinctual know-how in both examples relies on an everyday simplicity that is intentionally designed, engineered, and manufactured.

And so it is with matters of organisational culture. On the surface, employees tend to just experience it, work within it, participate in it, and/or contribute to it without giving it much thought. But underneath, inside each individual, there is a whole operating system that encodes their biases, mindsets, principles, ethics, and lived experiences, all of which informs split-second decisions that influence how they show up to a particular project, meeting, or interaction with a colleague.

Countless of these decisions occur daily and, when combined with the context of institutional quirks and characteristics, it all manifests in the form of an organisation’s culture. But just like a camera or a car, culture can and should be designed and engineered. That is exactly what we argued in our first essay on culture in the post-pandemic era. Our second essay framed the stakes for how culture can build future skills, enhance performance, and improve public health; and our third essay distinguished between broad characterisations and enduring ideals, arguing that the latter ought to be the basis for defining culture.

In this essay, we will propose a blueprint of sorts for all those definitions — an integrated framework that stitches together the business, cultural, and sustainability ambitions for a hypothetical organisation in a way that provides a container for each component while also showing how the whole set works together from a systems perspective. We will step through the framework’s components, offering a rationale for each and suggesting applications, time horizons, and frequencies of use.

We will then delve into the how components: how decisions are made, how people are expected to behave, and how work gets done. In all of this, we will reference the Inner Development Goals, or IDGs, which have featured throughout our essays as a taxonomy for human inner growth and development. Because Values play a central role in the framework, both literally and figuratively, we will give them special attention.

Finally, since many culture advocates face colleagues who recoil at the perceived complexity of an engineering view, we will show the simplicity and practicability afforded by a robust framework. To do this, we will demonstrate how one can be used to articulate value propositions and how, if done well, these propositions become authentic expressions of the framework — and the ethos it represents — rather than additional components or complexity to manage.

Guanghua Life: A Hypothetical Insurance Company

To make this work, we need a company that has all the culture components that would comprise the kind of integrated framework we are proposing. But such a company is difficult to find. Arguably, we ought to be able to find at least one, but that would turn this into an analysis or exposé of a particular company, and that’s not the intent. The intent, to be clear, is to demonstrate that a robust, multifaceted framework can contain complexity and present simplicity at the same time.

So we will use the example of Guanghua Life, a fictitious life insurance company that is a composite of actual pan-Asian insurers. We have chosen insurance because one of the authors has experience leading corporate culture for an insurance company and also because, as a centuries-old industry, many of the concepts, strategies, and cultural markers are arguably malleable enough to create the hypothetical. We have taken a best-of approach, selecting real-world exemplars from AIA, FWD, Manulife, and Prudential as follows:

• AIA illustrates how a carefully-crafted Purpose Statement and a marketing campaign can serve as bookends for one another, with the former saying why the company exists and the latter touting what mark they want to make in the world.
• FWD is a great example of a thoughtful Mission Statement that truly gets to the heart of why they do what they do. Ok, as a matter of fact, they do label it as a Vision, but a plain-text reading gives it more of the feel of a company on a quest or a mission.
• Manulife is a model amongst insurers for message discipline around Strategic Priorities, clearly and consistently framing what results they seek at both their 2018 Investor Day and 2021 Investor Day events. Their ESG impact agenda is equally tight.
• Prudential has clever Values that map to the human body, setting clear expectations for how their people are meant to conduct themselves. They also laid out a complementary set of Principles that shapes how the company conducts business.

We will use bits and pieces from the above examples to populate Guanghua’s framework. In the hypothetical, the CEO of Guanghua recently had an enlightening experience in one of the Stanford d.school’s executive education programmes, where she was introduced to human-centered design. Intrigued by the possibility of what design thinking means for how Guanghua’s 17,500 employees might be more innovative, inclusive, and customer centric, the CEO started reading up.

She subsequently discovered the UK Design Council’s Double Diamond, which, in the real world, just celebrated its 20-year anniversary. In the words of the UK Design Council, the Double Diamond has come to be known as a “universally-accepted depiction of the design process and outlines the steps taken in a design or innovation project regardless of the methods or tools used.” Here is how they describe each step:

• Discover. The first diamond helps people understand, rather than simply assume, what the problem is. It involves speaking to and spending time with people who are affected by the issues.
• Define. The insight gathered from the discovery phase can help you to define the challenge in a different way.
• Develop. The second diamond encourages people to give different answers to the clearly defined problem, seeking inspiration from elsewhere and co-designing with a range of different people.
• Deliver. Delivery involves testing out different solutions at small-scale, rejecting those that will not work and improving the ones that will.

