Changing Culture..

It's been a few weeks now since my last post....apologies for that. I have been travelling a lot with my work recently and having some great cultural experiences. It would be an under-statementto say that I have developed myself over the past weeks, facing many new challenges in delivering learning to a many diverse audiences including Australia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.

The work I am involved with at the moment has entailed designing some learning interventions aimed at raising awareness and understanding around a particular subject. It is really the first step for the organisation along a 3 year journey to change their culture. The first step is to get people on board and then comes the difficult bit.....embedding these new behaviours so that they become engrained into everyday working life. I have explored how training can play a role in this here and here.

I particularly like to use something called the commitment curve that is a great tool to have a conversation with a client about culture change. It is shown below:

I am currently using it to explore the following questions with my client:

• Where on the curve are you currently. How do you know you are there?
• Where on the curve do you ultimately want to be. What will be different about being there? What will you see, hear and experience that will be different?

I believe these are really important steps to take before we can even contemplate what kind of interventions may be required to get there.

In my next post I want to explain a culture model that I am using. This is helping me think about the levers we can pull in order to create the desired culture. As you can imagine this is a very difficult undertaking but I think it highlights the fact that it is not just about training people or just about creating new policies and procedures......it is a combination of lots of things.

If you want to find out more about this then keep a look out for my next post.