Merging 2 cultures LO25945

From: Francis Wade (francis@fwconsulting.com)
Date: 01/19/01


LO'ers

I'd love your insight on the following question I'm grappling with:

I've been starting to work with a Caribbean company that is about to be
taken over by large multi-national. Not only is there a company culture
to deal with, but also a national culture that is different.

An important premise of the work we do is that culture is comprised of a
network of conversations -- or in other words, it lives *only* in
language. Other aspects of the organization including org. design,
performance assessment etc. help to reinforce or hinder particular
conversations depending on the situation.

Another important premise is that to create a future, an organization must
first complete the past i.e. put the past to bed, resolve any regrets,
forgive as needed, acknowledge success and failures. And what's being put
to bed is all the conversations about the past that are still influencing
the present e.g. "how bad things are around here" or "we used to be the
best company around."

The question I'm interested in is, how to do that effectively in a large
organization? There are a few different perspectives I need help in:
a) what's a powerful context to create for people engaging in the process
b) what would the process look like
c) how do you know when it's time to create a new future?

Our normal way of doing this is to engage in a large-scale
meeting/coaching session which works well for groups of up to 150 or so.
Past that it becomes difficult. What process can be used in a 1000+ person
organization?

Help!

Francis

P.S. I'm posting to some other groups looking for ideas on doing this.

=================================================================
Framework Consulting, Inc. 954-447-4412
15240 N.W. 7th Street 954-447-3895/fax
Pembroke Pines, FL 33028-1839 francis@fwconsulting.com
http://www.fwconsulting.com
Making breakthrough results easy.
=================================================================

-- 

"Francis Wade" <francis@fwconsulting.com>

Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <Richard@Karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>


"Learning-org" and the format of our message identifiers (LO1234, etc.) are trademarks of Richard Karash.