The CEO became convinced that these Ways of Working have applications far beyond innovation projects and that they could, as Stanford put it, “fundamentally change the way people tackle challenges in their work and lives.” Inspired, the CEO continued researching, coming across a post by Dan Nessler, who had revamped and expanded on the Double Diamond. This helped her and Guanghua’s executive committee visualise:

• What these Ways of Working look like in practice;
• What kinds of skills the L&D team would need to build; and
• What kind of culture would bring it all to life.

Revamped Double Diamond by Dan Nessler

Now, back to reality. Readers of our series will have an inkling of why we are bringing the Double Diamond into our hypothetical scenario: in our second essay, we unpacked McKinsey Quarterly’s Business Value of Design, which found that design-savvy companies achieved 32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher total returns to shareholders (TRS) growth than their industry counterparts. Any leader would ask how to replicate results like these.

And that’s exactly the question our essay series is attempting to answer: How might we position culture initiatives to double as capability-building exercises, and vice versa, all in service of future skills and modern ways of working that put an organisation and its people at the top of their game? So, without further ado, let’s get into Guanghua Life’s integrated framework and see how it works.

A Holistic, Integrated Framework

Setting up the hypothetical reveals the complexities involved and underscores the need for a frame. Another interesting fellow, Simon Sinek, may have just the thing. In his famous TED Talk, which has amassed more than 60 million views, he uses the concept of the ‘golden circles’ to argue that great leaders start with why, inspiring their followers and creating emotional connections, before getting into processes and methods (i.e., how) and products, services, and offerings (i.e., what).

He does mention culture and leadership implications. But his main point seems to be beseeching leaders to not pitch products, but to pitch the company’s Purpose, arguing that that’s the best way to capture the hearts and minds of customers, employees, and stakeholders. He goes on to say why he believes that’s the case, drawing reference to neuroscience, the limbic system, and how humans tend to make decisions.

Sinek’s why-how-what construct holds promise for framing Guanghua’s cultural markers together with its strategic narrative, ESG ambitions, and other ideals that likely to find their way into its annual reports and brand and marketing materials. In short, the integrated framework, as shown below, captures the essence of the company in all regards.

Sample Framework for Guanghua Life, a Hypothetical Company

While each component is distinct, it is important to note that each one exists within the larger system and is complementary to and reinforcing of the others. Each one is also likely to exist somewhere in the organisation, so this framework is not necessarily advocating for their creation but, rather, making the case to put the components together in one place so that they can be managed holistically as a set.

Settle Down, It’s Just a Framework

To be clear, this is not the only way to do it, and it might not be the right way to do it for a given organisation. We are just illustrating how it might be done. One thing that culture advocates must prepare for is the onslaught of calls to simplify or slim down the framework. There is always merit in the aphorism less is more, and where possible, keeping things simple is advisable. However, there are two cautionary tales here.

• Illusion of Simplicity. First, taking something out of the integrated framework does not necessarily mean it won’t continue to live on in some far-flung corner of the organisation. Allowing this to happen opens the potential for competing narratives and the complexity that comes with managing or reconciling them. So, one benefit of using an integrated framework is that it facilitates conversations around whether components are needed and equips leaders to make hard decisions about distinguishing between them or retiring them altogether. Otherwise, removing something from the framework creates the illusion of simplicity rather than the intended simplification.
• Foreground vs. Background. Second, the integrated framework is meant to be comprehensive and to put many and varied and necessary components in context with one another. It is not meant to be presented to the masses for memorisation or even to broader leadership teams for application. It has a very narrow purpose, which is to tame complexity and facilitate conversations amongst senior-most leaders on the wooliest of topics as they decide what sits in the background of their integrated framework (i.e., an engineering blueprint for a car) versus what gets experienced by or communicated to employees in the foreground (i.e., simply driving to the grocery store).

So, when reductionists want to cut critical components, you might playfully ask them whether an automatic transmission should be removed from the design of a car in order to simplify the blueprint. The answer is that you could, and the design would indeed be less complex with a manual transmission, but the car won’t provide the same efficiency, functionality, and user experience as a car with an automatic transmission, the absence of which might affect whether advanced features such as adaptive cruise control can be included. The same is true for culture.

