Culture · Reading it · Component
Competing values profile
Current and preferred profiles across the four culture types of the Competing Values Framework, used as a comparison lens with its limits in view.
The deliverable
What it is
Cameron and Quinn sort culture on two dimensions — flexibility against stability, internal against external focus — which produce four orientations: clan, adhocracy, market and hierarchy. Organisations hold all four in different proportions, and the profile shows the balance.
Its strength is comparability. A profile can be taken across units, repeated over time and set beside a preferred profile, which makes the direction of a desired change concrete. Its limit is that it describes orientation and not content: two organisations with identical profiles can hold quite different assumptions.
One level in
What it is made of
Each element is a constituent part of the component. Follow one to see the attributes it carries.
Current profile
How the culture is distributed across the four orientations today, as rated by a defined group of respondents.
3 attributes: Share per orientation · Rated unit · Rated by
LearnPreferred profile
The distribution the organisation believes its strategy needs, set by people who can explain why.
2 attributes: Target share · Why this shift
LearnLens limits
What this profile cannot show about the culture, noted beside it so the numbers are not read as more than they are.
2 attributes: Not captured · Covered by
Learn
Use the profile to compare, not to conclude. Two identical profiles can sit on quite different assumptions.
The other components in reading it
Observation log
Dated episodes from ordinary work, each recorded as it happened and tagged with the pattern it suggests and who saw it.
LearnReward trace
Who was promoted, praised or protected, and for what — the behaviour the organisation actually pays for, read from its own decisions.
LearnSubculture map
The units whose cultures differ from the whole, on which assumptions they differ, and the interfaces where those differences meet.
Learn