Practical use

Below we will give a number of examples about the use of culture scans:

• Strategy Fit: are your culture and strategy aligned? Cultural constraints determine which strategies are feasible and which are not. For example, if your culture is characterised by a very normative culture, a strategy aimed at competing on customer service does not have much chance of success. Instead, you may want to take ethical responsibility for everything your organization does. However, if your culture is characterized by a very pragmatic approach, thus doing whatever it is that your clients want you to do, you may not be able to meet this ethical responsability strategy.
• Mergers & Acquisitions: identifying the potential areas of culture conflict between the partners. This can either be an input to the decision whether or not to merge, or, if the decision has been made, an input to a plan for managing the post-merger integration so as to minimise friction losses and preserve unique cultural capital
• Effectiveness: Measuring the development of organisational cultures over time. This will show whether attempted culture changes have, indeed, materialised, as well as the cultural effects of external changes which occurred after the previous survey.
• Internationalisation: what fundamental changes are required for the organisational culture to capitalise on the development of internationalisation.
• Management skills: to optimise for example the methods for effective teamwork and transfer of knowledge from one venue to another.