The fundamental value proposition for any consultant is to provide an outside perspective on the operations ’s operations. This outside perspective is freed from the organizational history, habits, and politics and can look at a situation with fresh eyes. Organizations can develop this without the help of an outsider, but it isn’t easy.
Why?
An organization is bound up with its plans, space, people, actions and expectations. All of these come together to shape a force that propels an organization forward. Its biological equivalent is fat stores in an animal: they provide energy when food and nourishment are low. Organizational leaders can rest on these things and the patterns they create. This is culture.
Culture doesn’t change much. It’s slow-moving and stable. It’s also highly prejudicial toward things that aren’t part of the culture. The only exception to this is if you’ve built a culture of inquiry, learning, and experimentation. This culture encourages people to explore, share, create, and try new things, and, in the process of doing all that, they are free to admit ignorance sometimes and failure at other times.
This is a relatively rare occurrence for many reasons, most of which concern how the aforementioned forces shape the way we organize.
Culture is largely invisible, which is why an outside perspective can help make it become seen.
Seeing Beyond Your Culture
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. - Marcel Proust
I love this quote; it’s displayed on the Cense homepage. It reflects how external consultants (or attentive visitors of any sort) bring value to an organization. New eyes are required to see your culture differently. That outside perspective doesn’t have to involve an outside person, but it helps.
Cultivating the capacity to see beyond your culture involves fostering curiosity. Curiosity is a uniquely positioned quality that can penetrate cultural barriers created by the very things that hold a perspective in place. A way to frame culture is to say: ‘people like us do things like this.’
What curiosity offers is a chance to interrogate that phrase in context. That means asking:
Who are the people? Who is included in this definition in your organization?
What ties these people together?
What do we (the people) do? What are the practices, rituals and rules (stated and unstated) that define who we are and what we do?
What is left undone?
How coherent is all of this together?
It’s the last question where the outsider perspective is important. Culture is dynamic and exists within a social context that changes around it. If a culture doesn’t change - even to maintain its position or set of relationships with larger systems - it loses coherence.
The external perspective allows us to see where our cultural system fits or doesn’t fit with the system around it. What was once considered ‘best practice’ may no longer be the case. In some cases where there is great flux and new learning (or complexity), best practice may no longer be possible. We might be dealing with good or novel practice.
Sense | making and Design
Sensemaking is the process of exploring and understanding material that challenges our coherence. When working with organizations, the key is to ask the kind of questions that generate this material. What fits, what doesn’t and how do we create coherence?
This is where design comes in. Design is taking what we learn and shaping it into what we want to do with that learning. Learning - new knowledge integrated into our ways of thinking, seeing, and acting on the world — is channelled through design.
Organizations change when we redesign the culture. Maybe it’s in the ways we talk to one another — which might mean designing new communication and reflection opportunities. It could be the way we work together, by redesigning how or where people self-select and enrol in projects or by looking at how people work. What does it mean to lead? That’s another design question.
When we sense and make sense, we learn. When we convert our lessons into actions, that’s design.
That’s how it all comes together. An outside perspective fosters new ways of seeing, which leads to new learning, and can lead to new designs that change the culture of the organization.
It’s not always easy, but it can be simple.
Photo by Cédric Blondeau on Unsplash
Not common at all for a culture to encourage a good long look at the lens through which they see and judge and intend to shape the world. Also, adipose tissue is a site for accumulation and storage of toxins.