Using the Integrated Framework to Tell a Story

One way to think about the framework is in terms of the story it tells about the company. Of course, it’s rare that the whole story will be needed from start to finish in one setting. But the benefit of having it is that it builds a shared understanding and sense of alignment amongst the leadership. Before we unpack each of the components in Guanghua’s integrated framework, let’s demonstrate how its story could be told.

Guanghua means beautiful.

At Guanghua Life, our purpose is to help millions of people live longer, healthier, better lives. This is why we exist. We are on a mission to change the way people feel about insurance and, in doing so, we believe we can vastly improve coverage across their health, protection, and savings needs …

This is particularly true in Southeast Asia, where rising incomes, shifting generational dynamics, and the lack of social safety nets create significant opportunity for us to deliver both profitable growth and social impact in all of our chosen markets. This is why we operate in these chosen markets …

We know that our stakeholders, particularly investors, want confidence in how we conduct our business. So we have laid out a very clear set of principles that guide how our leaders make decisions: we put customers first, we act with integrity, we take the long view, and we are inclusive …

While that’s how we conduct business, we have even higher standards for how we conduct ourselves as individuals. Here, we are reminded of the very human nature of our line of work, so our values reflect that, asking our people to ‘show up’ as ambitious, curious, empathetic, courageous, and nimble …

When they do, they are much better positioned to be innovative, inclusive, customer centric, and risk savvy in their work. We are making significant investments in our capabilities, notably to discover, define, develop, and deliver breakthrough solutions at scale and at pace …

Such capabilities, at the individual and organisational level, equip us to meet our obligations on the world stage. Our ESG impact agenda focuses on empowering sustained health and well-being, driving inclusive economic opportunity, and accelerating a sustainable future …

But, of course, we have obligations to our shareholders, too, and we are laser focused on accelerating for growth, delivering for customers, optimising our portfolio, improving our expense ratio, and engaging our high-performing team. These strategic priorities each have clear goals …

And finally, if we get this all right, our vision is to have engaged one billion people to live longer, healthier, and better lives by 2030 …

That’s a beautiful life for a lot of people.

You can see how a complex and indisputably jam-packed framework lends itself to a very clear corporate narrative. Again, it’s unlikely that this whole story will be needed on a frequent basis, but it is comforting to know that all these components hang together in a cogent way.

Unpacking the Why, How, and What Sections

The why part of the framework exists at a higher level of abstraction, capturing an organisation’s Purpose Statement, Mission Statement, and rationale for its chosen markets. These components speak to the emotions of stakeholders, inspiring them to do something for the company, work with the company, buy something from the company, and/or otherwise accept its presence in their lives, wallets, and communities.

• Purpose Statement. This is used primarily for rhetorical purposes, it should roll off the tongues of leaders verbatim any time they need to talk purpose. Since it is existential in nature, it ought to have one of the longest timelines, i.e., 10 years or more.
• Mission Statement. This is used to rally people and remind them why the company does what it does, and it’s also great fodder for brand and marketing materials. This may take many forms as brand campaigns come and go, but should span a few years, i.e., 3 years or more.
• Market Context. This is used to communicate the rationale for being in chosen markets, helping to contextualise the Purpose and Mission Statements. This is connected to economic, societal, and political dynamics, so it can be more fluid, i.e., 9–18 months.

Some organisations may choose to have a Purpose Statement and to forego a Mission Statement. That certainly helps with the calls for simplification. However, given that many watchdogs, notably the UK Financial Reporting Council, have expectations around clearly-articulated Purpose Statements, the reverse does not seem advisable — i.e., to have a Mission but not a Purpose. Either way, whatever statements get used should have a rationale and a use case that is clearly distinguished. For example:

• If you’re going to have a Purpose and a Mission, then you should be clear on why you need both, what each one gets used for, how they’re different, and how they relate to / reinforce one another.
• If you’re going to have a Purpose and not a Mission, then be able to articulate the rationale for why that’s the case, and insist that your leaders don’t inadvertently conflate the two.
• If you’re going to have a Mission and not a Purpose, see above. In a world filled with noise, message discipline is key to sending clear signals to your employees and stakeholders.

The how part of the framework contains ideals like Principles, Values, and Ways of Working. These capture how the company and its people operate in the context of everyday work — making decisions, showing up as humans, and applying best practices from the disciplines of design thinking, lean start-up, and agile development. Because of their conceptual similarity, these components must be carefully defined/distinguished.

