hello and welcome to today's lesson where we're looking at Edgar shine's organizational culture model now you'll sometimes see this model referred to as the cultural triangle or the three levels of culture model or even the iceberg model and in simple terms the model can be used to help you understand and then shape an organization's culture it's common for an organization's leaders to claim a culture of Acts or a culture of why and while there may be some culture shared across the whole organization the real culture of an organization exists within small teams or sets of people within that organization these sets of people have usually worked together for some time and have a shared history of successfully overcoming problems so culture ultimately comes about through the behavior of individuals shine defines culture as everything an organization has learned throughout its history culture isn't just how people feel it's also how people think about and respond to things as a group now shine actually gives a much more nuanced definition of organizational culture than the one I've just given which you can see here and because it's a little bit more complex feel free to pause the video and read this a few times to help it sink in so he defines organizational culture as a pattern of shared basic assumptions that are invented discovered or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with the problems of external adaption and internal integration that have worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore is to be taught to new members of the group as the correct way to perceive think and feel concerning those problems so with that let's take a look at the model it's a tool that can help you understand an organization's culture the model says that there are three different layers to every organizational culture at the top we have artifacts which sit on top of values which sit on top of assumptions it helps to think of this as an iceberg where the artifacts are the most visible part and just like an iceberg only about 10 of organizational culture is easily visible so let's examine each of the levels in a little bit more detail so first artifacts these are those elements of culture that are easy for Outsiders to the organization to observe so they're the visible organizational structures and processes although artifacts can be easy to see they can be hard to decipher so for example suppose you're looking at an organization and seeing its organizational structure you can see it quickly but it's hard to interpret why it is the way it is and what that means at a deeper level to really make sense of artifacts you must dig deeper and that leads us to values so suppose you have an organizational structure as your artifact beneath that you'll have a set of values that caused you to set up this structure in the first place so values often referred to as espoused values are harder to see than artifacts they are the strategies goals and philosophies declared and endorsed by the organization these are the reasons why the organization chooses to do things in a certain way and it's why one particular artifact might look the way it does so finally at the bottom of the pyramid we have the organization's assumptions these are the unconscious beliefs that people within the organization hold to be true but without ever challenging testing or verifying them for themselves those assumptions are Unwritten and usually unspoken they can be challenging to ascertain and you'll unlikely discover them quickly you can think of assumptions as the foundation or cause of the other parts of the pyramid above so here's a simple five-step process you can use to apply shines model so step one focus on a specific business problem step two engage a group to find out what's causing the problem step three is to create the right environment four is to specify the change goal and finally five is to build a change program to rectify so let's walk through each of the steps so for step one so culture only really matters when there's a problem much like your personality only matters if there's a problem if your organizational culture is adaptive and can change automatically to new internal and external realities then you don't have a problem and you don't need to fix your culture but if you do have a prop problem the first step is to spell out the problem as specifically and precisely as you can step two is to engage a group now culture exists in groups as we've said so this step involves getting a group of your people together who can get to the bottom of what's causing your business problem in this step you'll use the culture model to understand how the different levels of culture apply to your specific problem step three is to create the right environment so to ensure your group has the best chance of getting to the root of the problem create a safe space for their discussions anything someone says in the group discussion should not be used against them later it should be a safe place to speak your mind question the status quo speak up to managers and play Devil's Advocate step four is to specify the change goal and you can do this by answering the question what would Behavior look like a year from now if we solved this problem answering this question will help you move away from understanding your problem and towards thinking about how to solve your problem and finally step five is to build a change program to rectify so now that you're clear on where you're going it's time to put together a plan to make it happen now the change program should include steps like getting Senior Management on board and targeting quick wins so you can start to see results and build momentum quickly your change program doesn't need to be huge in scale it simply needs to fix your business problem so let's work through the steps for a straightforward example so step one is to focus on the specific business problem so for this example we're going to imagine an organization that believes its overall sales are suffering because it's individual sales people are working against each other step two we're going to engage a group to find out what's causing the problem so you put together a focus group consisting of multiple salespeople and several of their managers using shine's model you investigate the problem and see that at an artifact level sales people undercut each other to win a bonus over their colleagues now that's beneficial to the individual but detrimental to the organization and a values level you see that competition is encouraged between sales people and in fact their entire reward structure is set up to support this sales managers are also rewarded based on the total value of sales not collaboration and finally at the assumptions level you find that the organization's founder set things up the way they are currently based and he did that based on the assumption that individuals perform best when they stand to win from their actions step three is to create the right environment and to do this you not only allow people to speak freely but you consider allowing people to make mistakes As you move into a new way of working step four is to specify the change goal and you specify the sales people Behavior one year from now to be sales people work collaboratively to create the best outcome for themselves and the organization and finally the final step is to build a change program to rectify now it's outside the scope of this video to show you how to do this but some simple steps you could take might include creating a simple system allowing the first salesperson that receives a customer inquiry to be the one that gets the commission doing that's going to stop your sales people from undercutting each other you could also change your bonus structure so it doesn't solely focus on what was achieved but also on how it was achieved now before we wrap up there are a couple of advantages and disadvantages of shine's model to cover in terms of advantages then the model provides a mechanism or lens to think about and frame organizational culture it also encourages you to think more deeply about culture by breaking culture down into three levels in terms of disadvantages there's no one definition of organizational culture so the model that works best for you will likely depend on what culture means to you finally individuals Drive culture so what do you think is a cultural problem may just be an issue with one or a few individuals so in summary Edgar shine's culture model is a tool that can help you understand organizational culture and from that you can shape organizational culture the model says that there are three different layers to every organizational culture at the top we have artifacts which sit on top of values which sit on top of assumptions so that's it for this lesson really hope you enjoyed it and I look forward to speaking to you again soon