Building the Cultural Artifacts of the Organization*
Daniel May
The Maersk Institute
University of Southern Denmark, Odense
Campusvej 55, Odense M DK-5230, Denmark
dmay@mip.sdu.dk
School of Computer Science & Software Engineering
Monash University, Caulfield
900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East, VIC 3145, Australia
Abstract
The culture of an organization can be grown and disseminated by infusing it in the artifacts of
the organization. These artifacts can be physical things, informational objects, or conceptual
artifacts. As people internal and external to the organization encounter these artifacts, they
also encounter the culture. This paper focuses on conceptual artifacts—such as stories,
metaphors, activities, and patterns—that are constructed and used in the life of the
organization’s culture. The paper presents a collection of patterns that discuss how to create
and apply conceptual artifacts in growing an organization’s culture.
Overview
The culture of an organization is critical to its maintenance and growth. An organization’s
culture shapes its daily activities, how it understands its past and future, the relationships
between the people within and the relationships with outsiders—and the decisions that are
made over time.
In a previous paper (May 2001), an initial version of a pattern language was presented for
designing the sustainable organization—an organization that may persist for many years or
generations, transcending its initial founders and being highly adaptable. This paper presented
a set of patterns organised at three levels at:
*
The work reported in this paper has been funded in part by the Co-operative Research Centre Programme through the Australian
Government's Department of the Industry, Science and Resources. This research was supported in part by the Danish Natural Science
Research Council, No. 643-00-000113.
Start from a
Grain
starting point
Culture that
Grows
Culture in the
Artifacts
Steady
Expansion
core growth patterns
Genius of the
AND
Constant
Exploration
Effectiveness
from Redundancy
expansion patterns
Figure 1: Patterns in (May 2001)
Starting point comprises the initial pattern in the collection. Core growth patterns comprise
those patterns used to build the core of the sustainable organization, enabling it for growth and
expansion. Expansion patterns are used to help manage and make choices during expansion.
One of the ‘core growth patterns’ of this language is Culture in the Artifacts (May 2001):
this pattern suggests that culture can be infused throughout the organization by expressing it in
the artifacts of the organization. This pattern discusses three types of artifacts where an
organization’s culture can be expressed:
1. Physical artifacts: these are physical objects and environments in the organization
(e.g. pieces of artwork, furniture, rooms, meeting places, equipment).
2. Information artifacts: these are primarily informational or computational (e.g. lists,
directories, databases, computer applications).
3. Conceptual artifacts: these are objects that we use in our mental or conceptual space
(e.g. metaphors, stories, patterns, etc).
This paper focuses on conceptual artifacts, presenting a set of patterns for their application in
building cultural artifacts for the organization.1 Figure 2 illustrates the patterns in this paper
and how they relate to the Culture in the Artifacts (May 2001) pattern.
1
The intention is to elaborate on patterns for each of the different types of artifacts presented
in Culture in the Artifacts (May 2001) in subsequent papers.
Metaphors that
Inspire
Stories that
Bind
Culture in the
Artifacts
(May 2001)
Patterns that
Capture
Activities that
Shape
Figure 2: Patterns for conceptual artifacts
The patterns in this paper assume this overall context: you are applying Culture in the
Artifacts (May 2001) in your organization, because you want to grow it by spreading a
certain type of culture throughout your organization and you wish to do so by infusing the
culture in the organization’s different artifacts.
More specifically, Figure 3 illustrates the different contexts in an organization’s trajectory
where the patterns may be applied.
Patterns That Capture
the
organization
Metaphors That Inspire
Stories That Bind
Activities That Shape
Figure 3: The organization’s trajectory and contexts for patterns
Stories That Bind are useful for helping an organization look to the past, drawing from the
organization’s history and using it to explain the present and inform future action. Activities
That Shape are used to reinforce an organization’s present culture and practice, anchoring to
the past (where the activities were practiced) and reassuring towards the future (where these
activities will continue). Metaphors That Inspire are used to drive the organization forward,
drawing from stories and activities as a foundation. Patterns That Capture can be applied
anywhere in the organization’s trajectory, but are products of more of a reflective, meta-level
activity. At any point, patterns can be captured and applied throughout the trajectory of an
organization. It is likely that the further an organization travels on its trajectory, the more
opportunity there is for patterns to emerge and be applied.
