When it comes to the future of work, you’d be forgiven for thinking we should all religiously follow the example of a handful of currently-successful organizations - a cookie cutter recipe for corporate culture.

Be part of a squad like at Spotify, be nimble like Netflix or design-minded like Apple. Do it as they do, and mirror their successes… right?

Wrong.

We need to change the conversation away from mimicry when it comes to shaping authentic and effective culture.

“How your company works should be aligned with its market and strategy, not the latest trend, business book or Harvard Business Review case study. This means taking a clear stance as companies on how people work together, and making this as varied and as competitive as our markets. What’s more important than product/ market fit? Culture/market fit.”

For Sarah Dickinson, Managing Director at NOBL Collective, it’s this marrying between how we work and how we win which holds the keys to lasting competitive differentiation. It’s also the focus of NOBL’s workshop at Innov8rs Austin, 4-5 December 2019.

Launched in 2014, NOBL helps organizations bring understanding and definition to their culture. Now, more than ever, they believe that organizations are waking up to seeing culture as a strategic asset - not a ‘soft’, nice-to-have-moment at your annual offsite. Rather it’s a system of connected practices, artifacts and behaviors which are treated deliberately and with care and intention, whether you’re running a meeting, dealing with a deadline or managing an innovation program.

Finding a culture/market fit

Where product/market fit is all about ‘being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market’, culture/market fit is even more foundational:

Find yourself a healthy market, sure, but then develop a culture that can deliver to that market.

Without culture/market fit, bringing the right product to market is impossible:

“Culture can be this overwhelming, amorphous topic, a bit like ‘strategy’, so we start by simplifying it to its essence. This means surfacing language and characteristics that all members of a team or organization can use to describe their own culture. With clarity and common ground they can then start to think about ways to better align culture with strategy.”

For example,

  • If you’ve identified that your market strategy is all about delivering the most seamless customer experience, then your culture should value collaboration more than individual control.
  • If winning in your market means elevating a tool into a work-of-art like Apple by prioritizing form and function, then you need a culture which values beauty and elegance above convention.
  • If remaining competitive means a flawless, reliable product - then you need a culture that values process over creativity.

Rather than copy-pasting to get the next-best-thing like many consultancies, NOBL doesn’t hand over a document or a playbook. They believe in ‘movements not mandates,’ inspiring and guiding leaders and difference-makers to drive the change themselves.

To identify their culture/market fit, NOBL has built a model based on the acclaimed and time-tested Competing Values Framework. In doing so, they found that there are four flavors of organizational culture, each of which has unique traits, competitive strengths and an animal mascot to make things easy:

  • The Elephant Herd: these cultures value interpersonal dynamics and relationships above all else. They are described by employees as being personal, mentoring, accepting, consensus-seeking, and trusting. These cultures tend to excel at strategies such as experience/service design, talent acquisition, and virtuousness. Think Patagonia, Pixar, and Zappos.
  • The Bird Flock: these cultures value agility above all else. Employees use words like entrepreneurial, inventive, adventurous, inspiring, and fast-paced to describe these workplaces. Bird flocks tend to excel at cultural intelligence, customer intelligence, and of course speed to market. Think Beats, Zara, and Netflix.
  • The Bee Hive: these cultures value process and procedure above all else. Employees say these cultures feel logical, stable, efficient, comfortable, and respectful. Beehives often rock at achieving economies of scale, preserving intellectual property, and dominating on price. Think Toyota, GE, and Coca-Cola.
  • The Wolf Pack: these cultures value execution and results above all else. Their employees use words like competitive, goal-oriented, accountable, focused, and productive to describe their workplaces. Wolf Packs can crush product design, geographical strategies, and capturing network effects. Think Facebook, Nike, and Bridgewater Associates.

Finding your cultural formula

How do these cultures manifest in practice?

“Take Zappos, for example, who put a strong emphasis on interpersonal dynamics, employee engagement and effective managers above everything else. Their company values include ‘family spirit’ and open, honest relationships. These qualities are reinforced throughout their processes and systems, from a recruitment process that can look more like months-long dating, or the 10-20% of the department's time which managers must put into team-building.”

During their session at Innov8rs Austin on 4-5 December, NOBL's Kim Perkins will help innovation leaders identify the levers within their own organizations that can help to accelerate progress, identifying best practices and a suite of suggestions for applying culture/market fit.

How can innovators take these tools beyond this room of like-minded people, and use them across different business units and cross-functional teams? After all, finance and marketing, supply chain and business development often seem to have more differences in their ways of working than they do similarities.

“One of the things we believe in deeply is that subcultures will always exist. That’s completely natural and expected - as social creatures it’s our human nature to form groups and distinguish how they are different from others.

Often we dismiss these differences in behavior as ‘off-brand’ or as ‘counter-culture’, and instead lean into homogeneity, but organizations can thrive with a mix of company cultures at any one time. We shouldn’t block this.

Take Amazon, for example, which has subsidiaries all over this map because they’re competing in many different environments.

And even across teams this happens. Often finance teams will work more like a “beehive” - emphasizing rigour and process, where marketing teams are naturally more “bird” like, agile and entrepreneurial given their external customer focus and need for speed. They need to have a different set of beats-per-minute.”

What organizations do need to focus on are the interactions which make or break cross-team collaboration. Here the mission is to find a lingua franca, a common language and shared set of agreements to facilitate healthy, happy communication.

It’s one thing to determine how you’ll compete, but another to build an understanding of the culture required to get there. Without culture, that competitive strategy will always exist in a PowerPoint and never be realized across your people’s attitudes or behaviors.

Embrace the fact that organizational cultures are complex, adaptive systems which are greater than the sum of their parts, and jump in.

As Vern Dosch, Author of Wired Differently, says:

“I used to believe that culture was ‘soft,’ and had little bearing on our bottom line. What I believe today is that our culture has everything to do with our bottom line, now and into the future.”

Want to get a grip of your company culture to drive innovation? Join Kim's Learning Lab at Innov8rs Austin, 4-5 December 2019.