Culture Change

We engage with clients in a culture change process only if they want help in understanding how their culture aids or hinders their efforts to achieve organisational aims, to develop or implement new strategy, or to make organisational changes.

Our central understanding of the notion of an organisation’s culture is as the manifestation of shared underlying assumptions and values, which have become embedded in the organisation in ways which may no longer be conscious and are taken for granted. These often include unquestioned ideas about, for example:

• the ways in which problems are solved and decisions are taken
• how strategy is developed
• how people are treated
• types and quality of products and services offered
• how these are marketed
• as well as the extent to which differences in these practices are tolerated.

The consultant’s primary function in this area is to stimulate inquiry and diagnosis through curiosity and questioning into the client’s world. We encourage our clients to become actively involved in diagnosing their own situations and helping to formulate as well as implement interventions. Interventions might entail, for example, organisation re-design and leadership development. We have a particular interest in working with organisations that, through partnership alliances, mergers or acquisitions need to attend to the impact of diversity and cultural differences. Our approach to culture change fits with the Tavistock Institute’s core method of action research.