Target culture design

Target culture design helps you decide how your organisation can come together and work as one - around shared principles, common practices and an environment that helps people bring their best. Culture can feel a bit abstract, so we focus on making it practical - something leaders and teams can use in their daily work. We shape it with your people, starting from what’s already working, so everyone gets a real say in the place they work.

When target culture design might help

Culture design often starts with a small thought - that teams could pull together a little more, or that something good happening in one corner deserves to be shared. Here are some of the moments when people decide to do something about it.

What target culture design might work on

Organisational culture means different things to different people. It’s hard to define and hard to measure, and plenty of culture work has faded once the launch was over. So we keep it simple, and focus on three things you can work on:

• Shared principles - what people agree matters most, and bring into the room when they’re deciding something.
• Common practices - the ways of working everyone agrees to share.
• An enabling environment - the leadership, structures and rewards that make it easy to work this way.

When these three shift, culture tends to shift with them. A values poster or a new brand can help tell the story, but people feel culture in what happens in meetings and in everyday work.

Principles that help everyone focus on what matters most

Principles are the few things your organisation agrees matter above all else. Once they’re agreed, they give everyone the same place to start, whether that’s the board weighing up a big decision or a team planning its week.

When it’s clear what matters most, there’s less guessing about what’s important. Disagreements have something to centre on, so a tricky conversation can turn into a shared question: which option fits what we’ve agreed matters? Principles help people make sense of what’s going on around them, and see how their own work connects to the whole.

A principle usually works best with a short name, a sentence or two on why it matters, and a question people can ask in any meeting. Every team can ask the same question and answer it for its own work. That’s how principles bring people together while leaving room for each team to work in its own way.

A few things we might work on together:

• Finding the principles people already use. The best ones are often found rather than written - they’re already there in how people describe “the way we do things here”.
• Keeping the set short, so people can remember them without looking them up.
• Keeping the people you serve in view, as well as how you work together.
• Trying them out in real decisions before the wording is settled, and changing what doesn’t quite fit.
• Talking through what happens when two principles pull different ways. Agreeing how to weigh them up early makes those conversations easier later.

There’s more on the thinking behind this in our article on why values statements often struggle.

Common practices that shape how it feels to work here

Common practices are the ways of working an organisation agrees to share. They might be habits, behaviours or ways of running things, like who gets involved in a big decision or how teams pass work to each other.

What makes them common is the agreement. When everyone has agreed “this is how we do things here”, people know what to expect from each other, wherever they sit. That’s where the unity comes from.

Common practices work best when they’re simple and written down, so they’re easy to remember and easy to pick up when someone new joins. They also look different in every organisation. In a small charity, a handful of shared habits might cover most of what matters. In a larger organisation, some practices may need to be the same everywhere, while others are translated so they make sense for each team.

They don’t need to be big. A few small practices, carried out right across an organisation, can change what it feels like to work there.

A few things we might work on together:

• Spotting good practice that’s already there. Often one team has found a way of working that others would happily share.
• Agreeing a small set, rather than a rulebook.
• Linking each practice to a principle, so people know why it matters.
• Deciding what’s shared everywhere and what each team can adapt.
• Testing them with a few teams first, then adjusting before they become part of how you work.

An environment that helps principles and practices come to life

The environment is everything around people that makes it easier, or harder, to work in line with what you’ve agreed. It includes how decisions get made, how teams are set up, the informal networks people rely on, what gets rewarded and recognised, and the systems people use every day.

Leadership sits at the heart of it. Everyone who leads people casts a shadow - what they do and what they notice tells others what matters. When leaders role-model the principles and practices, the rest of the environment tends to follow.

A useful question to ask of each principle and practice is this: does our environment support it, enable it and reward it, or does it pull the other way? Where it supports them, there’s something to build on. Where it pulls the other way, that’s often a good place to start.

A few things we might work on together:

• The leadership shadow - how leaders at every level can model the principles and practices, and help others do the same.
• What gets noticed and rewarded, including recognition and promotion.
• The people others listen to. Informal networks can help a new way of working spread from team to team.
• Time and space for the practices you’ve agreed, so they don’t get squeezed out by the day job.
• Structures and systems, where small changes would make the right thing easier.
• Working with HR and other teams who look after reward and performance, so changes fit with how those systems already work.

