The Org Culture Framework

Mirroring individual personality tools, the middle area represents balance where there is flexibility to vary the degree of control over thought, action and difference according to the situation. The further towards one of the ends of a dimension a culture is perceived to be, the more inflexible it becomes and the more unlikely it will be able to flex one way or another when the circumstances require it.

In my view it would be a mistake to think that a high degrees of freedom position on the scale represents flexibility – all it means is that a culture is habitually and inflexibly prone to affording its people a lot of freedom to think, act and differ. In my experience, it is just as common that certain organisations are ideologically free, than ideologically controlled.

And these ideological extremes can easily become dysfunctions or over-played strengths. The “right place to be” is what is right for the nature of the work that needs to get done; at a higher level what is right for an organisation’s strategy and operating model. But cultural extremes carry risk due to their inflexibility. And my hypothesis is also that in terms of the Freedom to Differ dimension, it is likely that higher degrees of freedom here increase an organisation’s ability to innovate and adapt – critical long term survival capabilities in today’s VUCA world.

Where did these dimensions come from, and why the three areas? Over the course of my career I’ve spoken to managers at all levels across many different organisations about the various factors they weigh up to ensure their teams perform to the best of their ability. And what has consistently emerged is a set of balances that need to be struck in the way work is undertaken – ways of working – in order that a team can fulfil its core purpose.

These balances seem to be similar regardless of sector or line of business, and regardless of business area. And if you start to read about this subject, of course many other practitioners and academics have found the same (see Origins & Academics for more on this). They are otherwise known as dilemmas, polarities, dichotomies, tensions or paradoxes.

I also like the concept of cultural “traits” as they way they seem to work is similar to personality traits such as Introversion vs. Extroversion. Again, this should be no real surprise because a group’s culture is largely formed from the personalities that make it up. Culture is effectively organizational personality; and the more extreme the traits, the less the flexibility and the greater the risk.

What other frameworks lack for me though is a format that links these balances to the work that people do – with a clear line of sight to business strategy – and a simple explanation for what is being balanced and why. That is what I’ve done here. I’ve not really discovered new cultural content, but I have tried to make it easier to understand and apply.

Click here to see how culture can be linked to an organisation’s strategy and unique value proposition through the degrees of freedom concept.

I recently came across Michele Gelfand’s work, and her acclaimed research on Loose/Tight cultures is a great validation of what I’ve set out here. In effect I’ve done a deep-dive on organisational culture whilst Michele’s work covers the culture of societies, countries and families too. She has done the academic hard work which I never had the bandwidth for, and my hope is that this fresh articulation and framing of org culture (my Org Culture Framework), will make it even more accessible. There are many other academics whose work on org culture is consistent with the notion of ”degrees of freedom”, but hers is the only one that explicitly calls out this unifying factor and validates it through research.

For a longer explanation of how the framework was developed, how it links to business strategy, and its academic basis, please read this document on Origins & Academics.

All the culture dimensions in the Org Culture Framework are set out on a 0-100% “degrees of freedom” scale. This is possible because a large proportion of human behaviour – not just human behaviour in organisations – is subject to social control and norms around the degree of freedom tolerated. These norm pressures work to regulate people’s thinking, actions and also their freedom of speech. Who sets and governs these norms in an organisational context is a critical cultural question which is addressed by the Freedom to Differ area (see points 3 and 4 below).

The practical dimensions under Freedom to Think (FtT) and Freedom to Act (FtA) link to the solution development (thinking) and delivery (acting) phases of an organization’s work cycle. This allows a team and their leader to more easily identify the culture required to power the work they do, linked to their role in the operating model and ultimately business strategy. Aligning culture to a team’s work – or at a higher level the organization’s solution development/delivery processes and operating model – is an important feature of this approach. Please click here to see culture aligns to strategy through the degrees of freedom concept. Although it would be a stretch to say that it is scientifically proven, experience and dozens of case studies in the specialist literature show that culture is a critical driver of strategy and sustainable business performance. Culture can make or break a strategy, so it’s important to have a practical tool that enables a team to think about what effective culture looks like in relation to their work.

