Introducing the Culture Sprint

So what’s a Culture Sprint? It’s a 4-day process for answering critical workplace-related problems through designing, prototyping and testing ideas with employees, then creating a blueprint for making the change take hold. They lead to breakthroughs in a company’s culture that might otherwise take months — or never happen at all.

Culture Sprints didn’t exist until I started running them :) So in this article, I’ll introduce the process I use and why it came about. If you’ve run or participated in Design Sprints before, some of the format will seem familiar, but it’s equally fine if you haven’t. (I’ll publish detailed articles on each day’s process separately).

And huge thanks up front to Jake Knapp, who famously invented the Design Sprint process at Google Ventures, for all his invaluable help and advice along the way.

Before we dig in, some background

As a founder of several startups (including 2 acquisitions, 1 work in progress and 1 fail), a digital product specialist and a consultant, I have facilitated and participated in heaps of Design Sprints. They are an incredibly effective way of arriving at customer-first solutions to critical problems at speed within organisations of any size.

But aside from product innovation, over the years I’ve also become obsessed with what is commonly referred to as “company culture”. Having worked in the extremes of workplace experience, from startup to global multinational, from walking into work with a smile on my face everyday to dreading getting out of bed in the morning and trudging into the office of doom, I’m fascinated with what causes different types of cultures to form and evolve.

It became clear that culture is both at the heart of corporate success and employee satisfaction, and conversely the cause of misery and ultimate failure. I immersed myself in all things culture to try to find a winning formula.

Long story short, there is no single “winning formula”, as such. Every company, every team is clearly different with different combinations of values, behaviours, aspirations, goals, growth stages — and of course people.

But what really struck me, having talked to a number of founders, CEOs, HR people, organisational psychologists, employee brand strategists and VCs, is that although many of us realise just how important culture is to get right, a framework didn’t exist which would make culture change more tangible, measurable and more likely to take hold.

Culture means “the way we do things around here”

Culture has been a notoriously difficult concept to define, which is doubtless one of the reasons why it’s dealt with so poorly. The formal versions go along the lines of:

“The underlying beliefs, assumptions, values and ways of interacting that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organisation.”

Which is about right, but not particularly memorable or useful in practical terms!

Others describe it as “the operating system of your organisation”, although I’d probably say it’s more like the DNA, as culture is a very human concept rather than one you can code and leave to run with predictable outcomes.

A more prosaic definition which I use is simply

“The way we do things around here.”

Culture encompasses the values, beliefs, understandings, behaviours, systems, communications, happiness, rewards and aspirations of everyone working for a company. A great culture is what you get when all are aligned.

Culture change has had typically poor results in the past. This difficulty in changing culture is why it should be carefully defined and modelled with a Culture Sprint through a diverse group, and demonstrated by individual cultural champions throughout the organisation, daily.

It’s also why culture makes such a profound impact on profitability and can be an invaluable sustainable competitive advantage.

Yes, you can intentionally change your culture

Many people dismiss culture, not really giving it the attention it deserves. We hear leaders saying it “just happens”. Which is partially true, but it helps to think of culture like a garden: it will grow of its own accord, but to get it growing how you expect and like you need to constantly and carefully shape and nurture it before it gets out of hand.

If your culture is accidental, rather than intentional, it will get out of hand.

Design is the manifestation of a mindset. Design Thinking, popularised by IDEO, is one such mindset, a philosophy. The Design Sprint is a methodological process, based on design thinking, which tackles and solves certain problems in the most efficient way within a specific time range.

The Culture Sprint puts process to the mindset of wanting a positive, healthy company culture.

Design Sprints are best for product problems, not people problems

Design Sprints are awesome for rapidly solving a variety of critical business problems, and are particularly good for building better products. But in my opinion they aren’t ideal for tackling something as ethereal as company culture.

So the Culture Sprint is my attempt to provide such a framework — a step-by-step 4-day process to quickly and effectively overcoming problems and exploring new ideas with your company culture.

Whereas the outcome of a Design Sprint is a high-fidelity interactive product prototype, the outcome of every Culture Sprint is a cultural prototype which has been tested with real people, and a blueprint for scaling the new way of working throughout the organisation.

By combining select methodologies from Design Sprints, design thinking, behavioural science and even the psychology of movements and revolutions, I wanted to create a process for effective cultural change which anyone can do.

Evolve your culture continuously - it’s not a do-and-forget vanity project

So when’s the best time for doing a Culture Sprint? Well, whenever you want to try something new to address a significant problem or test a new idea for improving the way you do things. For example:

So there are certain events in the life-cycle of a business which can cause and indeed require a fairly predictable shift in culture, such as during periods of intense growth, or after a fund-raise, or when the number of your employees passes a tipping point (150 employees seems to be particularly common, for example).

But whereas culture change used to just be an event, in a volatile and unpredictable world it’s a constant.

A mindset of continuous improvement has to apply, which is where one-off “cultural transformation programs” fall down, and Culture Sprints can step up.

To fast-track cultural change, start a movement

Often, the successful instigators of change - especially cultural change that works and evolves with the company - are not in the first instance the leaders themselves but the people who are experiencing and living that culture every working day. There is no question that leaders set the tone of the culture BUT focusing purely on leaders for change ignores other critical social dynamics in your organisation that you can be leveraging to fast-track change.

So for the aspiring grassroots revolutionaries, visionaries and disgruntled employees everywhere… this is for you.

Don’t make the mistake of underestimating the commitment you will need to see this through: at its core, successful culture change involves starting a movement. The Sprint is deliberately designed to help make your movement spread successfully.

Let’s make the world of work, work

This brings me to my own motive behind the Culture Sprint: I’m driven by a vision of a world where work is fulfilling, where work brings out the best of our abilities, where we can be ourselves in the office, and where work/life balance is not a sacrifice we should have to make.

A world where we can work happy.

That surely has to be worth setting a few days aside for?

I'll be publishing how to run each day of a Culture Sprint here.