These patterns focus on how culture in conceptual artifacts may be created. The target user
for these patterns is the organizational designer. I use this term to mean someone who has a
role in configuring and designing the organization (how it functions, how it is structured). I
do not limit this role to management at strategic levels, since any employee can be effective in
this activity—applying these patterns—at various levels. This effectiveness will vary in
proportion to whether an employee is considered a thought-leader and the responsibility/power
that the employee has within the organization.†
Notes
†
The notion of an organizational designer is emergent in the recent literature on
organizational theory. In particular, as organizational theory recognizes that organizations
may be configured to maximize their capabilities in the knowledge economy (e.g. the learning
organization as per Senge 1990), there has been increasing focus on how this configuration
may be effected (Mintzberg & Quinn 1996). The organization is being increasingly viewed as
being model-driven (Groth 1999) with the implication that the model can be changed or
replaced. Implicitly, organizational design is the province of the senior or top-level manager;
business courses and management theory texts are the main discussion forum for such notions
of organizational design and models. These are the people who are thought of as
‘organizational designers.’
Yet we intuitively realize that change can be effected at various levels of the organization,
even at a very local level. Organizational design need not come down from the top but may
emerge through, from the efforts of people throughout an organization who are structuring and
altering the organizational design in their part of the whole. I suggest that these people are
also organizational designers, anyone who may be a change agent in shaping their part of the
organization’s model. This is very much a perspective borne of applying systems theory (von
Bertalanffy 1968) to the organization, characterized by Senge (1994) 2 and Checkland &
Scholes (1990). Manns & Rising (2001) also adopt such a perspective in looking at
organizational/system issues with introducing patterns into organizations.
2
Senge (1994): “During the last few years, a new understanding of the process of
organizational change has emerged. It is not top-down or bottom-up, but participative at all
levels—aligned through common understanding of a system.”
References
von Bertalanffy, L., General System Theory, G. Braziller, 1968.
Checkland, P. & Scholes, J., Soft Systems Methodology in Action, John Wiley & Sons, 1990.
Groth, L., Future Organizational Design: The Scope for the IT-based Enterprise, John Wiley
& Sons, 1999.
Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management, Harvard
Business School Press, 1998.
Manns, M.L. & Rising, L., Introducing Patterns into Organizations,
http://www.cs.unca.edu/~manns/intropatterns.html, on-going project last updated Feb 22
2002, checked Mar 23 2002.
May, D., Patterns for Building the Sustainable Organization, KoalaPLoP 2001, Melbourne,
Australia, 2001.
Mintzberg, H. & Quinn, J., The Strategy Process: Concepts, Contexts, Cases, Prentice Hall,
1996.
Nonaka, I., “The Knowledge-Creating Company,” Harvard Business Review, Nov-Dec 1991.
Rising, L. (ed), The Patterns Handbook: Techniques, Strategies, and Applications, Cambridge
University Press, 1998.
Schultz, M. (ed), Hatch M.J. (ed), Larsen, M.H. (ed), The Expressive Organization : Linking
Identity, Reputation, and the Corporate Brand, Oxford University Press, 2000.
Senge, P., The Fifth Discipline, Century Business, 1990.
Senge, P., The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Nicholas Brealey, 1994.
Stories That Bind
Context
Part of growing a culture is building a shared memory, solidarity, and sense of
belonging—the things that bind an organization together. This shared memory is used to
help an organization look back, drawing from its experiences in order to explain the
present and inform future action.
Problem
How do you create a shared memory, solidarity, and sense of belonging?
Forces
•
You cannot create shared memory, solidarity, and sense of belonging by fiat; the best
you can do is to create an environment that is conducive to people in the organization
sharing with each other, creating the sense of solidarity and belonging.
•
Capturing ‘shared memory’ is a difficult thing. While explicitly documenting the
culture is an important thing, the form of what is documented is crucial in whether it
encourages these elements to be shared. As individuals, we remember things in
different ways.
