Framework library · Leadership, teams and culture

Culture canvas

Culture is the way things are actually done: which behaviours get rewarded, how decisions are made, what happens when someone raises a problem. The workbench takes ten practices that can be observed and changed, records for each what the organisation says and what people actually do, and marks whether the practice helps or works against the change. A wish for a different culture becomes a short list of practices to keep, change and start, and a first experiment to run.

LevelIntermediate
TimeTwo hours to map the culture as it is; another hour to agree the shifts
Who to involveA mixed group from across the team or organisation, not only its leaders, including someone new enough to notice what long-serving staff no longer see.
Also calledCulture Design Canvas, culture map, team culture canvas, culture mapping

Use it when

  • A strategy needs people to work differently, and "we need to change the culture" has to become specific.
  • Two teams or companies are being combined and their ways of working keep colliding.
  • A new leader wants to understand how a team really works before changing anything.
  • Exit interviews or staff surveys point to how work is done, such as meetings, decisions or feedback, rather than to pay or workload.

Avoid it when

  • You need to measure culture across a large organisation or track it over time. Run a survey, then use the canvas to discuss the results.
  • The problem is one manager's behaviour. Address that directly with the manager.
  • You want a quick picture of the mix of culture types now and needed. The competing values framework does that faster.

How to run it

  1. Write what people actually do

    For each practice, write what people do, with an example. "Customer credits above a set amount wait for the monthly committee" says more than "we are customer-first".

  2. Set it beside what is said

    Note what the values statement, the leaders or the induction pack say about the same practice. Where the two differ, the gap is where to work.

  3. Mark whether each practice helps the change

    Helps, neutral, or works against it. Start with what gets rewarded and corrected: promotions and praise show the real values faster than any statement.

  4. Decide keep, change or leave for now

    Keep at least as much as you change, and change no more than four practices at once. A culture moves through a few practices people can see, not through a new statement.

  5. Agree the shifts

    In the second part, write what to keep, stop and start in plain terms, and the first experiments.

  6. Run one or two experiments

    Change one meeting, one decision rule or one ritual for a month, and check whether behaviour changed before rolling it out.

Work through it

Answer the questions below, or load the worked example to see a finished one. The drawing updates as you type. Export the result as a PowerPoint deck, a Word document, an Excel workbook, a PDF or plain text.

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Mistakes to avoid

  • Writing the aspiration instead of the reality. A map of how things should work hides the gaps it was meant to find.
  • Leaving it to the leadership team. Leaders tend to see the culture as they intend it to be, so the map comes out kinder than the place.
  • Rewriting the values statement and nothing else. People watch what is rewarded and how decisions are made, and a new statement over old practices breeds cynicism.
  • Trying to change every practice at once. Effort spreads thin, nothing changes visibly, and people conclude the change was talk.

Where it comes from

Gustavo Razzetti of Fearless Culture published the Culture Design Canvas in 2019 as a way to map a culture on one page. Edgar Schein's distinction between espoused values and the assumptions that actually drive behaviour (Organizational Culture and Leadership, 1985) is the older root of comparing what is said with what is done. The list of practices and the questions here are Blue Prysm's own. Source.

The idea of mapping a culture on a canvas is the work of Gustavo Razzetti (Fearless Culture). This workbench is Blue Prysm's own design. It does not reproduce the Culture Design Canvas and is not endorsed by Fearless Culture.

Use it with

Work through it with us

The frameworks here are free to use as they stand. If you would rather work through the question behind this one with us, these are the ways an engagement starts.