Glossary - Corporate Culture terms

Sharing knowledge is a founding principle of The Cultureship Practice.

This evolving Glossary captures the key areas of novelty and priority within the theory, methodology and methods of The Cultureship Practice.

If you want to join us in one of our existing interests, or a project of your own which is complemented by our areas of expertise, please visit our Research page.

Reflects the modern obsession with always yearning for something better just out of reach, never concentrating fully on maximising the potential within the present. This is closely linked within the field of Organisational Development to Changemania (see later).

This refers to the ongoing pursuit of popular externally-accredited standards with a mindset which prioritises the accreditation above any fundamental cultural re-alignment.

One of our tools to aid personal reflexivity. Organisational culture is made up of a rolling average of individual self-images which both create and reflect the corporate-level culture. Our underlying mission with individuals is always to achieve a core shift from any weakness and poverty of self-image towards ableness and the riches of integrity. The powerful metaphor of Blackpool Rock helps implant enabling qualities right down an individual’s spine.

The obsession with management fads, comprising a continual but misplaced faith in change management initiatives to the exclusion of evolution, execution and attention to subtle detail. Such initiatives, in the absence of cultural finesse and context, often create cumulative disruption and harm.

This is one of the damaging results of Changemania. Beyond the established concept of Change Fatigue, we often witness a scepticism towards inchoate initiatives that brings this deeper level of staff disengagement. Employee Engagement collapses within the chaos of Changemania.

This parodies the popularity of mechanistic Trait Theory, whereby copying the characteristics of successful individuals is held up as a guarantee of similar success. We have noticed that the vast majority of successful managers wear clean shoes, hence clean shoes make for good managers. This circular, self-referential sophistry is found throughout much management science, whereby correlations are trumpeted as causality.

CCR is an acronym referring to our theory of innate human values as acted out within superior Organisational Behaviour: Community, Contribution & Recognition underpin a melding of higher organisational performance and greater personal fulfilment. CCR is the mainspring of great corporate culture.

This expresses the uneven and politically charged dynamic of change acceptance within complex and multi-tiered organisations. According to their propensity to embrace difference, we suggest a typology of individuals as Excitables, Persuadables, Bring Alongs & Opt Outs. It is aimed at helping prevent bona fide change programmes from descending into resentment and deeper Change Aversion.

This is our high level snapshot tool to capture the broad cultural mood within an organisation. It uses our typology of organisational mood seen as Alive, Checklisted, AWOL, Traumatised and Feral.

Our primary orientation, the approach we bring to our work with organisational development and corporate culture research. Out of the many metaphors through which organisations can be assessed and engaged, we believe that culture remains far and away the most useful top-level analogy. But, as the “neo” suggests, this is a fresh and re-invigorated approach. Away from the excessive claims of positivistic certainty over corporate culture, and utterly opposed to the management scientists who declare that it is just another systems variable to be controlled and manipulated at will, we place core, societal values at the heart of our work.

Our typology which helps illuminate and capture both the unproductive and also the optimal relationships across the three main tiers of organisational structure. These layers are Leadership/Senior Management, Middle Management & Frontline Staff. We characterise three levels of interaction from sub-optimal in Hierarchical Hell, through mediocre in Comfortably Numb, leading up to productively, supportively and honestly interacting within Co-construction. It is also a key tool in beginning to reconfigure perspectives on the kinds of structural inhibitions which can be habitually reproduced within organisational culture.

Our meta-theory. We believe that superior corporate culture rests on Community, Contribution & Recognition (whilst always recognising that, beyond culture itself, strategy and systems also play their vital parts). We also believe that there is the possibility of some active, personal and collective input – the artisan overtones are captured in the “ship” of Cultureship – to the fostering of CCR and hence superior organisational culture. These comments locate us within the ongoing debate which is at the core of much of the human and social sciences – the argument as to whether it is institutionalised structure or human agency which determines our dispositions and actions. Cultureship insists that it is a joint process (though weighted more towards habit and culture than any classic notion of Free Will) and that human action can make a difference, although not in any over-individualised sense of naïve boosterism (e.g. “What I can conceive, I can achieve!”).

Our term for a shared, conscious but largely unspoken failure to engage with what many individuals believe to be the operational causes of organisational problems. Complicities of Evasion operate where most people know that what is being done is wrong but do not challenge the pretence. Complicities of Evasion thus differ from Groupthink, which is more about a strong consensus surrounding over ambition and omnipotence, than this weak consensus which knowingly keeps quiet on structural limitations and weakness.

The enduring personal skillset we seek to embed within individuals. It draws on theories of Reflexivity, which is the recognition of the context of beliefs and behaviours set within times and places, environments and human relationships. Reflexivity is the ability, albeit never fully realisable, of recognising not only what one is thinking and doing but also having a strong sense of why. Beyond Reflexivity, Cultureship Literacy also draws strongly on motivation and values, which we express as our working methodology of CCR. Cultureship Literacy is also our organisation-wide goal, as increasingly culturally literate individuals create a higher performing and more humanly fulfilling organisation which becomes much greater than the sum of its individual parts.

This is a debilitating lack of organisational cultural self-awareness, resting on universal barriers to open and constructive community and communication which take on specific manifestations within organisations (e.g. Changemania, Badgewearing, Complicity of Evasion, Failure Platitudes). Cultureship Illiteracy is a post-disciplinary concept which operates across the boundaries of traditionally separate research fields: Psychology, Social-Psychology, Sociology and Organisational Behaviour being the most relevant.