•
Relating to everyone in the organization is challenging: we all come with different
sets of life-experience, attitudes, values and goals. Because of this, it is difficult to
create shared memory, sense of belonging, and solidarity—attributes of a culture that
can grow. We must be able to account for these differences between us.
Solution
Encourage the telling of stories about the organization and people in the organization.
Through the life of the organization, there will be various events that mark the evolution
of the organization—variously inspiring, exciting, tragic, and reflective. Storytelling
allows a level of personal identification, yet shared meaning, across the organization.
One of the strengths of stories is that they can be customized (often unconsciously) by
listeners themselves, in ways that are relevant to them. It is crucial to identify the essence
or gist of the story: you can tell the story in different ways with particular language and
particular words for different audiences, but the gist is what is communicated and
remembered by the listeners.
Storytelling can take various forms:
•
Oral: you can share stories by telling each other orally. This may be in an informal
setting, as you recount stories over lunch or in small working groups. Or it may be a
more formal setting, for example, where a senior manager is retelling the
extraordinary effort of his team in a large company meeting.
•
Documented: you can write down the stories and share them with each other. This
may be in an informal setting, as we publish internal newsletters, or a more formal
setting, such as publishing in an annual report or writing it in a book about the
company.
Multimedia allows stories to be conveyed in all kinds of ways.
Rationale
The critical element of the story is that it seeks to involve the listener, not merely
conveying a set of past or possible events to the listener, but of transporting the listener
into a different world—one that is coherent, real, inclusive, and immersive. That is the
mark of a true story.
By encouraging the telling of stories, two effects take place:
1. Listeners feel involved in the story and the fabric of the organization. The stories bind
you together, as you listen and as you pass on the stories to other people in the
organization. As you do this, you are actively building shared elements—a memory
of events for the organization, and common strands that confirm your solidarity.
2. Listeners are inspired to create their own stories. As you listen and share stories about
the organization and others within it, you find yourself involved in events that will be
encapsulated as stories and shared with others. There is an attraction in wanting your
stories—you—to be incorporated into the overall fabric of the culture. And this
encourages the sense of belonging: you are part of the culture.
Many companies use stories to grow and bind the culture together. Storytelling is a wellidentified technique in the discipline of organizational culture (Schultz et al 2000) and is
also seen as a canonical technique of knowledge management (Harvard Business Review
1998).
Resulting context
As stories are told and shared within the organization, the culture becomes enriched and
grows layers. This is a positive thing as the culture is more active and becomes more
definable. However, as with anything that has layers, the culture can become weighed
down and form prejudices and tunnel vision—stories are powerful in creating solidarity,
but they can become sacred cows that are difficult to kill (in particular, because stories are
often tied to specific people and events). Thus, the binding together of the organization
that comes with storytelling may also bring with it a limiting of one’s perception of
possibility.
As with the other patterns in this set, the resulting context of this pattern will inevitably
involve certain people in the organization feeling less able to relate to the culture of the
organization. This is because the artifacts that have been created articulate the evolving
culture more clearly, and therefore making the gap more distinct between those who fit
with the culture, and those who do not.
Related patterns
Metaphors That Inspire draw on stories to support and explain created metaphors.
Stories provide a cultural foundation and link to the past, from which metaphors are
drawn.
Activities That Shape will be where stories are shared between people.
Patterns That Capture will ‘mine’ stories to derive patterns that the organization can
use, as well as using stories to illustrate the application of patterns. Stories may also be
used as part of the solution component of a pattern.
Examples
Healthtron, a healthcare company, is growing its culture by using stories. Seminal
moments in the organization’s trek are extracted and used as examples by the staff
amongst each other to illustrate key themes and Metaphors That Inspire. For example,
a number of staff stayed at the office late after hours one evening in order to help one staff
member complete a critical submission to an examination board the next day. The
submission required everyone’s input and needed to meet the deadline tomorrow. This
heroic effort is now shared as a story among staff, reinforcing the solidarity among staff
that worked together that night and inspiring other staff in the company. Other stories are
exchanged and disseminated through the organization, including those of difficult and
unfortunate incidents that have happened in the company’s life.
