HARNESS
the hidden
power of your
organisation
A fresh approach to understanding organisational culture and making it work in the service of your strategy and stakeholders.
What you will find here
This site is targeted at experts, practitioners and leaders interested in culture in organisations. There are many frameworks and tools that you can use to analyse and change organisational culture. However not many are rooted in the work people do, with a clear line of sight to strategy. What you will find here is a practicality and coherence which sets this approach apart.
Simple Explanation
Understand how organisational culture is rooted in the concept of “degrees of freedom”.
Strategic Alignment
Connect culture to strategy and operating model, and work through leadership dilemmas.
Practical Tool
Use slider technology to give your view on the gap between current and required culture.
Research Opportunity
Lead studies to answer important questions about organisational culture, and how it drives success.
A Personal Introduction
A warm welcome to “The Org Culture Project”. My name is Andrew Strowger and I’m a Chartered Occupational Psychologist with over 30 years experience working as an HR Director and OD consultant in some of the world’s best known businesses – PwC, Aviva, Sanofi, Novartis, Unilever, Barclays, Co-op, ACCA and others.
I offer interim and consultancy solutions relating to people strategy and its main elements – leadership, culture, capability, organisation design, and practices across the employee lifecycle.
This site is the culmination of my thinking on the nature organisational culture and how it drives/inhibits strategy. I hope you’ll find something here of interest or practical use, and I’d be delighted to hear your thoughts via the Contact page.
An introduction to The Org Culture Project
Understanding the essential character of organisational culture enables you to harness its power
Culture is like the wind
A work colleague said to me recently that culture in organisations is like the wind. You can’t see it or grasp it, but everyone can feel it’s force – a great metaphor I thought, reflected in the imagery on this website. I was reminded of my teenage obsession with windsurfing and the struggles I had harnessing the power of the wind. Some of my friends mastered the art, balancing all these forces of nature and navigating the choppy waters with speed and style. That is my hope for what the business leaders of the future will be able to do with culture, equipped with the right tools to understand its essential character and harness its power.
The science of organisational culture
For many years culture has been a rather mysterious “make or break” factor in organisational life, with little expert agreement around its core content or character. However I believe a consensus is now emerging in academic circles around what org culture is, and what it looks like. It is akin to individual personality and can be described in terms of traits or dimensions, pivoting around a centre point with extremes at each end. The question really is how best to organise and portray these dimensions.
Degrees of freedom
My approach is to link culture to the core work that people do in organisations – the way this work gets done, and the way decisions get made. It draws on the most up to date thinking in the field, and presents things in a different way which I hope will make discussions around culture accessible to everyone. It is based around the unifying concept of “degrees of freedom” which has been extensively researched and validated, but not yet converted into a practical approach. The Org Culture Framework set out here does just that. It enables leaders and their teams to work through tricky issues and explore behavioural undercurrents with minimal expert support.
Why a project?
Even though I believe the science is closing in on the truth about culture in organisations, there are still many questions that need to be asked and answered. The Org Culture Framework I’ve created provides a great opportunity for leaders to unlock the power of culture with their teams. But it also allows credible research hypotheses to be created and tested. The Org Culture Survey tool enables data to be gathered that can then be used to shine some light on what is still a rather murky and mysterious landscape. Please go to the Research page if you are interested in this aspect of The Org Culture Project.