Organisational culture change
“What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.”
- Robin Wall Kimmerer
What is organisational culture change?
Organisational culture change is the process of bringing everyday norms and behaviours into alignment with stated values and visions.
So that the internal culture can enable and fortify your boldest visions and strategies and provide cohesion and belonging during periods of change.
How do you define culture?
Culture is the water we swim in. It’s all around us, but we often don’t even notice it’s there.
Culture is also the glue that holds everything together in a group or organisation.
It’s what we do every day, over and over again.
Culture is how we treat ourselves and each other. It’s how we walk, move and talk.
It’s the symbols, rituals, values, norms, language, history, stories, music, art, food, memories, sayings, dress codes and jokes we share.
What a culture change process entails
All of my work is fully bespoke and shaped together with each organisation.
A culture change process typically requires a minimum of six months of working together, either with the whole organisation or the leadership to start with.
Core elements include:
Workshop facilitation - as a whole group and in smaller constellations for increased safety, courage and impact
Content input - to develop a shared language and understanding around power, rank and identity, culture, conflict and feedback
Qualitative research - to bring different experiences into one narrative
Embodied resilience practice - to build stability in people’s nervous system
1-to-1 work - to go deeper and offer tailored support
Mediation - to support people work through tensions, differences and conflict and repair hurt
Regular review points - to reflect, adapt and ensure alignment with organisational goals
A shadow consultant - to provide supervision, quality assurance and support
Each organisation is unique. You might require some or all of the above or something different entirely.
My work is tailored to each specific context and meets you where you are.
Photo by the charming Livio Salvi
If you resonate with my approach but what you need isn’t on my list, it doesn’t mean it’s not possible! Book a free consultation call so we can explore what working together might look like.
Why is culture change necessary in organisations?
The visions that guide non-profit organisations’ work (e.g. for more freedom, equity, community, collaboration) typically represent qualities that are marginalised in our present world.
Organisations exist to fill this gap and represent something different.
But the implementation often gets tricky. Because what makes up these visions often doesn’t reflect the qualities we learn in our current system.
So we fall back into the ways we’ve been conditioned (such as competitive behaviour or linear thinking), which undermines the vision.
This creates a gap between our vision and values and our actions and behaviours.
The cost of this gap can be small (misunderstandings, awkwardness, tension etc.), and sometimes it’s large (loss of trust, causing harm, being accused of coopting language etc.).
The values-action gap is not a sign of failure but a signature of our time that points to the depth of the change that needs to happen.
A note on culture change and EDI
Aligning your culture with your vision is central achieving your strategy, especially if that strategy is about increasing equity, inclusion and social justice.
Simply bringing people with different backgrounds and identities into an organisation without the dominant culture being open to change creates pressure to assimilate.
The shifts I see organisations committed to deep inclusion make include:
Learning to harness rather than flatten difference
Becoming skilful at effective feedback
Building embodied capacity
Moving through conflict rather than around it
All of these are critical culture change skills.