Consensio

Intangible cultural heritage (see Wiki page for definition) is summarised as the ‘living heritage’ of national culture; the oral tradition. The treasured way of preserving one’s national culture is in stark contrast to the difficulty of passing on healthy organisational cultures, which have so much influence on the success and survival of companies in the market.

Much has been written about the influence of national culture and cross-cultural influence on globalized companies (see for example key culture writers like Hofstede, Tropenaars and Friedman). The link of one’s heritage and underlying assumptions to organsiational performance per se has held bread and butter money for generations of business consultants, HR professionals and psychologists.

It strikes me as interesting, that a quantitative measurement is often engaged to ‘measure’ the organisational culture, e.g. “…33% of our people are effective in their performance; 43% engage in after-hours social activities…”, as if behavioural observation was all that culture is; e.g. we hear culture defined as ‘the way we do things around here‘.

This may be a catchy way of remembering this ‘culture thing’, but it is not an organisational culture definition. Culture is deeper ingrained in people than behaviour that we observe everyday. We behave based on our beliefs and values which are fundamentally based on our deeper assumptions.

That’s why culture can be shared, even when the key people, who left the place, are not there anymore to demonstrate the behaviour. I call this the living heritage of organisations. To measure this, we need different instruments, don’t you think?