Principles, for example, can be cast as how an organisation conducts business and makes decisions in the interests of its stakeholders. Values can be construed as how individuals are expected to conduct themselves and ‘show up’ to work, as defined by a set of underlying mindsets, behaviours, and unaccepted behaviours. Taken together, the Principles and Values enable people to adopt shared Ways of Working. In other words, the Principles are more cerebral, the Values are more social, and the Ways of Working are more practical.

• Principles. These are used in the code of conduct and governance manuals as a rubric by which we expect people, primarily leaders, to make business decisions. They can be the basis for leadership development programmes. They’re generally timeless, but may have to be updated as circumstances warrant, i.e., annual review.
• Values. These can be powerful when applied to everyone equally. They form part of the EVP in terms of how people are expected to ‘show up’ to work and can be used for feedback, performance, and reward decisions. Although the Values ought to endure for 3–5 years or longer, their underlying mindsets and behaviors may get updated annually.
• Ways of Working. These offer a set of norms, habits, and rituals for innovation and collaboration (i.e., the Double Diamond) that get aligned with Values and developed via L&D programming. They are timeless, but certain practices may get emphasised depending on their strategic import, i.e., annual review of in-demand skills.

As we will demonstrate in the deep dive on Values, each of these components require additional architecture to support their definition and the distinctions between them: how you label them; how you describe them; and what sub-components you choose to further flesh them out (e.g., mindsets, behaviours, micro-skills, etc.). Practically, these are the things that might get used in leadership/talent programmes, employee surveys, continuous feedback apps, etc.

The what components are things like the ESG Outcomes, the Strategic Priorities, and the Vision Statement. These gesture to what the organisation is doing, producing, and/or affecting through its work. They speak to its role on the regional or global stage and also to its obligations to investors and shareholders — striking the balance, both rhetorically and practically, between the need to operate responsibly and sustainably and the need to deliver profitable growth (or the need to faithfully steward resources in the case of a public or nonprofit entity).

• ESG Outcomes. These are part of an ESG strategy and articulate the institution’s role on the world stage, helping stakeholders and investors understand whether the entity represents a worthy investment and whether it’s upholding its legal, ethical, and moral obligations. They are strategy based, so 2- to 3-year cycles.
• Strategic Narrative. These outline the business strategy so that employees and stakeholders alike have a shared understanding. These can be aligned with org- and team-level performance objectives. The contours of a strategic narrative might endure for 3 years, while their underlying details may change annually, half-yearly, or quarterly depending on the organisation’s cadence.
• Vision Statement. Purpose and Vision Statements are similar, but distinct, and care should be taken to avoid confusion. The difference with the vision is that it is what they want to achieve and/or become in the future. Timeline similar to Values, i.e., 3–5 years.

A good test for all of this is to think as though you are in grammar school, and try to put these things into a sentence. For example, if you’re unsure of why the Vision Statement might be in the what section of our proposed integrated framework, ask yourself what a Vision Statement is meant to represent. It is a statement of what the organisation hopes to be or become or to achieve at some point in the future.

Taking a Deep Dive Into the How Section

Let’s pick up on our earlier point that the integrated culture framework is not for memorisation by the masses. In fact, not only is the framework not meant for memorisation, neither are its components. To the contrary, the idea is to design and engineer a cultural ethos that becomes second nature, something that shapes — in split-second timeframes, like snapping a photo or driving to to the grocery store— how employees show up in the moment and think, act, and decide in the context of everyday work.

In our third essay, we distinguished between the more abstract characterisations of culture that leaders tend to use and the enduring ideals that ought to define culture. Examples of the former include leaders advocating, and understandably so, for more innovative, inclusive, and customer-centric cultures. We offered a list of 17 noble characterisations of culture. And most employees would agree with most of them, saying or thinking to themselves, “sure, I want to be more innovative and inclusive and customer centric and risk savvy, but how?”

Astute readers may note that we are in a deep dive on the how section of the integrated framework. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that we will now attempt to answer that rhetorical question that earnest employees might have, and we will do so by invoking the enduring ideals, which we have linked to the Inner Development Goals, or IDGs for short. Again, the IDGs represent a taxonomy for human skills and qualities — in other words, things that can be trained and nurtured, respectively.

For context, the IDGs include 23 skills and qualities across five dimensions: being, thinking, relating, collaborating, and acting. In the how section of Guanghua’s integrated framework, we proposed three components:

1. Principles, which are to shape how decisions are made;
2. Values, which are to shape how people ‘show up’ as humans; and
3. Ways of Working, which are to shape how works gets done.

