Organizational culture mindmap

This is my quick mental map to understand an organizational culture – what it is, why it’s important, how to design it, how to implement it, how to change it, how to improve and maintain it. I want to write separate articles about a big majority of these points.

• Understanding
  • What culture is and what’s its place in the organization
  • Why it is important
  • What is Excellent organization
  • What is Competing Values Framework, the best from all 4 types of culture and the typical troubles with each of the 4 types of culture if imbalanced with other types
  • Typical cultural flaws (list of 80+ typical cultural flaws with sub-list of 10 most vicious flaws)
  • 5 stages of Tribal Leadership
  • 4 main causes of bad cultures
• Design
  • Set the basic philosophy or system of core values and/or principles
    • Possibility to inspire from a list of tens of possible values, principles
  • Verify its correctness, completeness, ability to implement with 10+ simple theoretical checks
    • It’s reasonably short and easy to remember
    • In agreement with values and personalities of leaders (and ideally also employees)
    • In agreement with organization’s purpose (vision, mission, strategy)
    • In agreement with organization’s external environment
    • Ability to guide daily decision making (list of tens of possible/probable difficult daily situations)
    • Potential to lead to excellent organization
    • Potential to get the best and avoid the worst from all 4 types of CVF cultures
    • Potential to fight the 4 main causes of bad cultures
    • Potential to fight the extended list of typical cultural flaws
    • If it’s about culture change rather than culture implementation, then many others
      • Fit with leadership and majority of employees
      • Implementable first steps
      • Has potential to fix troubles with current culture
      • The new culture should keep the best from the old culture
• Implement the designed culture (in a new organization)
  • Based on the organizational model
    • External environment – including communication with external environment
    • Purpose – goals
    • Leadership’s behavior
    • Policies and processes – including special activities to support desired culture
    • People and structure – rewards, hiring, training, firing, promotions, organizational structure, …
    • Metrics
    • Tools and internal environment
    • Product / Service
• Change (in an existing organization)
  • Understand the current situation
    • Bottom-up analysis – interviews, metrics, observation
    • Top-down analysis – things from “understanding culture”, OCAI test
  • Everything from “implement in a new organization”
  • Prevent the biggest change obstacles
    • Employee resistance
    • Leadership’s behavior not supporting change
    • Lack of resources and budget
  • Have a change plan and change project (e.g. Kotter’s 8 step model)
• Verify and maintain
  • Metrics, monitoring, data collections, analyses and reviews
  • Possibility of culture design improvements
  • Reinforcing mechanisms