3.21 – The Culture Matrix

Thanks to conversations I’ve been having with Mark Earls and Tracey Camilleri (about a project might might well use this project to form and shape) the matrix has a new name. The ‘relativity’ matrix is a bit technical, a bit clumsy, a bit hard to grasp, as both Tracey and Mark pointed out. What about the Culture Matrix instead, they suggested?

It also feeds back to something Grant McCracken and I talked about earlier in the month; you can’t very well call it one layer of this ‘culture’, because it’s ALL culture.

So then, the Culture Matrix.

Something that helps you see everything at play within an organisation, and why the issues you find may be affected (and resolved) by all the different things around it. For instance, if your product innovation efforts aren’t delivering meaningful results, it could sound like a problem on the intersection of Customer and Division:

And it might be tempting to look precisely at the product innovation and marketing teams to try and solve the issue.

Yet by looking around the problem, we can start to see the effects that other factors within the organisation might have.

Below the initial diagnosis on the Matrix, the company’s commercial imperatives may prevent the right product being made. We’d love to deliver the product suggested by the inovation team, but we had to cut costs in making it.

Above it, there may not be the right platforms provided to truly experiment on. We wanted to make a truly market-changing product, but we tried to make it in the same spaces we make everything else, with predictable results.

To the right, the research drawn from different teams may have been incomplete.We conducted the usual market research tests, but we didn’t listen to any of the customer complaints that come in from a different team.

To the left, it may be a factor of the company as a whole drifting out of favour with the customer. It’s not the products that people have a  problem with, it’s us…

It begins to become a lot simpler like this. Yes, there are hidden complexities, but that’s never a useful way to pull people in to something. This seems like it’s getting towards a simpler, more compelling expression. You can thank Tracey, Mark and Grant for that.

ACTION 21 – TAKE A PROBLEM YOU HAVE, AND PUT IT ON THE MATRIX. WHAT MIGHT BE CAUSING IT?

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NOW READ – 3.22 – Indicator Events

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• Category: Smithery 3.0