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During my early management positions, I was part of some great successes that often seemed like sheer serendipity. But as I analyzed these organizations, I saw that they had detectable, recurring traits. As I assumed more leadership roles, I began to see patterns that helped to explain a culture’s strengths and weaknesses.
As I began to put words and definitions to these patterns, I embraced a model that resembled a pyramid made up of five basic tiers, starting with core values at the base, then direction, structure, measurement and rewards at the very top.
Pyramid model of cultural traits
The model served me well for many years. But as I gained more experience with it, I began to realize that it did not truly express what I had discovered about the critical elements of culture and their interrelationships. The pyramid’s form implied that the lower blocks needed to be in place before working on the ones above them but that is not always the case.
Then one night, in that lucid time between wakefulness and dreaming, the image of a Rubik’s cube came to mind. It dawned on me that the mechanics of solving a Rubik’s cube was a great visual metaphor for culture, as I viewed it.
The Rubik’s Cube TM, like organizational culture, looks simple. But there are actually 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible ways to configure it. If you start twisting the cube, and don’t know what you’re doing, it merely continues to look very much like it did before you began. Hopeless.
It hit me: This is true of cultures too. You can try all kinds of management programs and processes. You can make a new strategic plan one year and create a new compensation plan the next, and follow up with management by objectives the third year. While you might see marginal improvements, in most cases, you still end up feeling like you are doing little more than twisting the cube, without really solving the puzzle of organizational effectiveness.
In fact, you’ll never solve the Rubik’s Cube TM puzzle unless you understand the 54 moves required. Solving the puzzle, like building a highly effective workplace culture, requires that each “twist” have a specific purpose and that the move relates to the end goal of completing the cube -- or fulfilling your vision for your organization.
So, with a bow to Mr. Rubik, I created a new model to delineate the six critical elements of organizational culture, the Visionomics Cube. At the very center of my cube, surrounded by the six critical elements of culture, is the stakeholder. The six elements continuously act and interact with each other around the stakeholder to create the beliefs and assumptions each stakeholder has about the organizational culture.
Six elements of the Visionomics Cube
The six critical elements of organizational culture are:
- Core Values: Our universal commitment to how we will interact with all the stakeholders of our organization.
- Products and Services: Determines who our internal and external customers are and forces us to assess how we are meeting their needs, wants and values. This information leads to understanding how we must continuously adapt to competitively meet those customer expectations.
- Direction: Our organization’s goals, objectives and strategies that will allow us to achieve our purpose and vision.
- Structure: The element of culture that ensures that every stakeholder is clear about who is responsible for what in the organization, and that the operating and cultural processes are as effective as possible.
- Measurements: The process of determining progress toward our individual and collective goals and objectives, using methods that engage employees through involvement, proper measurement and timely feedback.
- Rewards: The effective combination of extrinsic rewards that include economic incentives, such as salary and bonuses, and intrinsic rewards that are based primarily on non-monetary rewards.
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Jerry's Blog 
