Cultural Web
The Cultural Web maps the six everyday elements, stories, symbols, power structures, organisational structures, control systems and rituals, that surround an organisation's paradigm, so you can see what actually shapes behaviour rather than what the values statement claims.
Six labelled spokes ring a central hub marked paradigm, one spoke per everyday element of the organisation.
Reach for this when…
- Strategy is agreed on paper but nothing changes on the ground.
- A merger is stalling and nobody can explain why it 'just doesn't feel right'.
- A new process keeps getting quietly ignored despite formal sign-off.
How to run it
- Gather people who actually work in the culture, not just leadership.
- Map each element: stories, symbols, power structures, organisational structures, control systems, rituals and routines.
- Write out the paradigm those six elements add up to, the assumptions nobody states.
- Compare that paradigm against what the strategy actually needs.
- Pick the one or two elements doing the most damage and change those first.
A worked example
Situation. Rodrigo Salazar ran Salazar Repuestos de Bicicleta, a third-generation bicycle parts manufacturer in Arequipa, Peru, where a new inventory system kept being quietly bypassed.
Applied. Mapping the web showed the official training wasn't the problem: power structures, an informal veto the founder's son still held over any change, mattered more than the formal control systems on paper.
Result. Once that informal veto was replaced with a named decision role, the new system was adopted within weeks, not the training itself.
The catch
It describes the current culture well but doesn't by itself tell you how to change it, and the exercise can become a two-hour talking shop unless someone forces a decision on which element to tackle first. It also depends on people being willing to discuss power openly, which is exactly the element hardest to get honesty about.
If nobody in the room will say who really holds the power, the web will come back clean and useless.
Origin: Gerry Johnson & Kevan Scholes