At AG Communication Systems, the most important element of the entire patterns writing
effort was the documenting of stories of past projects by pattern authors. As pattern users
found patterns in the repository, they first turned to the story behind the pattern,
documented in the Rationale or Known Uses sections. The stories gave credibility, of
course, but also a sense of shared history, as readers were able to identify with the
reported projects, “Oh, that’s what happened on 1721!”
Metaphors That Inspire
Context
Part of an organization’s culture is its view of the future and how it should get there. This
will affect its day-to-day activities. Views of the future tend to be of three types: vision
(an overarching perspective), strategies (high-level policies and approaches) and goals
(more concrete, lower-level objectives).
Problem
How do you express an organization’s views of the future that the people in the
organization can understand, identity with, and share?
Forces
•
Vision, strategies, and goals have to do with looking forward. So, the way you
express these things must be capable of inspiring and drawing the organization
forward. Mere statements of objectives fall short of this aim.
•
Relating to everyone in the organization is challenging: everyone comes with different
sets of life-experience, attitudes, values and goals. Because of this, it is difficult to
express vision, strategies, and goals in a way that everyone can identify with. You
must be able to account for these differences between everyone.
•
Organizations can be complex, busy places—you need a way to express vision,
strategies, and goals in a compact and concise way. Everyone should be able to relate
them back to the daily, routine work that they do.
Solution
Express vision, strategies, and goals as metaphors. A metaphor transforms the description
of one thing into the form of another. You can use this property to transform a set of
perspectives of your organization’s future into a form that is more easily understood,
appealing at an intuitive level, and evocative at inspirational level.
Like stories, the ability to personally appeal to diverse people in the organization is a
strength of metaphors. The right metaphors are powerful in that they are sufficiently
vivid to create pictures that people can understand (e.g. the company as a family) yet
general enough to allow people to create their own internal version of that picture, one
that is most personally relevant (e.g. my experience and perception of a family). For
example, a company’s metaphor of “best friend to the customer” helps employees quickly
realize how the company seeks to treat its customers, because it encapsulates our
collective—and individual—understanding of how we treat our best friends. The
metaphor is personal because each employee understands ‘best friend’ in the context of
personal experience and can treat customers as ‘best friends’ in the context of that
employee’s specific function (e.g. waiter, cook, cleaner, secretary, chief executive
officer).
You can create metaphors not only to communicate vision, strategies, and goals to others
in the organization, but also for your own use—metaphors can help to reinforce your
understanding of the organization and your place in it. Metaphors can also be used as a
lens through which stakeholders external to the organization can understand the
organization (e.g. customers perceive that they will be treated like a “member of the
family” or “a best friend”).
Rationale
While metaphors can be used for various purposes, they are used in this context to focus
the organization on looking forward, helping it understand itself in a way that elevates its
gaze from the daily minutiae towards striving forward. To focus an organization on
“where it is going.”
Metaphors are useful because they can be collectively illustrative and appealing, yet retain
enough vagueness that allows us to make it individually relevant and personal .
Additionally, metaphors tend to condense the rich content of vision, strategies, and goals
into succinct thought-images. The ability to reify vision, strategies, and goals as
metaphors means that you can treat them as distinct entities: enumerating them, discussing
and comparing them, replacing them with more appropriate ones over time.
Resulting context
As metaphors are used to articulate the vision, strategies, and goals of the organization,
these metaphors accrete as part of the culture. You have more cultural conceptual
artifacts that form part of the culture and make the culture more definable. Metaphors can
be lenses that you look through to create a shared understanding of your organization, but
may also limit the things that you can perceive. You are as powerful—or as limited—as
your metaphors.
While metaphors may be created by individuals and associated with certain individuals in
the organization, metaphors are not necessarily so linked with individuals in the
organization, as much as stories are. Stories tend to be focused on specific events and
happenings (with specific people and what they did); metaphors are more likely to
comprise thought-images that not specific to individuals, appealing to general and
overarching ideas. This means that the organization may find it easier to create, remove
or modify metaphors, cf. stories. Metaphors are not as much an obstacle to reinvention as
stories can be. This does not mean that changing or dropping a metaphor is painless:
metaphors can be missed, but they can be replaced with new ones; stories form part of the
collective memory of the organization and cannot be so easily excised or forgotten.
