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Cultural Reinvention

Moving Toward an Indelibly Compelling Purpose

Details

Role: Organization

Focus: Cultural Reinvention

Outputs: Cultural Reinvention Playbook

Cultural Reinvention is about completely rethinking your organization — who it is, what it does, what its purpose is, what it believes, what it values, its guiding philosophies, its governing principles, and its defining structures — all so as to make it more relevant to where its markets are going and more resilient to the long-term changes confronting it.

Commensurate with this, it is about reimagining a bolder and more impactful purpose in the world – one that is very compelling and indelible – one that inspires your people to break out and take hold of the future and become its master, not its slave.   This empowers your organization to own and shape its future — so that it can deliver a transformed world for the good of all.

Achieving such a reinvention starts with redefining the organization's ‘soul’ — who it is, what it's about, and why it therefore exists.   It continues with redefining the organization's ‘modus operandi’ — its ways of seeing the world, of reframing the future, and of engaging with the world through a uniquely identifying series of behaviors.

Both of these – its cultural identity and its cultural practices – are crucial to giving the organization a uniquely recognizable identity in the world that lets it stand out from the pack and become the owner, shaper, and definer of its markets and industries.
Strategy X — recognizing this, and so that we can work with your team to accomplish this reinvention — goes extremely deep with your organization, peeling back its many nuanced layers so that we can burrow down deep into the true essence of who the organization aspires to be, and what it aspires to achieve in the future.

In doing this, we work our process – using our proprietary Culture X Framework – to completely reimagine your organization into one with an entirely new Cultural Identity – including an indelibly-compelling purpose and a mission and a vision reflecting that – and an entirely new series of Cultural Practices… beliefs, values, philosophies, principles, and structures — all of which will take it deep into a brave new future.

The end result of this is a powerfully redefined new organization — one with a very clear sense of purpose and identity in the world, and one with the cultural artifacts needed to be able to truly own, shape, and define the future ahead of it.

This is crucial, because no other transformations can or will succeed without first putting these properly defined cultural artifacts into place as their underlying foundation.

Strategy X is unique in its ability to define these.

Our Cultural Reinvention work involves two distinct parallel areas of focus.
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Cultural Identity | Cultural Practices
Cultural Identity
The point of Cultural Identity is to completely reimagine and redefine the soul of your organization — who it is and what it stands for in the world.

To this end, we work hand-in-hand with your organization and its leaders to thoroughly dissect and cross-examine your present organization and its existing cultural artifacts – and then – through a series of dialogues and conversations with key stakeholders – we ultimately move to defining, articulating, and documenting an entirely new set of artifacts for the organization.   These are ones that clearly define who the new organization is to be, and what it is to be about.

This includes the following four (4) cultural artifacts:

  • Core Identity — Who the organization fundamentally sees itself as being, and who it desires the world to see it as being.

  • Purpose — Why the organization fundamentally exists, and thus what its compelling purpose is to be.   This is indelible — it will not change over time.

  • Mission — Given its purpose, what mission will it aspire to in order to live out that purpose throughout the future.   This is a manifestation of its purpose, and as such can change and evolve over time as its environment changes and evolves.

  • Vision — The organization's vision for how it aspires to impact the world over time, and what the world will become because of its efforts, together with who it will itself become on account of this journey.
Redefining these four artifacts will redefine the very essence, soul, and identity of your organization — empowering everyone involved to see it in a completely new light, and to aspire to being a key part of helping it live out its new purpose and mission in the world and consequently achieve the aspirations of its new vision.

As a result, your new Cultural Identity will serve as the basis for being able to embark on any number of new growth and innovation strategies aimed at staking entirely new ground in your industries and markets — and breaking into or defining new ones!

To undertake our Cultural Identity work, our Culturologists work very closely with key members of your organization to engage in a highly curated set of creative activities designed to distil the past & present and define the future.   These activities are rooted in linguistics, anthropology, design, and strategy.

These creative activities include the following:
  • Appreciative Inquiry
  • Critical Questioning
  • Scenario Analysis
  • Challenge & Opportunity Reframing / Remapping
  • Verbal Analogy
  • Visual Analogy
  • Word / Name Association
  • Brand Identity
  • Brand Positioning
  • Brand Promise / Brand Message / Brand Language
  • Brand Experience
  • Brand Design
Cultural Practices
The point of Cultural Practices is to fundamentally reimagine and redefine the beliefs and behaviors of your organization — what it believes and how it will act that out.

To this end, we work hand-in-hand with your organization and its leaders to thoroughly dissect and cross-examine your present organization and its existing cultural artifacts – and then – through a series of dialogues and conversations with key stakeholders – we ultimately move to defining, articulating, and documenting an entirely new set of artifacts for the organization.   These are ones that clearly define what the organization believes and values, and through what new behaviors it intends to live those out.

This includes the following five (5) cultural artifacts:

  • Beliefs — What the organization fundamentally believes about the world around it, and consequently its place in that world given its purpose.

  • Values — What the organization fundamentally values in its journey of trying to live out its purpose and thereby achieve its mission and vision in the world.

  • Philosophies — The organization's guiding mantras on how to address and confront the many realities of the world around it — in light of its beliefs and values.

  • Principles — The organization's core tenets governing how it will behave across each of its domains and activities — both today and into the future.