The culture dimensions under Freedom to Differ (FtD) are even more fundamental, indicating who sets the ground rules, controls the norms and decides the balances in a business area. They are about the distribution of power and how differences are managed – the extent to which individual perspectives are taken into account in deciding the approach to thought (FtT) and action (FtA). Freedom to Differ (FtD) is diversity through the lens of employee voice and authenticity – whether people are free to say what they are really thinking and feeling without fear of reprimand from their group/leader. Honest conversations have always been a hot topic in organisations, but not just for motivational reasons. It is well documented that the corporate consequences of (in)group-think and over-deference to authority at the expense of focusing attention outwards can be severe (see point 4 below). My hope is that the Org Culture Survey tool described below will be able to act as an early warning signal where levels of psychological safety are low, helping to avoid business loss – of trust, customers and talent. For more on the phenomenon of deference to authority – what I call the “strong vertical force” – please refer to this document on Origins & Academics.

In the field of diversity it is generally accepted that organisations which allow its members too little freedom to express ideas which are different from the group, the group’s leader, or the status quo, run a risk of not being able to adapt to changes in their surrounding environment (internal and external). Stating this positively, Freedom to Differ (FtD) is a key driver of innovation and agility, increasing an organisation’s chances of long term survival. There is a direct analogy here with the world of evolutionary biology, although in this field mutations cannot be suppressed in the same way as differences of opinion. Having said this, too much FtD can lead to a lack of cohesion, resistance or even rebellion – “organisational entropy” as someone once described it to me. Once again balance is key, but in today’s VUCA world organisations that revert to traditional “command and control” practices to re-establish order do so at their peril. For me, FtD is an organisation’s True South. It complements the power of True North and embodies the spirit and energy that employees bring to, and hopefully are able to express, in the workplace in the service of business performance.

How can we convert all this thinking into a practical approach? In a nutshell, the Org Culture Survey tool enables leaders and their teams to consider and plot what culture is required to succeed in their organisational area. If considered to be insightful, desired culture can also be plotted as this could be different from the culture required. Current culture can be measured simultaneously, and gaps to required/desired culture easily identified. These gaps are then an important topic for team discussion and action. It won’t always be an easy discussion, as balances involve trade-offs, but at least any major mis-alignments and extremes can be understood and worked through, potentially also with inter-connected teams. Please read the Culture Change and Practitioner Guidance pages for further details on how to apply the tool.

My approach clearly allows for cultural variability within an organization linked to the different kinds of work that need to get done. For example, the research and marketing functions will typically need greater degrees of freedom than manufacturing. This is not to say that an organization can’t have a common set of values that sets out fundamental behavioural expectations like Respect, Integrity and Customer Focus – “cultural hygiene factors”. However if we think of culture in a more subtle way, in relation to the various balances that need to be struck, a single monolithic “freedom formula” for all areas and roles is unlikely to be fit for purpose. Sub-cultures are necessary and healthy as long as there is a common thread of alignment to organizational values.

In effect what the 12 dimensions provide is an array of cultural choices for business areas, supporting the need for “organisational ambidexterity” – being able to do a number of different things equally well, simultaneously. The only hypothetical restriction that relates to the nature of a “trait” approach is that any one business area will struggle to be at both ends of a single culture dimension simultaneously e.g. low discretion AND high discretion. Having said this, a leader is still free to vary degrees of freedom by role and individual. So the opportunities for flexibility are considerable as long as levels of cultural self-awareness are high. My hope is that the Org Culture Survey tool will help to raise these level of awareness, enabling culture to be managed consciously by teams in the service all the stakeholders of an organisation – cultural intelligence.

Many readers will have noticed a number of assertions and assumptions in the points above – the larger the gap between current and required culture, the greater the risk to productivity and performance; higher scores against FtD drive higher levels of innovation and agility. They are reasonable assertions, rooted in the insights of academics like Michele Gelfand, but good science is about continuing to put reasonable ideas to the test. You don’t need a PhD to be a social scientist, but you do need a robust and credible research model and set of testable hypotheses. The Org Culture Framework and Org Culture Survey tool provide the means to study these questions in the background whilst leaders/teams look at their cultures in the foreground. What it needs if for enough people to sign up to using the survey tool. If you are interested in getting involved, please go to the Org Culture Research page.

Of particular interest to me is the question of whether it is possible to create a culture which simultaneously exhibits cultural traits at opposing ends of a single dimension e.g. long and short term mindset.

This is the AND vs. OR question, and a trait approach by definition indicates that a “personality” (in this case an org personality) cannot be at both ends of a scale at the same time.

But is this true, and is a trait approach validated by the evidence? For me this is an important question to answer as in my experience it is not uncommon for senior leaders to “want it all” and deny the existence of trade-offs e.g. I want to go really quickly, involve loads of people and keep costs very low. These contradictions can cause havoc in organisations.