How we’ll help you develop your target culture

Every organisation is different, so we’d agree the approach with you, based on your size and how much you already know about your culture. A couple of things stay the same whatever the mix: people are involved at every step, and ideas get tried out before anything is settled.

Starting from what’s already working

Good culture design builds on what people already value. If you’ve had a culture review recently, we’d start from what it found. If not, a round of conversations can help - asking people what makes them proud to work here, and what they’d want to keep whatever else changes.

This is sometimes called appreciative inquiry: starting with what’s going well, and asking how to have more of it. It tends to give people energy for the work ahead, because they’re building on something they recognise.

Picturing the culture you’re creating

It helps to start with a clear picture of where you’re heading. Imagine walking into your organisation in a year or eighteen months’ time. What would you see and hear in a meeting, or on an ordinary Wednesday? And what would it feel like to work there?

Answering that together, with leaders and people from across the organisation, gives the culture a clear shape. From there, we can work backwards to the principles, practices and environment that would help you get there. The picture also gives you a set of simple tests. Every option gets checked against it, which gives everyone a fair way to weigh them up.

Bringing many voices into the design

People tend to feel a culture is theirs when they’ve helped shape it. In a smaller organisation, that might mean a few workshops with people from different teams and levels. In a larger one, there are simple ways to bring hundreds of people into one conversation. In World Café, small groups move between tables and build on each other’s ideas. In Open Space, people set the agenda themselves.

We’d also involve the people others listen to. They’re not always the most senior, but they often know what will work in practice, and their support helps new ways of working spread.

Shaping principles and practices together

Your people know your organisation far better than we do, so the drafting happens with them. Our part is to bring structure, good questions and ideas from elsewhere, and to hand ownership over as we go.

We’d usually draft a few options and improve them together, checking each against the picture you agreed at the start. Wording matters here: a principle people can say in their own words is one they’re more likely to use.

Sometimes two principles pull against each other. Polarity mapping can help. It sets out the good in each side, and what happens when you lean too far either way, so people can agree how to keep the best of both.

Trying your culture design out in real work

Principles and practices only matter if they’re useful in people’s day jobs. So before anything is settled, a few teams might try them for a few weeks, then share what helped and what they’d change. Short rounds of trying, reviewing and adjusting mean the final version has already been tested by the people who’ll use it.

Checking the environment

New ways of working last when the environment makes room for them. If a practice needs time nobody protects, or a principle goes unnoticed when people follow it, it tends to fall away. So for each principle and practice, we’d look at whether the environment supports it, enables it and rewards it. A simple grid can help, with principles and practices down one side and parts of the environment along the top. It makes it easy to see where things already fit together, and where a change would help most.

Leaders often find it useful to reflect on their own shadow too: which principles they already model, and where they could show the way more. Mapping informal networks - who people go to for advice, or to get things done - can also show how new ways of working are likely to spread.

Bringing your culture design together

The design comes together in a working session, where people agree the final principles and practices, and the first changes to the environment. We’d write it all down simply, so it’s easy to share and easy for someone new to pick up.

A lighter culture design might be a few workshops and one round of testing. A deeper one might add organisation-wide conversations and several rounds of testing.

What you come away with

Target culture design leaves you with a culture your people helped design, and a practical plan for starting to put it into practice - where to begin, and how you’ll know it’s working. It usually includes:

• Your shared principles, each with a short reason and a question people can ask when they’re deciding something.
• Your common practices - what’s shared everywhere, and what each team can adapt.
• A picture of where you’re heading - what you’d hope to see and hear in a year or so.
• Where to start - the first practices to try, the teams to begin with, and the changes to the environment that would help most.
• The people taking it forward - leaders, and people who’ve already tried it out and can help others do the same.
• Simple ways to see how it’s going - a team check-in, and a few signs of progress drawn from your picture of where you’re heading.

We’d also help each team translate the principles and practices into its own work. That might be a short guided session, where a team works through the questions that go with each principle and agrees what they mean for its day-to-day work. We’d support managers to lead these sessions, so the culture reaches every team, including people who weren’t part of the design.

What happens next is up to you. Many organisations take the plan forward themselves. Others like to have us alongside - supporting people as the changes take hold, or helping you keep things moving over time. And if it turns out you need something lighter than you expected, we’ll say so.

Common questions

Thinking about the culture you’d like to build? Talk to us about target culture design