As with the other patterns in this set, the resulting context of this pattern being applied
will inevitably involve certain people in the organization feeling less able to relate to the
culture of the organization. This is because the artifacts that have been created articulate
the evolving culture more clearly, and therefore making the gap more distinct between
those who fit with the culture, and those who do not. The example of a company
metaphor “best friend to the customer” draws a line, including those employees who can
relate to customers in this way and excluding those who cannot.
Related patterns
Stories That Bind are useful to support and explain metaphors. They are useful in
providing the cultural foundation and the past, from which metaphors can be drawn.
Activities That Shape are where metaphors are shared and disseminated between people.
Patterns that Capture will ‘mine’ metaphors to derive underlying patterns. Metaphors
may also be used as part of the solution component of a pattern.
Examples
The use of figurative language and evocative imagery is illustrated in Honda’s metaphor
of the Theory of Automobile Evolution. This combined two (contradictory) ideas into the
single phrase, that of automobile as machine and that of evolution, normally associated
with living organisms. This helped to focus the development of a next generation concept
car by encouraging speculation into the characteristics of such a car. The company also
used the slogan “Let’s Gamble,” coloring its approach to designing for a new generation
of car driver and departing from the familiar—the metaphor of gambling/chance-taking is
substituted instead of traditional engineering. Nonaka (1991) describes these metaphors
in use.
Melbourne High School (MHS) is a high school that has implicitly used metaphor to
shape its students and staff. Founded as a state-run high school 125 years ago, it is unique
in requiring entrance examinations to screen students and is steeped in tradition, making it
more like a private school. Over time, the school has developed a view of itself that can
be described as “crème de la crème”, where staff and students at the school are told to
consider themselves as “the best of the best” and are propelled by the idea that they are
brought together to create excellence in their activities. This metaphor is powerful; all
students start at 14 years old and will have come from other schools. Thus, cultural
imprinting starts from the first day and almost at the same time for the students. The
metaphor is so strong such that there is a bond of camaraderie between students who have
attended this school that extends across generational, political, social and economic
levels.
Activities That Shape
Context
An important part of an organization’s culture is its reinforcement loop. An
organization’s culture should have a mechanism to reinforce aspects of its culture,
including its view of the past and the future. Not only should this reinforce the culture for
people who have been with the organization for a time, but it is especially important to
‘bring into the culture’ the newcomers to the organization.
Problem
What kind of mechanism can we use to reinforce an organization’s culture?
Forces
•
Patterns of behavior cannot simply be manufactured or declared by fiat. People will
not simply behave in accordance with the culture because you tell them so. However,
it is possible to create and support an environment that encourages them to do so.
•
Creating a reinforcement loop will cost, in terms of time, money and physical
resources. You cannot engage in reinforcing the culture ‘for free’.
•
The culture should be reinforced in a way that is not artificial or breaks the culture’s
world view. It should be done as naturally as possible, so that the culture is reinforced
subconsciously, in a “business as usual” fashion.
Solution
Create activities in the life of the organization so that people will interact with each other.
Such activities may be meetings or gatherings, where social or professional interaction
may take place. Or they may be opportunistic, such as ad-hoc discussions in the corridor.
Infuse these activities with elements from the culture; these activities should be an
opportunity for people in the organization to interact with each other, but they should also
reinforce the culture in various ways. Weave elements of the culture (e.g. stories and
metaphors) into these activities, so that the activity is not culture-neutral. Over time,
these activities will become part of the culture themselves and further enrich it, in
addition to building a sense of community.
Support these activities with resources: allow people the time to participate in such
activities, provide food and other materials that are needed, and tailor the environment for
such activities to take place (e.g. open spaces, coffee machines, whiteboards). Encourage
these activities with in-principle support and allow them to happen with consistency.