One can imagine how the IDGs might map to the Principles, Values, and Ways of Working — and we are going to show that mapping exercise, but before we do, a point about Values.

The Values, as envisaged by our framework, are a core concept that is cast as fundamentally human in nature. The suggestion is to articulate Values — arguably the highest-profile and most popularly-accessible component — in a way that people can readily internalise and actualise. To do that necessitates using the simplest, most elemental ideals amongst the IDGs and giving people a mnemonic of sorts. As we draw on examples from pan-Asian insurers, we can see from Prudential’s 2021 ESG Report that its mnemonic is the human body.

Prudential plc’s 2021 ESG Report (Page 37)

In that same report, Prudential describes how its Values were defined in a bottom-up way through a co-creation process, and also how those definitions include mindsets, behaviours, and unaccepted behaviours. From the 2021 report:

Input from our colleagues during 2020’s Collaboration Jam helped us to define our new values: ambitious, curious, empathetic, courageous and nimble, which we believe are fundamentally human values, represented by different parts of the body so that they are accessible regardless of language or seniority.

Each value is defined by different mindsets and acceptable and unacceptable behaviours, making it clear what is expected of our colleagues. Our values are embedded in our approach to feedback and reward.

Details on that Collaboration Jam and related efforts to engage employees can be found in Prudential’s 2020 ESG Report, which shares how the Values were first validated in an employee survey with 95% participation rate and subsequently shaped by input from more than 5,400 colleagues in the Collaboration Jam. The results of these efforts can be seen on Prudential’s careers website, where the Values are showcased. Below is an example of how they have defined empathetic, one of their Values.

A Composite of Screenshots from Prudential’s Careers Website, October 2023

When Values are reserved for the more human IDGs, there must be a container for the more traditional cultural markers such as customer care, teamwork, integrity, accountability, empowerment, collaboration, communication, and the like. These are implied by many of the IDGs, but some stakeholders will want to see more explicit reference drawn to them. That’s where the Principles (i.e., how decisions get made) and the Ways of Working (i.e., how work gets done) come into play.

To illustrate, let’s return to our hypothetical of Guanghua Life. Below is an intentionally simple, one-to-one mapping of the IDGs to the components in Guanghua’s framework, with the simplest ones reserved for the Values. The 23 IDGs could be remapped many times in an equally valid one-to-one matchup and/or mapped to multiple components.

Mapping the 23 IDGs to Guanghua’s Principles, Values, and Ways of Working

Playing with these concepts in this way could inform a debate amongst Guanghua’s executive committee on what goes in the foreground as a matter of labelling the components versus what goes in the background as a matter of defining the components in more detail — and also what gets positioned centrally through the Values versus what gets positioned on the periphery in the Principles (i.e., how decisions are made) and in the Ways of Working (i.e., how work gets done).

While there are distinctions in the positioning of the how components, there also are opportunities to draw connections between them. Take, for example, the Values and the Ways of Working. If the Values are how to ‘show up’ as an individual, and if they are more behaviour based, then you can imagine how they can be in service of the Ways of Working — i.e., if you ‘show up’ empathetically, then you are much better positioned to discover insights about your customer or stakeholder.

We are not arguing that any of this is particularly novel or unique. The IDGs were developed as a complement to and in context of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), suggesting universal applicability across sectors, domains, and functions. Critics may raise a fair point around whether the use of such generic ideals in defining an organisation’s culture will result in any form of competitive advantage.

Our retort is that the differentiation comes not from the definitions, but from the careful, disciplined implementation of the ideals that the definitions and distinctions enable. Cultivating culture and building capability with the degree of rigour we are implying is not for the faint of heart, and leaders across sectors can distinguish themselves and their institutions by embracing the conceptual aspects involved, applying systems thinking, and adopting a holistic approach.

Put simply, it is the hard work that goes into contextualising these components that brings the competitive advantage.

Considering the Payoffs of a Robust Framework

Investing the time and energy in frameworks, constructs, and definitions around cultural components may seem like an indulgence. But all of that upfront work can pay off. One example is value propositions, which can amplify different aspects of the integrated framework. When done with intentionality, these feel like authentic extensions or expressions of the framework rather than being in competition with it.

