Culture change
Everyone knows culture is important to the success of an organisation. But we also all know how hard it is to change 'how things are done around here'.
We use forensic analysis of your internal everyday language to create an objective, evidence-based reading of your culture, and provide guidance about how to realign it with your strategy.
What is culture?
Organisations and people are complex, but cultural habits and rules of thumb are often simple. Culture isn’t what is dictated from above, but is made and sustained every day, by everyone. It comes down to established habits and shared - but unspoken - beliefs and rules of thumb.
Language reveals culture
Everyday language both reflects and sustains a shared culture – so analysing language carefully will point to what's being taken for granted and NOT said. It points to the shared beliefs and rules of thumb in play that are affecting how your people and your business work. It often explains what's been getting in the way of real change.
What then?
Is your current culture serving you well? We'll then consider the findings with you in the light of your current strategy. What remains essential and positive – and could even be amplified? And what would now benefit from being challenged or evolved?
"We also needed to be paying some attention to the internal culture. But that’s a very hard thing to do because usually you don’t have a language to talk about it. I mean culture is a terribly nebulous word, so I thought of Linguistic Landscapes as a way of making that tangible"
"It is something tangible and real, in a way that anybody can actually understand, rather than becoming abstract and conceptual, which is often the problem with cultural models."
"It’s often shining a light on something that everybody knows but nobody’s really thought about before ... they are able to highlight different themes and give them a significance that they haven't had before. It’s so powerful because it’s always a real lightbulb moment."
"It was actually commissioned to do something quite specific and it ended up changing a lot of the communication of the organisation in the broadest sense. It gave the organisation a really distinct voice and allowed us to create change."
“I was not entirely sure what to expect. There was, therefore, a little nervousness about investing the money. (But) we have been able to drive a very challenging conversation about organisational approaches to communication and campaigning. It has thrown up profound and far reaching challenges to (our) core communications approach - the research helped shine a specific and credible light into some very difficult areas.”
"Their value is helping companies transform themselves from the inside out."
"It has the power also to get to the root of the problem before you get further down the line, like you can create the platform for the whole of your communication strategy with some good work from Linguistic Landscapes, that will help inform your communications development for years to come."
"I use LL because they give me insight that I can’t get elsewhere and also because I know that senior people within the organisation - because it’s evidence based - will also understand it. And then the organisation can actually do something with the output, rather than just go 'Isn't that interesting?' "