Imagine your organization with the ability to constantly create meaning and transform itself, to support more diversity and greater sustainability. These are traits of a living systems-based organization.

With the right conditions in place, organizations are intelligent, creative and adaptive. They are environments where people thrive, rather than exist to make a buck.

If you are ready to embrace change as a way of life, we can help you to develop a thriving culture: creative, dedicated, committed, motivated and highly productive.

"Culture is to organizations as personality is to individuals." -- Schein

Culture has taken a front seat in the quest to understand organizations and shape their behavior. Organizational culture embodies the norms, values and beliefs of an organization. While leadership initiates culture, in the long run, culture can and does shape leadership.

An organization's behavior is a reflection of its culture. Strong organizational cultures offer a way of life where people feel free to explore and collaborate, to observe and share different perspectives, to imagine what hasn't been and invent what needs to be.

Understanding organizational culture is one thing; changing it is another. It is difficult to change a person, much less a culture. "If you want to understand something, try changing it." -- Lewin. Yet change is at the heart of what organizations deal with every day.

Our culture model offers a blueprint for shaping organizational culture. We design for alignment of values with organizational purpose and goals. We design for alignment of organizational strategy with behavior. Throughout the process of designing and implementing cultural change, we honor the organization's history and people's innate desire to achieve good things for good purposes.

The brave new world of global business is unforgiving. Competition is unrelenting. Sustainable success requires an ability to harness the wisdom of the entire organization and to transform this into an energy greater than the sum of its parts. The power of a strong culture can be a significant advantage, as we can see in companies like Hewlett-Packard, a company known for its culture of innovation. Shaping a culture requires simple honesty, from the values and beliefs of an organization, through design, and in the authentic behavior of leaders. Cultures can be shaped, but not as a "top-down" exercise. Rather, cultures are shaped in an inclusive, open effort that seeks to gather the wisdom of the whole.

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