May Newsletter : On Shape and Texture
Have you ever thought about the cultural shape and texture of your organisation? Well now you can. We’ve taken the core technology of the 8 Tribes online profiler and applied it to groups – staff, customers, members, stakeholders. . . brand enthusiasts. . . .all kinds of groups.
In June we’re trialling the 8 Tribes Staff Profiler for the first time. We have some illustrious guinea pigs from the creative industries – including a cutting edge magazine and a department within one of New Zealand’s foremost arts institutions.
The profiler is a simple-to-operate tool that compares the tribal profile of groups within an organisation with that of the organisation as a whole. It alerts us to any major differences in values and world view within the organisation and gives clues as to the underlying essence of the organisation and the way it is being expressed.
We have a similar tool to cover customers and stakeholders which allows us to investigate any major differences among the values and interests of those groups. Bringing the staff profiler on stream now lets us look at an organisation – and its communications strategies and processes – from both inside and out.
In and of itself, that’s a kind of breakthrough. In my experience, HR, Comms and Marketing people rarely have a shared view of the organisations they belong to – let alone common investigative tools to support that perspective. Now they do.
But back to the trial.
My 8 Tribes co-author Chris Brown and I share the belief that diversity is the key to generating creative energy and innovation. Different views of the same thing. Finding what we would call the collective mind of the organisation – and seeing how pervasive it is – will be fascinating.
There’s no one best shape for an organisation to have – you can just as easily be too united as too diffuse. And as Branson showed with Virgin, there’s no one best tribe for any organisation or any industry to be. In fact we’d seriously warn a group that was tribally monolithic that it risked becoming a victim of its own orthodoxy – whatever it was.
I remember a friend years ago who went to work for a brewery and was rather taken aback by the amount of beer they expected her to drink on St Patrick’s Day. Green beer at that. All a bit Papatoetoe for that Grey Lynner. Yet with the market at the time tipping away from bulk towards premium, it was her distinctive insight they really needed, not her allegiance to the common values.
It might be that the greatest value of these 8 Tribes staff profile exercises will just be to allow people to acknowledge that they don’t share the orthodox view – or to re-frame what it is they do bring to the group.
But even these ideally more differentiated organisations might have their problems if people of similar tribes clump together too much or pull in different directions. Maybe the silos that so often exist in organisations are associated with different tribal profiles. That might suggest that, rather than having to break them down, you might just need to learn to speak their language.
Speaking of language, it will be interesting to see just how particular tribal values are expressed in workplaces:
- to what extent people of different tribes use different kinds of messages and communications styles and talk past each other;
- whether different kinds of social behaviour within an organisation have any relationship to tribal affiliation.
Do multi-tribal organisations celebrate their differences? Do Otaran organisations feast together? Do Grey Lynn – dominant organisations get bulk bookings for experimental theatre? Do Raglan – rich organisations have their own sense of time?
Again – though we’ve done a lot of thinking in this area already – as befits a researcher and a communications specialist – we’re going into the trial with an open mind.
If you’re interested in finding out how we got on or in adding your organisation to our venerable list of experimental subjects do let me know. What with this and my Trajectories process, it’s becoming R & D city round here. Thanks Dr Cullen.
Talk soon.
Jill
P.S. See the next print issue of Idealog for the latest article on 8 Tribes
PPS And go here to see a truly gorgeous piece of NZ artistry by those talented Flight of the Conchords boys.
Jill Caldwell is Director of Windshift Communications Ltd. Click Here to contact Jill directly This is a free monthly newsletter provided to direct subscribers and legitimate Windshift contacts only. No further use is made of subscriber information.
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