Roughly a year ago, I facilitated a session on designing organisational culture. One of the slides I showed suggested that there are various methods and tools that aid culture change. I gave some examples of each. So, under 'methods' I listed: Developing supportive infrastructure, changing the context to change the habits, shaping group norms through incentives, relaxing or removing 'old' rules and controls, you and other leaders and managers demonstrating 'new/desired' cultural attributes.
And under 'tools', I listed: incentives, policies, symbols, feedback, communication, education and development.
A couple of weeks ago someone emailed me the slide back asking if I'd facilitate a 'deep dive' session exploring what I'd put on it. I called him and we agreed I should cover: What are tools? What tools work? How can we use them? (A tall order in 90 minutes. Note to self: be careful what I put on PowerPoints!).
To get myself thinking about this I google imaged 'what are tools?' to see what came up. The first screen showed a lovely range of things – a construction site helmet, a questionnaire, a hammer, some instructions, a reporting dashboard, some desktop icons, a mind-map, and so on. So, that got me heading towards answering the question with 'tools are shaping devices'.
I guess I was prompted in that definition as I'm doing a FutureLearn course on the Philosophy of Technology . It's packed with questions and discussion on the role of technology plays in mediating human interaction with the environment. It seems to me that technology – at least the form discussed in the course – is one type of tool. And, as we learned, tools/technology 'shape all kinds of relations between humans and the world, and in doing so, they influence practices and the ways in which we perceive the world.'
In trying to shape organisational culture or 'manage change' we are selecting tools that we think will do that.