Adaptive Cultures Insights Diagnostic

Measure and enable your organisation’s ability to achieve, adapt and evolve

The more adaptive the culture, the more likely the organisation is to be able to successfully respond to disruptions and changes. And, over time, to become the disruptor rather than the disrupted.

The Adaptive Cultures Insights Diagnostic measures the capacity for an organisation to:

Align

align all its parts with a clear and expansive purpose

Grow

grow and achieve in line with its purpose

Adapt

self-reflect, learn and adapt rapidly

Co-create

envision the future and co-create alternative possible futures

About the Framework

The Adaptive Cultures Framework is based on the research of Adaptive Cultures founders Alison Cameron and Andrew Brown into what enables successful cultural evolution. Through fieldwork, interviews and case studies, Adaptive Cultures have identified the aspects of culture that enable an organisation to build greater capacity to adapt. Building greater adaptive capacity enables cultural evolution.

The Adaptive Cultures Framework helps organisations to identify their current and aspirational stages of cultural maturity and the Insights Diagnostic helps organisations to focus their cultural evolution efforts and initiatives in areas that will make the biggest difference.

The Insights Diagnostic

The Insights Diagnostic can be run for an entire organisation, function or team, or for subsets of the organisation, function or team. The Diagnostic can be run for the current culture, the aspirational culture, or both. The Current Culture Diagnostic provides insight into your organisation’s current stage of cultural evolution as well as key levers to evolve to the next stage. The insights provided assist organisations to identify cultural inhibitors and plan a comprehensive, actionable journey of cultural evolution. The Aspirational Culture Diagnostic complements these insights by identifying the aspirational stage of cultural evolution for the organisation, in its unique context. The output gives insight into the level of adaptability required of the organisation. Benchmarking this against the current culture results can help to identify gaps and focus initiatives and energy in areas that will create most momentum.

The Benefits to Your Organisation

Using the Adaptive Cultures Insights Diagnostic in your organisation is a powerful cultural intervention in its own right. The Diagnostic encourages respondents to reflect on their behaviours, mindsets and worldviews and the way these, and broader systems, processes and ways of working, influence culture.

The Diagnostic can enable your organisation to:

evaluate the impacts of culture initiatives – it can be used repeatedly to measure progress and refocus energy and efforts

successfully manage and lead through mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances

build a collective vision of the aspirational culture

measure and gain insight into current culture and stage of maturity

identify and address inhibitors and barriers to cultural evolution

identify and leverage cultural enablers to build momentum

assess organisational awareness of the need to evolve and commitment to change

align culture and leadership to strategy

Categories Measured

Adaptive Capacity and stage of cultural evolution are measured in the following categories:

Accountability & Ownership

measures the level of collective and individual accountability and ownership expected of people in the organisation. Culture levers measured include how feedback, performance management and responsibility is perceived and applied.

Adaptability, Learning & Innovation

explores how the organisation relates to ambiguity, views and executes on change initiatives, and engages with learning and innovation. This category also measures how the organisation responds in times of crisis which reveals a lot about an organisations stage of cultural evolution.

Communication & Collaboration

measures how different business units work together, how communication forums are used, and when, why and how communication flows through the organisation.

Leadership & People

explores how leadership is perceived in the organisation and how it is applied through leadership behaviours, expectations of leaders, what leaders prioritise and the way leaders enable voices to be heard in the organisation. What strategy means to the organisation and how leaders enable strategy is also explored.

Organisational Design, Systems & Processes

explores the adaptive capacity enabled or inhibited by the organisational design, systems and processes of the organisation. Culture levers explored include resource allocation, risk management, and how people work with systems and processes throughout the organisation.

Purpose & Community

explores the organisations stated and lived reason for being and how the way this is engaged with limits or enhances the organisations adaptive potential. This category also examines the relationship of the organisation to key stakeholders and organisation’s approach to talent acquisition and diversity are also explored.

How it works

Adaptive Cultures works with you on any Diagnostic customisation required and provides guidance on engaging and communicating with respondents prior to roll-out. Regular reminders are sent to respondents and data on completion rates reported through the process. The data collected in the Diagnostic is processed electronically, and a report (or reports) is generated to meet your organisation’s specific needs. The Adaptive Cultures Insights Diagnostic is available online and on almost any digital device.

Interpreting Results
The results of the Adaptive Cultures Insights Diagnostic provide a comprehensive view of the adaptive capacity of the organisation in each category.
When an organisation takes the Diagnostic, the results of the individual respondents are aggregated and placed in a report along with a high level summary of the identified current stage of cultural evolution. If the aspirational culture is also measured, these results are also included in the report. The report includes a deep dive into category results and individual question responses. Each question provides an option for respondents to write comments, providing additional qualitative data which is highly useful in analysing results.
The Adaptive Cultures Insights Diagnostic is best interpreted by accredited practitioners who have been trained to recognise and interpret cultural patterns and who have a deep understanding of the Adaptive Cultures framework. Please contact us to be connected with a practitioner closest to your region.
A workbook to help you to interpret the results of the Diagnostic, and create a plan for application of the insights, is provided alongside the Adaptive Cultures Insights Diagnostic report.
Overall, the results, report and workbook will help you to:
- understand and leverage the aspects of your culture that support your aspirations highlight aspects of your culture that inhibit your aspirations
- highlight aspects of your culture that inhibit your aspirations
- identify areas you should focus on to create a more adaptive culture and organisation
- Your organisation can then focus on the areas and initiatives that are most needed to create momentum in evolving culture and enable the organisation’s purpose and strategy.
Customisation
The Adaptive Cultures Insights Diagnostic can be customised to your organisation’s specific needs.
The most common customisation is in the form of demographic questions which can be used to create report segments for your organisation. Adaptive Cultures can create reports based on groups such as functional areas, regions, management levels, gender, tenure and more. Custom reports can be created to meet your organisation’s specific needs.

Individual Insights

We provide an option for individual respondents wishing to gain an insight into their experience of their organisational culture and which areas they might need to focus on to influence and guide cultural evolution.

The cost is $175 and includes a report and the Diagnostic workbook.