Years ago, when dealing with a team facing lots of interpersonal issues and a lack of safety, where people were not able to work together, and nothing seemed to work, I turned to the Culture Map, created by Dave Gray, as a way to help the team map, understand, and transform their culture. Since then, I’ve frequently turned to the Culture Map whenever there’s been a need to help people better understand many different types of situations.

Whenever there’s a need to understand or a desire to improve a challenging situation with a team or an individual, I often return to the Culture Map because of how simple it is for people to use and how many problems it helps with.

What I’ve come to realize after using this tool for so long is that it’s more than just a transformation tool meant for understanding or designing a company’s culture. The Culture Map helps us use culture as a lens to explore and solve countless different types of challenges at any level within a company.

What is the Culture Map?

The Culture Map is a tool to facilitate conversations about the elements of an organization’s culture:

• Outcomes: The tangible, positive or negative results and impacts an organization or group gets as a consequence of their behaviours.
• Behaviours: Specific, concrete, tangible, and observable ways people act and interact with each other.
• Enablers and blockers: The explicit or implicit structures and systems that lead to people’s positive or negative behaviours.

Dave Gray originally developed the Culture Map to use for cultural change initiatives to help clients understand the cultural blockers and enablers that are often reinforced, intentionally or unintentionally, by management. 

The output of a culture mapping workshop is a set of culture maps that describe both the current outcomes, behaviours and enablers of a group and another set that describes the desired outcomes and what new behaviours or enablers will be required.

Culture mapping is a tool for understanding your current organizational culture and envisioning the desired state so you can find and overcome barriers to change.

Dave Gray, Three Tools to More Effectively Collaborate Across Your Organization

The Culture Lens

I’ve come to realize that rather than just using the Culture Map to diagnose and design an organization’s culture as part of a more significant change or transformation effort, it’s also a lens and a way to understand and solve the challenges facing team members, managers or entire departments.

When dealing with many different types of work challenges, the Culture Map can help us find cultural explanations for people’s behaviours:

• Suppose you have managers who act selfishly and who like to control people. It doesn’t sound like a great place to work, but if it’s happening, then it must be working somewhat. What kind of outcomes is it getting? What’s influencing or supporting managers to act that way?
• In the case of Project Managers that are overburdened, stressed and on the verge of breaking down, if everybody knows about it, why is nobody able to do anything? What’s happening, but more importantly, what’s not happening?
• If someone asks a question or proposes a new way of working, does the culture support them? Or do people react negatively and shut down those who take the initiative or stand out? How do leaders and managers behave in these situations? What’s driving that behaviour? What unwritten rules are people following?

There’s a saying by W. Edwards Deming:

Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.

W. Edwards Deming

Deming’s quote made me think of the connection we’re exploring using the Culture Map. Mapping his quote to the Culture Map, we get:

If the sum of an organization’s enablers, blockers and behaviours is the system, then it’s also true that its enablers, blockers, and behaviours are perfectly designed to get the outcomes it does.

An organization’s enablers, blockers, and behaviours are perfectly designed to get the outcomes it does.

While this parallel between the culture map and Deming’s quote on systems helps to highlight how enablers and behaviours are strongly linked to outcomes, the quote doesn’t translate perfectly because culture and outcomes aren’t separate things.

Because culture and outcomes are so strongly linked, it feels more appropriate to say that outcomes are a property of a culture rather than a product of it. If people’s behaviours make employees unhappy at your company, then unhappy employees are an outcome but also a part of your culture.

Follow-up Activities

The Culture Map fits the requirement of being a small step that teams can take to improve things. The Culture Map is a step that teams, departments, or organizations can take to understand how behaviours, enablers and blockers result in the outcomes they’re getting.

As an alternative to a current-state Culture Map or as a follow-up step, you could create a future-state Culture Map, starting with the outcomes you hope to achieve and identifying what behaviours and enablers you need to make those outcomes more likely.

Another possible step might be constraint mapping, an activity that helps uncover the different parts of a system that can be managed and helps uncover opportunities to make more, smaller nudges to a system rather than rely on one large and risky change initiative. Constraint mapping would be helpful to understand the current set of enablers or blockers more deeply and create more options for how to change things.

Conclusion

The Culture Map is a powerful tool to help individuals and teams understand, diagnose, and design their culture. We can also use the Culture Map to help us understand and solve the daily challenges that teams and individuals face.

The Culture Map is an accessible, easy-to-learn exercise for teams or groups to understand how their culture affects the outcomes they’re getting or the outcomes they’d like to get.

The Culture Map is a small step that can provide lots of value, and after mapping their current state, teams have a few next steps they can take, including creating a future state Culture Map to identify their desired outcomes, or they can try constraint mapping and explore their behaviours, enablers and blockers more deeply.

More Culture Map resources:

• The Culture Map: a systematic & intentional tool for designing great company culture by Strategyzer
• Best practices: how to use The Culture Map by Strategyzer
• All about Culture Mapping by Dave Gray