There are various approaches that can be used to encourage an organization to meet the
costs and find resources to support activities, such as those outlined in Manns & Rising
(2001).
Rationale
Part of culture is not just things that express the culture (such as the other patterns in this
collection). Culture is also the things that you do, ergo the activities that you engage in.
We can couple the creation of cultural activities with the growth and dissemination of the
culture. By creating opportunities for people in the organization to interact, we create
opportunities for people in the organization to “rub each other” with the culture. Often, it
is in these times of interaction that Stories that Bind are shared and Metaphors that
Inspire are reinforced.
Resulting context
The activities in an organization’s culture are a powerful part of structuring and
reinforcing the culture—significantly, most of these activities are likely to be implicit,
disseminating the culture akin to making people “breathe it in.” Thus, activities that
become part of the culture can be pervasive, powerful conceptual artifacts.
In this particular case, the activities that shape a culture are not always as explicit as
Stories That Bind, Metaphors That Inspire or Patterns That Document. While there
may be touchstone activities that are very clear (e.g. a company conference, Friday drinks
at a certain pub), many activities are more subtle and implicit. This makes it more
difficult to change the culture, if certain activities no longer seem appropriate to the
organization’s culture.
As with the other patterns in this set, the resulting context of this pattern will inevitably
involve certain people in the organization feeling less able to relate to the culture of the
organization. This is because the artifacts that have been created articulate the evolving
culture more clearly, and therefore making the gap more distinct between those who fit
with the culture, and those who do not.
Related patterns
Stories That Bind are shared and disseminated during activities.
Metaphors That Inspire are shared and disseminated during activities.
Patterns that Capture will ‘mine’ activities for recurring behaviors and processes that
are instances of activity patterns. Activities may also be used as part of the solution
component of a pattern.
Examples
AG Communication Systems is an unusual company, in that it sponsors several specialinterest clubs for its employees: a flying club, a golf club, a tennis club, a volleyball club,
and a music club, to name a few. The music club sponsors two variety shows a year and
has produced major musical productions based on themes from the company’s history.
All these provide ways for employees to interact but, more importantly, they choose
activities they truly enjoy and, in a very real sense, take this joy back to their work.
DSTC is a large university-based IT research conglomerate in Australia. When it sets up
branch offices in various locations, it will seek to install an expensive espresso coffee
machine at that location. DSTC has seen that the activity of creating social traffic around
the coffee machine is conducive to creating interaction between staff members. This
interaction encourages staff to meet each other – a challenge in an organization that is
physically distributed, and whose work is typically desk-based– breaking down the
isolation that may be typical in universities and IT-related organizations. The social
traffic is also a catalyst for researchers to talk about what they are doing, leading to
knowledge sharing and creation of new collaborative possibilities.
Melbourne High School has a speech night at the conclusion of each school year. The
event is a powerful cultural tool in the life of the school. It is held in the city’s large town
hall, comprising academic awards, a comprehensive music program, and a speech by a
famous past student of the school. Throughout the evening, each part of the program
reinforces the school’s metaphor of itself as “crème de la crème” (see Metaphors That
Inspire). The high point of the evening is the massed singing by the 1200 students who
attend the school, who will have been practicing for many weeks prior to the evening.
The first year student is typically shaped in a profound way by this evening: he has
participated in a ritual of rehearsal and execution of an event that every boy in the school
has experienced, one that points to many other aspects of the school’s culture (e.g. music,
academic excellence, involvement in the community). After that, he knows that he is part
of a distinctive group and culture.
Patterns That Capture
Context
Part of growing the culture more effectively is to distil and identify the essential elements
of your culture. There is a drive to identify those recurring things in the way you do
things, so these are not lost. Once you identify them—once we have a handle on them—
then we are able to ‘hack’ the organization, to actively and explicitly grow the culture in
certain ways.
This process can take place at any time; it is a reflective activity. As time passes and the
organization travels further along, its essence will become more likely to emerge and it
will become more important to capture it.
Problem
How do you capture and express the essence of your organization’s culture?
Forces
•
It is also difficult to get people to articulate what they think the culture is: it involves a
stepping back and expressing it in a way that we are not used to doing on an everyday
level. It is meta-level. People usually think in concrete terms.
