How to Design an Organization Culture

Speaker: Alex Osterwalder (@AlexOsterwalder)

“Your company’s culture is your operating system” – Dave Gray

In most companies, there is a gap between the actual culture and the desired culture.

Potential Culture Issues

• Loudest people get promoted
• Bonuses not correlated to current performance
• Culture of fear
• Managers don’t give feedack

What does a great company look like?

• Makes a profit
• Gets customers excited
• Gets employees excited
• Makes the world better

“The world is full of bankrupt companies with world-class culatures. Culture does not make a company” – Ben Horowitz

This applies to startups, but existing companies can suffer dramatically from bad culture.

Culture Map

• Used to systematically design organizational cultures
  • Based in research on culture development and success
• Uses experimentation and testing to design better organizational cultures

Exercise #1

Discuss with your neighbor what corporate culture is, what is consists of and write down a definition.

Ideas from the crowd:

• the reward system and how you indicate to new employees what is important
• how people work with each other
• attitudes and behaviors of your employees

Everyone has a different definition and understanding of culture.

Working Definition

The values, beliefs and behaviors practiced in an organization. Formed over time because they are rewarded or punished (by formal and informal rules, rituals and behaviors).

Exercise #2

Describe your corporate culture and elaborate why your culture is the way it is.

The Culture Map

• Behaviors
  • How we act or conduct ourselves, espeically toward others
    • What do we do? What do we say?
• Outcomes
• Enablers
  • Formatl and explicit ru
• Blockers

At VC Firm

Outcome: respect entrepreneurs

Behavior: Always be on time for meeting entrepreneurs

Blocker: Busy call schedule

Enabler: $10/min fine

Strategyzer

Outcome: Happy team, low employee turnover

Behavior: Collect happiness data, ask how to improve, act on feedback

Enabler: TINYpulse surveys, black hat / yellow hat, Coffee chats

TINYpulse surveys

• On a scale of 1-10, how happy are you at work?
  • 1 being extremely unhappy about about to quite – t 10 being extremely happy and humping with joy.
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how enthusiatstically would you reapply for a job here?

Black Hat / Yellow Hat Exercise

• What are all the thinks you don’t like at Strategyzer?
  • People type into the chat window. Everyone types in for 1 minute.
• What are all the things you love about Strategyzer?
  • Everyone types in for 1 minute

Coffee Chats

• Bi-weekly chats on how to improve

Using the Culture Map

• Identify 1 consistently bad outcome
• Describe the behaviors it results from
• Identify what enables this beahvior or blocks it

OR

• Identify 1 or more bad behaviors
• Describe the bad outomes it leads to
• Identify what enables the behaviors or blocks the good behavior

On Designing Business Tools Like Culture Map & Business Model Canvas

• Make them visual
• Create a structure that facilitates group discussion
• Make it intuitive and buzzword free
• Difference between a framework and a tool

“You can wireframe your culture” – Paul Kenny

Exercise: Come up with the enablers that could transform the previously described negative behaviors and outcomes in your company into positive ones.

Use Lean Startup principles to designing organizational culture. Come up with a hypothesis on how to change your culture

Microsoft Stack Ranking

Target Outcome: Better performance

Enablers: Stack ranking

Actual Behaviors: Superstars stopped collaborating, political horsetrading increased, people focused on posturing, not doing work

Actual Outcome: Performance tanked, created culture of fear & beauracracy

Test Card

1. We believe that…
2. To verify that, we will…
3. And measure…
4. We are right if….

Three Levels of Using the Culture Map

1. Individually map your as-is culture. Think hard about enablers and blockers.
2. Gather your team, map and discuss your as-is culture.
3. Design a workshop to move from an existing culture to a designed culture.