Cultural change takes a lot of care and guidance

Metamorphosis is the transformation process that turns a crawling worm into a beautiful flying butterfly. It needs breakthrough innovation and a cocoon to nurture transformation development.

Many chief executives and senior officials seek my advice in nurturing breakthrough innovation to craft cultural metamorphosis. Many organisations try to create a company-wide paradigm shift and lose touch with their existing core competencies. Organisations need to know how to leverage their existing organisation heartbeat and turn it into new cultural competitiveness.

I advice many chief executives in leading organisations to develop their  cultural-metamorphosis blueprint with these strategic steps:

n Discover authentic organisational passion heartbeat

Assessing and awakening the unseen greatness is critical to creating a new culture. Many organisations do not pay much attention to this point and lose touch with their reality when they try to build new things on a weak base. We at Asia Pacific Innovation Centre use multi-dimensional organisation-intelligence assessment technology to discover the innate drive. After knowing the core, you can leverage your mainstays into the next level of the metamorphosis.

n Architect Cultural Core Values

When we know the organisation intimately, we will know what current use of our greatness is and which area has the potential to grow. 

My experience with one leading financial company was that they had the ability to analyse the customer's financial problem and come up with an innovative solution. Their unseen heartbeat was in the areas of customer engagement and relationship building, which they never empowered their employees to use.

After the top management saw the strategic map of organisational heartbeat, we facilitated the top teams to architect new core values based on the new findings including customer problem solving, innovative solutions, relationship engagement and service-mindedness into the top priorities.

n Build a "walk the talk" cultural leader

When crafting the blueprint, we involve a cultural leader who has the leadership profile matching with new core values. This leader will co-crystallise the blueprint with my team and come up with theme ideas to illustrate the difference between the new and the old habits. These activities will communicate the new cultural blueprint to the rest of the organisation.

n Create a critical mass behind new cultural ambassador

My team and the cultural leader then roll out a cultural transformation workshop to educate the employees about the new culture. We then get a critical mass behind the new cultural ambassador.

n Develop new practical cultural best-practices stories

To sustain the new cultural metamorphosis, the collection of new cultural best practices to showcase practical solutions is key.