Culture Design

"Purpose is the seed of inspiration, and your culture is the water that makes it grow,” states Jason Burnham, the Founder of Culture Design. This statement emphasizes the need for companies across the globe to establish a brand purpose that extends beyond financial rewards, and to nurture a culture that aligns and unifies the organization to deliver on its purpose. With customer, employee, and societal needs and expectations constantly evolving, the experiences people have with your brand – internally and externally to the organization – will directly impact your ability to build loyalty, retention, and advocacy.

Companies make significant investments to build brands, manage change, create operational efficiency, and improve organizational performance. Unfortunately, unless there is a culture that inspires, empowers, and enables employees to deliver on these strategic initiatives, there is a low likelihood of success. This is where the power of purpose and culture has a significant influence. As Burnham explains, “When executing any new strategy, your first question should be, is our culture capable of achieving our goals? Answering this question can mean the difference between success and failure. Culture is shaped by the ideas we share, stories we tell, and behaviors we observe that influence how we think, feel, and act. Your culture is defined by how you innovate and execute new strategies, communicate and educate employees, operationalize new systems and processes, and reward and recognize behaviors. Culture determines how well employees can align, collaborate, and innovate, all of which is required to drive collective action to achieve future state goals and desired outcomes. To create a sustainable culture that can consistently achieve your goals, you must instill employees with a sense of purpose and develop your cultural competency.”

Your culture is defined by how you innovate and execute new strategies, communicate and educate employees, operationalize new systems and processes, and reward and recognize behaviors

Of course, designing, aligning, and influencing a sustainable shift in employee mindsets and behaviors is very complex and requires a methodology that accounts for this degree of complexity. Especially for large global organizations with a multitude of social norms, values, sensibilities, and stigmas across many locations. To this end, Culture Design leverages evolutionary science, applied anthropology, and systems design to help organizations develop purpose-centric cultures to ensure strategy realization, brand activation, and operational excellence. “I believe what makes us unique, is a combination of our emotionally engaging, scientific approach, and anchoring purpose to a company’s brand. Most companies today have established an aspirational Mission, Vision, Values, and Brand Promise. However, unless employees know how to bring this brand identity to life through their roles and functions, it is nothing more than empty words. It lacks authenticity, which does not go unnoticed by employees and customers,” proclaims Burnham.

Burnham’s philosophy is apparent in Culture Design’s methodology and solutions. With options to meet most cultural needs and challenges, the firm offers a-la-carte cultural development services, as well as end-to-end cultural transformation and change management solutions.

Whether you require cultural assessment, future state design, transformation strategy, stakeholder engagement, leadership development, or performance management, Culture Design customizes solutions to satisfy your objectives. Something that really differentiates Culture Design from other firms is their application of co-creation workshops at each stage of design and transformation. The company offers an entire suite of co-creation design and innovation workshops to support brand experience design and cultural development. As Burnham states, “Engaging stakeholders through co-creation is one of the most effective ways to design and develop an organizational culture. Co-creation workshops provide a platform to listen, empathize, and share ideas in a creative and empowering environment to solve complex problems and uncover innovative opportunities. These workshops provide the emotional context and emergent ideas from a group dynamic not achieved through traditional research and strategic planning approaches. Frequent use of co-creation workshops in and of itself improves culture due to its diverse, inclusive, and collaborative nature.”

Culture Design is also setting a new benchmark in its approach to brand experience and cultural development. With memetics at the helm of its methodology, the company can not only understand what the current culture is but how and why it has evolved to its current state. This insight helps to understand the key variables and influencers that have shaped the current culture and how the organization needs to be engaged to inspire change and sustain a desired future state. With a global outreach and this extensive knowledge of memetics, it can thoroughly comprehend the underlying beliefs and stigmas of its clients and provide insights into framing narratives for communications and instructional design across the board, to bring about a uniform and sustainable change throughout organizations that serve as the bedrock for their growth.