The tendency, often lucrative for consultancies (Business Process Re-engineering being a typical example), for endless diagrammatic re-workings of internal process and power relationships. Lines on charts can often become more important in managements’ minds than actual processes, with the corporate culture and human elements barely getting a look in. Our ongoing corporate culture research shows us time and again that we must avoid both the excessive individualism of the personality trait approach central to much of occupatoinal psychology and also the process structualism which flows from many consultancies essentially born out of accountancy.

This describes the tendency to promote professionally/technically qualified managers to the level at which their underdeveloped human, interpersonal and broader management skills can become a manifest liability. Training and personal development need to become viewed as a right, not an imposition, nor an admission of failure. Sport, the public sector and professional services practices are particularly adept at promoting from within whist failing to consider the necessary concomitant development of skills. Dynastic family operations and large private sector firms with overly passive boards are also common culprits.

This expresses the tendency to misrepresent and under-represent key organisational debates in a way that discourages their full unpacking and hence stymies the development of effective options. Debates become rigidly framed in high level jargon about generalities such as “teamworking”, “leadership”, or “strategy” and the specifics remain unaddressed. Through talking around issues in this way (Failure Platitudes exist more in the way these concepts are used than in the concepts themselves), organisations never obtain a full picture of what the problems look like, still less what may be possible new ways forward. Organisational culture always lives in attitudes, behaviour and relationships; it does not reside in management-speak platitudes.

We tend to avoid one-size-fits-all questionnaires as they will frequently suffer from a degree of teleology; the sense that one is being led to a pre-set point (and inevitably a point that demands a declaration of improvement, true or not). And in terms of an organisation’s internal politics, questionnaires will in a number of ways potentially act as barriers to personal frankness. To obviate these flaws we have refined a method called Funnel Narrative, whereby we create story telling opportunities around partially focussed areas, yet leave the content and trajectory of individual stories to the teller. We use this method particularly in The Sum of My Cultural Parts as a detailed profiling exercise, locating the individual within general organisational areas and relationships yet allowing both the micro and the macro dimensions to be told.

Our parody of simplistic Contingency Theory, whereby the key to situational success is to change habitual approaches with the ease with which one can change hats. Such simplistic notions hopelessly underestimate the institutionalised influence of organisational culture.

This describes our ideal-type public sector organisation. We regard power and command as a reasonable part of a natural order – but only when expressed through deserved authority and respectful hierarchy. There are often ill-considered critiques of bureaucracy without an understanding that it is under-attention to the human dimensions and not the model itself where the main problems commonly lie.

This represents an over concentration on statistical measurements to the exclusion of core cultural dimensions. Numerical metrics may overlook the evolving context of what is desirable and feasible. Numbers alone can create a parallel universe of frustrating unreality, human disengagement and dogmatism. Our own corporate culture research, however, always also considers context BUT it is also always highly conscious of people.

The Cultureship Practice relies on a broadly humanistic philosophy. That is, on Douglas McGregor’s scale of Theory X and Theory Y people, we would tend towards the Y. Thus we value co-operation over coercion but we are not be so naïve as to assume that structures, systems and active values do not also play a vital role. We borrow further from the modern development of Positive Psychology, believing that theory and practice has concentrated so much on the negatives and downsides of human existence that in certain areas it has all but ceased to recognise potential and possibilities. It is here that we have developed our perspective of Possibilitise, a clear rebuttal of the nihilistic tendencies of much of the human sciences to Problematise, to paint individuals immovably into structurally limiting corners. The second dimension of this orientation is the type of knowledge we seek to create. Cultureship aims to open up new possibilities for doing things differently (and better) together – an EPISTEMOLOGY OF MUTUAL POSSIBILITIES. We reject the prevailing tendency of management science to attempt to produce immutable truths expressable as mathematical certainties. Co-operation, relevance and agility are our calling cards, not soulessness, abstraction and concretisation. Management science has been overly concerned with commanding absolute certainty. We argue that it frequently tends to seek the wrong kinds of knowledge, often expressed in unhelpful types of language.But this is no licence to sloppiness. It is an overdue recognition that people live within relationships (with themselves, with others and with their environments) and that these relationships are always in flux. There are no certainties, only temporary alliances of values, beliefs and resources. In philosophical terms, this is a Relational view. It is within this cultural flux that Cultureship operates. By positioning ourselves within the streams of corporate culture, we seek to open up possibilities for new channels and new creative flows. This is what we mean by Possibilitise.

Progressive Management bridges the gap between competent management and exceptional management. Progressive Management allows technical competence to flourish through better relationships, higher motivation and enhanced satisfaction.

This is our rallying call to customer-facing organisations to prioritise their efforts towards the support of their frontline staff. Too many corporate cultures become inwardly focused, obsessively political and do not look beyond their mechanical processes to their broader values and purposes.

The items in CAPITALS are taken from the unique methodology of The Cultureship Practice and relate to most of its core corporate culture related beliefs. We are happy for individuals and organisations to enjoy experimenting with this material in a non-commercial fashion subject to the specific terms of the Creative Commons license indicated herein. This in no way affects our existing Copyright ownership and privileges. It is, however, our intention to share Cultureship widely and to stimulate debate, with academics, pracademics and industry organisational development professionals, in what we believe is a fundamental route to corporate culture betterment. We always welcome conversations, critique and propositions.