• Employee Value Proposition (EVP). When an employee comes to work for an organisation, there’s a value exchange: they bring their time, talent, and passion; and the organisation provides community and a great place to work, opportunities for growth and impact, and recognition and remuneration. So the EVP must first answer the question of why at an emotional and inspirational level by drawing on the organisation’s Purpose and Mission Statements, which frame the work that’s getting done by way of Strategic Priorities. The Values give a feel for what to expect from colleagues and the Ways of Working speak to the environment and skills development. But the rest of the culture framework remains relevant and, as a secondary matter, can be used to further flesh out and reinforce the EVP narrative.
• Customer Value Proposition (CVP). Customers want to know the unique value that the product, service, or experience offers and why they should choose that company’s offering over the alternatives. By definition, features and benefits are part of the proposition, but a broader consideration surrounds the company’s ethos. So a CVP is first shaped by the Purpose and Mission Statements, which define the organization’s reason for existence and its relevance to customer needs, desires, and contexts. The Vision Statement offers an inspiring future, inviting customers on a shared journey. Market Context ensures alignment with customer demands, industry trends, and competition. Principles, Values, and Ways of Working, contribute to a comprehensive customer proposition, reflecting ethical practices and fostering trust.
• Investor Value Proposition (IVP). Investors tend to focus on growth, profitability, risk exposure, and increasingly, an organisation’s efforts to operate its business in a sustainable and responsible manner, balancing financial performance with ethical, social, and environmental considerations. So, for an IVP, the Purpose conveys the raison d’être and allows investors to decide whether it is aligned with their investment thesis. Strategic Priorities provide a narrative around how management intends to deliver desired results. The Principles inform how decisions get made in furtherance of those Strategic Priorities, suggesting rigour and inspiring confidence. Values give investors assurance that acceptable and unacceptable conduct has been defined with respect to fair treatment of customers and sound risk management — particularly when behaviours are linked to reward outcomes.
• Partner Value Proposition (PVP). Insurance partnerships, for example, with banks and digital platforms, extend the reach of all parties, enable enhanced/tailored solutions, and drive revenue growth and customer acquisition. Partners want the brand association to be accretive and the tech to be seamlessly integrated. So, as a threshold matter for the PVP, the Purpose ensures alignment between the core reasons for existence and the desired impact of both organizations. Values and Ways of Working provide the partners a tangible sense — behaviourally and practically — of what it’s like to collaborate with the insurer. And Strategic Priorities outline clear opportunities for partners to pursue in line with the identified Market Context.

These value propositions are an example of how an upfront investment in an integrated framework can later pay dividends when shaping communications and engagements with myriad stakeholders.

Mapping the Integrated Framework Components to Value Propositions

The seemingly pedantic and sometimes frustrating work that goes into exploring nuance, agreeing to definitions, and committing to precision with language and rhetoric can position an organisation to put forth a much more cohesive narrative around its strategy, culture, and sustainability ambitions.

Summary and What’s Next in this Series

This is the fourth essay in a 6-part series exploring culture in the post-pandemic era. In the first and second essays, we set the scene and framed the stakes, respectively. In the third essay, we distinguished between broad characterisations for messaging purposes and enduring ideals for purposes of defining an organisation’s culture.

In this essay, we explored how to define a culture framework so that its concepts are more accessible, learnable, and practicable for people and more durable for the organisation, ensuring that the framework can evolve over time without breaking its conceptual integrity. To make this argument, we made three distinctions:

• Why. This could include things like Purpose Statements, Mission Statements, and Market Contexts. These components speak to the emotions and aspirations of an organisation’s stakeholders, inspiring them to work with it, do business with it, invest in it, and/or accept its presence in their lives, wallets, and communities.
• How. This could include things like Principles, Values, and Ways of Working. For regulators and investors, these components provide assurance that acceptable and unacceptable conduct has been woven into fair treatment of customers, sound risk management, and reward policies. For current and prospective employees, they characterise the working environment and what it means to be part of it.
• What. This could include things like ESG Outcomes, a Strategic Narrative, and a Vision Statement. These components get people focused on the organisation’s role on the world stage, its strategies and tactics for delivery results, and what it hopes to become in the future as a result. Although there may be an emotional appeal, these are action oriented and meant to help people see their role.

The final two essays will outline an implementation strategy using a top-down, bottom-up, and middle-out approach; and how to integrate all of this in the organisation’s HR and people strategies.

Note: This article was written with the assistance of ChatGPT, although to a far lesser extent than with the preceding essays in our series given the complexities and nuances involved. The authors provided prompts, outlines from research and experience, and other prepared materials, while ChatGPT generated language, helped to refine the text, and supported research/citation requests for early drafts. The collaboration between the authors and ChatGPT highlights how the future of work will involve human-machine collaboration.