Thank you Isobel for this thoughtful and insightful post. I especially appreciated your definition of culture, as "the label we give to the beliefs that members of an organization hold about what success looks like within the organization." To change the culture, we have to make it concrete, as you point out.
This discussion reminds me of the premise of “Fourth Generation Evaluation,” a book written by Guba and Lincoln, 1989. Evaluating how well a school is functioning is best accomplished not by bringing in outside experts with clipboards (scientific objectivity), but by bringing in expert interviewers first to figure out what stakeholders claim to be going well and why they think so, what stakeholders are concerned about and what is raising those concerns, and what ongoing issues are dividing stakeholders. Claims and concerns can then be cross checked against other more traditional data. This approach seems to square with the premise that organizational culture denotes beliefs about what constitutes success for the people charged with producing it.
Thank you Isobel for this thoughtful and insightful post. I especially appreciated your definition of culture, as "the label we give to the beliefs that members of an organization hold about what success looks like within the organization." To change the culture, we have to make it concrete, as you point out.
This discussion reminds me of the premise of “Fourth Generation Evaluation,” a book written by Guba and Lincoln, 1989. Evaluating how well a school is functioning is best accomplished not by bringing in outside experts with clipboards (scientific objectivity), but by bringing in expert interviewers first to figure out what stakeholders claim to be going well and why they think so, what stakeholders are concerned about and what is raising those concerns, and what ongoing issues are dividing stakeholders. Claims and concerns can then be cross checked against other more traditional data. This approach seems to square with the premise that organizational culture denotes beliefs about what constitutes success for the people charged with producing it.