•
What form does this expression take? There are many different ways to express what
each of us think the essence of the culture is. It would be good to have a way of
expressing the culture that is sufficiently general, but able to cater to the specific.
Solution
Patterns can be used as a way of capturing and documenting aspects of a culture that are
running and recurring themes. Things that are good about a culture, the things about
culture that an organization does well.
By looking at the existing conceptual artifacts that represent the organization’s culture—
stories, metaphors, and activities—you start identifying what patterns may run through
the culture. Stories, in particular, are a good source for mining. They can be used in
tandem with patterns to illustrate the use of patterns, a powerful complementary approach.
Rationale
Patterns capture the essence of a solution and also offer a way of expressing that solution.
In addition, they are designed to be reusable and generative—taking the results of
capturing and documenting the culture, and feeding it into the activity of growing and
modify the culture (shaping the organization by applying its patterns to itself).
Patterns are good for capturing fundamental aspects of the culture because they make note
of the various features of each aspect: namely in the components of each pattern, e.g.
context, rationale, etc. In this way, they encourage a level of reflection and
documentation that is more than mere anecdotal speculation.3
Resulting context
Identification of the patterns that drive the culture of an organization can create an
environment of deeper and reflective understanding the organization. However, change
does not automatically flow from this. The people in the organization must be able to
identify with the patterns in the culture and understand what they mean.
Because patterns are metalevel, people have difficulties understanding them. We tend to
prefer dealing in concrete and specific things. It is likely that one needs to translate the
patterns found into something that people can more easily relate to. While patterns of an
organization’s culture can affect everyone, not everyone will find the content in each
pattern immediately relevant to what they do.
Thus, in the resulting context, organizational designers will be aided by patterns to better
identify core elements of how the culture operates, and they should translate the content
of patterns into language that the people in the organization can understand. The impact
on the culture and behavior of the organization is a function of the ability of the people in
the organization to comprehend these patterns.
As with the other patterns in this set, the resulting context of this pattern being applied
will inevitably involve certain people in the organization feeling less able to relate to the
culture of the organization. This is because the artifacts that have been created articulate
the evolving culture more clearly, and therefore making the gap more distinct between
those who fit with the culture, and those who do not.
Related patterns
Solutions arising from:
•
•
•
Stories That Bind
Metaphors That Inspire
Activities That Shape
are mined to find what underlying patterns may exist. In turn, these patterns may be used
as part of fundamental patterns that are part of the organizational culture.
Examples
AG Communication Systems had an extensive pattern mining effort. Classes in pattern
writing were taught and employees from different domains contributed patterns based on
their experiences. Since everyone was encouraged to take part, everyone participated in
3
This is the subject of work by Manns & Rising (2001) to make explicit, the tacit experience
and knowledge that comes out of organizations and cultures. In this case, it takes the
perspective of introducing patterns (or new ideas) into organizations.
an evolving patterns culture. When a book was published about the experiences at this
company (Rising 1998) and all pattern authors were mentioned by name (some with
pictures), there was a clear sense that this company and the people in it were very special.
Many companies intuitively look for recurring solutions, identify the core, attach a label
to it, and apply it in new situations. They sometimes attach labels to these solutions. So
they have been using patterns in an informal and ad-hoc way. For example, Consulting
Co. uses various patterns implicitly to manage its growth in the competitive IT/business
consulting marketplace. Patterns that are commonly applied include:
4
•
Sell Now, Resource Later (bid for an assignment first and worry about resourcing
later, only after the proposal has been won and a firm starting date is unknown).4
•
Whiteboards Stimulate Discussion (ensure that whiteboards are plentiful, including
small ones in cubicles, and situate discussions around them because they provide a
large canvas for illustrating and expressing ideas)
•
QA Before It Goes Out (everyone in the company must get someone to QA—quality
assure—their work before it is seen by a client. This encourages openness and
accountability about one’s work, as well as a culture of quality.)
May, D. & Taylor, P. “Knowledge Management with Patterns”, Communications of the
ACM, accepted for publication.