I was reading the April 2007 issue of WIRED tonight while supervising the final exam for my World Civilization course and came across the phrase 'cultural operating system.' While cultures are not software programs, I understand that the idea is intended to help us understand that there are identifiable factors that shape how a culture looks and feels and thinks.
This includes the micro-cultures of organizations and businesses and, like the operating systems on our computers, is invisible to most people (advance apologies to the Linux/Windows/OSX combatants for whom that isn't the case). Designing for change in organizations includes raising cultural operating systems to a conscious level and understanding how to re-shape those systems.
Individual ingenuity is critical but if it is seen as an isolated function, it will have limited impact in most cases. Understanding and learning must occur at the scale of both the personal and collective. The relationship involves applying your personal ingenuity capacity to the right part of the larger system at the right time, learning the moves of the surfer to approach a much larger entity in a way that leads to success rather than disaster.
And there aren't any legitimate out-of-the-box ways to do that. There are simply too many factors. But that doesn't imply we are without the means to actually influence change. There are disciplines and styles of thought and action we can employ. We need both the hard science and the imaginative in this process, learning a style that gives us the footing of an ingenuity artist.
This includes the micro-cultures of organizations and businesses and, like the operating systems on our computers, is invisible to most people (advance apologies to the Linux/Windows/OSX combatants for whom that isn't the case). Designing for change in organizations includes raising cultural operating systems to a conscious level and understanding how to re-shape those systems.
Individual ingenuity is critical but if it is seen as an isolated function, it will have limited impact in most cases. Understanding and learning must occur at the scale of both the personal and collective. The relationship involves applying your personal ingenuity capacity to the right part of the larger system at the right time, learning the moves of the surfer to approach a much larger entity in a way that leads to success rather than disaster.
And there aren't any legitimate out-of-the-box ways to do that. There are simply too many factors. But that doesn't imply we are without the means to actually influence change. There are disciplines and styles of thought and action we can employ. We need both the hard science and the imaginative in this process, learning a style that gives us the footing of an ingenuity artist.
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