  • Structures — The optimal organizational architecture for the organization to be able to carry out its mission and achieve its purpose in the world.
Cultural Practices are the natural and necessary counterpart to Cultural Identity, since Cultural Identity defines who the organization is, but not necessarily what it believes or how it will behave in the world.   As such, Cultural Practices define – as much as anything – the organization's ‘why’… why it has as its purpose and mission the purpose and mission that it does, and why those are important to the organization.   In other words, they define what really matters to the organization… what makes it tick.   These considerations will show up fully in the organization's Cultural Practices.

Redefining these five artifacts will redefine what your organization believes and values, what guiding philosophies inform its work, what principles it will use to govern its work, and what structures will allow it to optimally carry out the resulting behaviors.   Getting these absolutely right – and living them out consistently – will prove paramount to achieving success in the area of Cultural Reinvention, as it is only by carrying out these practices consistently that your organization will properly reinforce its articulated Identity, which inherently demands that these two domains – Identity and Practices – be entirely congruent with one another.

Your new Cultural Practices will thus serve as the basis for being able to embark on any number of new growth and innovation strategies aimed at staking entirely new ground inside your industries and markets — and breaking into or defining new ones!

To undertake our Cultural Practices work, our Culturologists work very closely with key members of your organization to engage in a highly curated set of creative activities designed to distil the past & present and define the future.   These activities are rooted in linguistics, anthropology, design, and strategy.   These are the same creative activities as we use in our Cultural Identify work.
To learn more about our Culture X Framework or any of these creative activities, drop us a line… we'll be happy to explain them in full detail.
The outcome of our Cultural Reinvention work
The outcome, and thus deliverable, of our Cultural Reinvention work is the development and documentation of a complete Cultural Reinvention Playbook.

This playbook prescribes for the organization the nine (9) cultural artifacts associated with Cultural Reinvention — namely:   Core Identity / Purpose / Mission / Vision / Beliefs / Values / Philosophies / Principles / Structures.

These are all formally documented in a final Cultural Reinvention Playbook Report.

After we deliver this report, we are fully available to work side-by-side with your team to help actually implement its prescriptions.   We do this through a variety of mechanisms, including: executive coaching, training, workshops, awareness sessions, corporate communications, marketing communications, and more… whatever is needed to meet your organization's needs.   We are highly experienced in helping to deploy Cultural Reinventions.   And… we don't succeed until you succeed – so we'll be here to support you for the long run – until you've totally nailed it, which indicates real success.
The real foundation for any form of Corporate Transformation
Cultural Reinvention is the necessary foundation for being able to undertake any form of Corporate Transformation — whether it be Digital Transformation, Agile Transformation, Corporate Innovation, Future Proofing, or what have you.

All of these first begin with a proper reinvention of the organization's culture — and will succeed most effectively whenever this reinvention has been tackled and accomplished first, as all the rest is largely ‘mechanics’ — meaning they won't take hold until this foundation has first been put into place.

Consequently, Cultural Reinvention is the prerequisite for success in any other form of Corporate Transformation.   Always begin here.   It is of course necessary that each of your organization's leaders truly live out the new beliefs, values, philosophies, and principles that have been articulated in this Reinvention.   It is thus presumed that they have each fully committed to doing so.

Drop us a line to learn more about this work.
Understand the Future
Learn how to think properly about the future
Develop a Future Fit Mindset
Weave this mindset deeply into your organization
Own Your Destiny
Show your organization how to own its future
Activate Powerful Strategies
Pursue long term strategies with deep impact
Develop Innovation Capabilities
Develop the capacity to be the innovation pacesetter
Dominate Your Markets
Become the real driving force in your markets
Reinvent Your Culture
Cultivate a new culture that can go the distance
Become a Digital Powerhouse
Go deep on the journey of digital transformation
Become an Iconic Organization
Achieve outcomes & results that legends are made of

Engage Us

Your challenges are complex.   Working with us shouldn't be.   We work hard to explain and simplify each step along our collective journey… what we'll be doing, how undertaking that step will work, how long each step or phase is expected to take, and the mechanisms by which each step or phase will succeed in achieving your organization's unique goals and aspirations.

At the end of the day, we want to ensure you're confident in our journey ahead — and that our work will deliver for your organization the outcomes and results – and impacts – needed for it to be able to own and shape its future.   That's why we're here.

01. Conversation
Real change starts with a conversation.   Here, we sit and talk with you about your organization and its needs & aspirations going forward.   This is a no-judgment / high-aspiration zone – and so we're completely open and honest here… nothing's off the table… everything is fair game.   We want to know the whole story… where you've been, where you presently are, and where it is you want to go.   That gets us to Step 2.
02. Proposal
Understanding both your present situation and your future aspirations, we prepare for you a Proposal detailing exactly what course of action we intend to undertake with your organization – in this case that revolving around Cultural Reinvention.   Documenting this plan of action and its expected outcomes puts us all on the same page with respect to our collective gameplan and its goalposts. That gets us to Step 3.
03. Execution
At the agreed-upon date, we engage with your organization and begin working together to execute the plan.   This requires a firm commitment from both sides to do all the hard work needed to achieve success.   Together, we work the plan methodically and systematically — checking in at numerous points to ensure that our efforts are in fact achieving their intended outcomes and results (if not, we circle back and either reinforce an effort and adjust the plan – always in tune with how your organization is responding).   Our goal is to fully achieve the engagement's expected outcomes, results, and impacts.
04. Follow Up
Because not all outcomes and results can be known immediately, we follow up with you over the course of several months – even years if need be – to ensure your organization is remaining on course with our interventions and in fact achieving its intended outcomes and results.   In most cases it will be.   But if for some reason it's not, then we'll still be here to help it get back – and remain – on track — ensuring that it continues achieving the needed outcomes, results, and impacts over the long run.

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