Interpreting The Colorful Language of Culture
Suddenly, lots of companies are focused on the most important thing: culture. But the all-important question remains: how can results be measured?
Culture has always been hard to measure, so it gets relegated to the realm of "soft skills," though it is actually the most difficult. I've been working with organizations around the world on their collaborative cultures for years, but this entire process has been transformed through use of the Culture Map tool.
With a single colorful graphic, I can explain what happened today at Science House. What you see above is actually a collection of four cultural fingerprints for four different types of organizations.
At Science House, we specialize in the intersection between humanity and technology, and we've been heavily focused on the transformation of IT. The group in the Imagination Room today was from the IT department of a multibillion dollar global company.
We started off the workshop by explaining the Culture Map system: all organizations have seven different components, each of which is represented by a different color. We introduced the seven colors, what they mean, how they are expressed, and their strengths and weaknesses. These seven colors show up in either small, medium or large quantities within an organization.
Immediately after introducing the Culture Map system, we showed participants the four color profiles above. They INSTANTLY understood what kind of organization is represented by each pattern. Not only that, but they could immediately identify the advantages and disadvantages in each. This translated into action on their own culture, which they could now see clearly for the first time. Just from seeing these seven colors and understanding the deep meaning of each, participants determined how they needed to grow and shrink the colors of their own culture in order to adapt and meet the demands of the environment in which they find themselves.
In the years since I've been developing the Imagination Age, I've seen countless tools that attempt to measure culture. This is the first I've seen that instantly reaches people on every level, and allows the transformation to be measured, managed and understood.
While every culture is a palette of all seven colors, and every person is as well, the Imagination Age is particularly focused on aqua, a color that signifies, among other things, systems thinking. We don't see much of it at all in western business, but that needs to change. You might notice my writing get a lot more, well, colorful, as I start delving into some of these issues.
Software Engineer | Freelance Artist
10yRita, Thank you for the posting! Once I found out what the colors meant (maybe you could post a color key someday?), the cultural fingerprints you show made perfect sense to me. What I see (left to right as type 1-4) when I look at the picture above is this: Type 1 - university, cafe/bar discussions of ideas Type 2 - bureaucracy, large industrial company Type 3 - entrepreneur, startup company Type 4 - early production company Some things that occurred to me that you might find useful (at least as feedback): Purple seems like an unneeded color. It is really the red-blue combination -- (red) action-focused, strong leader; and (blue) rituals and rules. That is pretty much the definition of a team culture. Every person or culture has a color fingerprint of basically two colors that have the strongest impact. Type 1 above could be expressed as two different types - science and engineering (yellow and aqua), and humanities (green and aqua). Realizing this, I figured out my own color pattern (aqua and orange) and compared that to companies that I have worked at over the years, and instantly saw why had fit well, or fit badly, at any given job. The Culture Map concept is hugely significant for hiring, both from the company and employee perspective, to see if the fit is good or will have friction. Another point that I noticed is that, in my experience, people keep the same worldview (personal culture map or colors) throughout most of their lives. They will, however, pretend to have a different worldview to get or keep a job or fit in, which can cause stress and friction. The importance of assuming that people do not naturally change colors is that if a company changes its overall culture, it will need to add people who match the new color fingerprint, and possibly remove some of those that don't, in order to be stable. And understanding the natural worldview (colors) of the employees will provide a measure of the conflict/friction between the purpose (cultural fingerprint) of the company and the actual composite of employee colors. Especially if the purpose, direction, or culture of the company are changed by management. And, finally, worldviews tend to conflict. Red and blue cultures will be antagonistic to aqua and yellow. Orange and red will tend to conflict with blue and green. And so on. Aqua is maybe a little less likely to be antagonistic with other color-views, though, because of the abstraction of other worldviews needed to understand how they interact, so there is less conflict there. I am looking forward to your future posts, especially as you delve more into the Imagination Age and Culture Map topics.
Executive Healthcare Leader. Passionate about organisational and systems connectedness towards societal wellbeing. Love genetic genealogy & connecting lost families. All views are my own
10yThis is intriguing and warrants some mulling over. Also the possibility of applying to family dynamics, your own personal development maybe . . . . Meanwhile, I'm wondering if we know enough to map our departments into a culture map .... mmnn
Thank you this is a very interesting read.
Founder of Jewel Content Marketing Agency | Truths & Memes | Content Strategy, Thought Leadership, Copywriting, Social Media 'n' Stuff for B2B & Tech
10yNever trust an article that liberally uses the pronoun "I" in it.
Customer Service Representative - USAF Vet
10yThis is super exciting. Up for some disruption anyone? :)