How a global company used a Synthetron value jam to assess readiness for a culture change.
Situation
A worldwide division of a large industrial services multinational developed a proposed new corporate culture with a changed mission.
They wanted to test this in order to launch it successfully at the worldwide top 500 conference.
This involved getting input from different locations before the conference.
Approach
Synthetron organised a value jam session with 8 online open discussions split by employee segment. The goal was to identify present: motivators, irritators, and hopes and fears.
The resulting synthetrons (most supported statementes) were analysed by segment. Furthermore they were integrated to give an overall insight into prevailing, missing, and aspirational values for different managerial segments.
The synthetron and mindset analysis produced a clear overall value map (values that enabled or slowed down). The value map contained a profile of each segment: person, team, company, and outside world.
Results
Management realised there was a significant gap between today’s aspirations & emotions on the one hand and the proposed new culture on the other.
Furthermore, they realised this would compromise the worldwide conference and that they needed to adapt the proposed corporate culture based on the input, and find the necessary bridges and convincing arguments, before moving ahead.
They postponed the conference while they addressed this gap.
