Culture and Risk Intelligence
In most organisations, culture change is viewed as a top-down initiative, a rational exercise, a leadership problem and a measurable goal.
Typical culture change initiatives include handing surveys and questionaries to employees and seeking their feedback, setting up SMART goals, motivating people through bonuses and sanctions, close surveillance of human behaviour and the central role assigned to ‘leaders’ and top-management to bring change.
Such initiatives assume that culture is:
- A mechanical system;
- Humans are motivated by incentives and fear;
- Success is brought about leaders and top managers (the hero myth);
- Human are objects and a sum of inputs and outputs.
This three-day workshop focuses on two key aspects:
> Making the familiar strange: how to make people aware of their assumptions within their own culture
> Making the strange familiar: how to listen, observe and respond when experiencing another culture.
Culture consists of our habits, heuristics, behaviours, attitudes, values, beliefs, language, history, artefacts and slogans that we share unconsciously within a group. Culture is so powerful it influences all our decisions without our awareness.
The key to all cultural intelligence is in making the familiar strange and the strange familiar.
Drawing from a vast range of disciplines and by using proven frameworks in Social Psychology of Risk that we call Culture Cloud, you will learn to observe, feel and experience:
- habits and rituals;
- Behaviours (under stress);
- alternative views on what people consider right and wrong (beyond rule following myth);
- The nature of power and authority
- understanding history beyond recorded events and facts;
- How to frame questions; observe silences (what is not said); and thinking metaphorically;
- The hidden meaning in artefacts displayed on walls
- How to understand slogans and symbols
Culture Cloud (based on Social Psychology of Risk)
What you will learn:
What you will experience and learn:
> How to surface the implicit/tacit knowledge in the organisation
> How to observe rituals, symbols and myths of a familiar culture
> How to observe rituals, symbols and myths of an unfamiliar culture
> How to map different subcultures within an organisation
> How to foster a culture of learning
> How to conduct culture audits
> How to think like an anthropologist
Duration: Three day in-person or ten online sessions (one hour each)
Note: this unit includes SPoR Foundation
Book Reference: 51 Stories in Culture by Dr Nippin Anand and Dr Robert Long