Cultivational Culture

It still amazes me how well the Internet works on educating me about things I don't know, I don't know. Now thats not a typo. When we are looking for something we search for it, but the real discovery is when we come across terms or concepts or ideas that we were not looking for but we can use in our daily lives or to understand certain phenomena. This leads me to the real reason for this post. I was reading through the Intelligent Enterprise newsletter and read a brief article called It Takes Two to Tango which talks about the relationship between project selection and value to the business or basically the impact of IT projects on the business. While reading this article I came across the term cultivational culture and it intrigued me, so I googled it and came upon this article titled "Why Good Management Ideas Fail" and while reading it I learned that organizations have four types of cultures. Control, collaboration,competence, and cultivation. So a cultivational culture as the name suggests is one that arises based on the collective beliefs of an organization. All cultures hamper or promote change in some way or the other. In a cultivational culture a process change may be viewed as a slap on the face to the employees of the organization as if insinuating that the process they had in place all along was wrong. Approaching change in such a culture would be very different than a control culture where all changes are likely pushed downward strongly and the organization has a no questions asked mentality. From all my past research on knowledge management and change management I am really glad to see more of us looking at organizations as living, breathing organisms and not as concrete structures. I hope this article (linked in the title) gives you some ideas on how to deal with change in your organization based on its culture or combination of cultures.