We invest a lot of time and energy thinking about how our organisations are described.
What's more revealing is how people describe them to each other.
People can usually tell the purpose and they know the values. They're written down and often genuinely believed.
But it doesn't take long before the stories start to emerge. It only takes a decision made under pressure for it to cut across those values. For example, someone being asked for honest feedback and discovering there are limits to how honest they can be.
Those tiny moments aren't a part of strategy documents, but do become stories, and those stories will shape people's understanding of the organisation far more than any carefully written statement of purpose.
Dave Snowden, who developed the Cynefin framework, has argued that storytelling is not an optional extra. It is the source of organisational culture. Indeed, complexity scholar Jean Boulton argues that even ‘fragments’ of stories change culture.
Which means the stories already circulating inside an organisation deserve attention. They show people how decisions are really made, what happens when someone disagrees and whether the values still hold when they're tested. If those stories are out of step with how the organisation describes itself, people will believe what they've experienced.
I explored this in more depth in a piece for Indian Management magazine, where it was the cover story in the May issue.
Read the full article Here
If someone joined your organisation tomorrow, would they understand your purpose from what is written down, or from what they watched people do?