3.12 – Going Culturematic
I was lucky enough to spend a few hours with Grant McCracken today, author of Chief Culture Officer, Culturematic and a whole host of other books you should have read by now.
We were talking about TV and other things (it’s worth reading Grant’s recent post on “Don’t Peggy Olson Me…”) , but Grant was kind enough to let me grab half an hour to play around with the PEOPLE layers, and explore CULTURE as the slowest moving layer.
Suffice to say, as Mandy Patinkin might say, this word I was using ‘might not mean what I think it means‘.
———————
ACTION 12: DRAW FIVE THINGS THAT DEFINE YOUR CULTURE
2 Replies to “3.12 – Going Culturematic”
Comments are closed.
Disclaimer: I’m coming to this late, so I’ve only just binged on the first twelve days, and haven’t listened to the boos. But that does mean it’s all in my head at once, at least. It’s brilliant stuff. Can’t wait to see where it goes.
1) I think culture is right because culture is organic and pervasive, whereas purpose is the preserve of leadership. Culture goes to the pub after work, purpose doesn’t even attend most meetings. I’m not saying purpose doesn’t matter, but it isn’t the people or the space.
2) “Work the verb and work the noun” is genius. To me, those are your circles and squares.
3) Scientifically, work is the expenditure of energy (e.g. the force required to overcome resistance). So winning is conservation of energy. How efficiently surroundings facilitate culture, spaces facilitate ways of working, systems facilitate actions etc. And how effectively “workarounds” and “didn’t works” (the deviations and losses from the ecosystem) are captured and incorporated back into the development of that ecosystem. In other words, how we learn from failure and adapt to change.
4) So my contribution/adaptation/wholesale revision would be:
The ecosystem is Work, made up of Workspace and Workpeople, comprising respectively:
Workspace: surroundings (exterior, structure), settings (interior, rooms, virtual equivalents), systems (teams, processes, OSs, platforms), tools (hardware, software, stationery);
Workpeople: culture (the pervasive way we are together), ways of working (how we interact and collaborate, including roles and services), actions (what we do, tasks).
The goal is to efficiently scale actions with positive results to ‘ways of working’ and ‘culture’, and provide tools, systems, settings and surroundings to facilitate this
(I think three or four layers is easier to handle than five. But i might be sacrificing subtlety for simplicity.)
In this version, you keep the purpose of the work, and even the beneficiaries and outputs of the work, separate. This is just the forces at play, not what they move.
[…] ACTION 13: CHNAGE SOMETHING IN YOUR WORK SPACE TODAY. WATCH HOW IT AFFECTS PEOPLE. PREVIOUSLY: 3.12 – Going Culturematic? […]