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How to create a purpose-driven organizational culture

In 2022 I was about to embark on a journey: researching how best to embed purpose within organisations, as part of my Executive MBA at Erasmus University. In this blog, I share some of the insights with a broader audience. This blog was also posted on my personal LinkedIn page.

As part of this research, I conducted literature research, interviewed a number of high level executives (internal employees and external network), and I also did quantitative research internally. The people that participated in this research will remain anonymous. Also, please note that this was a research of short duration, and I am not a PhD student or a University Professor…! But I did believe these findings were worth sharing. Enjoy the reading!


[Note: This is part 2 of the research]

Creating a purpose-driven organizational culture

The question of how to embed purpose into an organization was too large to tackle, so I decided to focus on organizational culture. This was because (1) the research mentioned it as one of the key pillars to better embed purpose into an organization; (2) it was closer to my current field (branding); and (3) culture touches upon every part of the organization (or as Peter Drucker said, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast.").

Before jumping into it, I would like to clarify one thing. My objective was never to create a new organizational culture. Every company has its own corporate culture, and rightfully so. My goal was to find ways in which an organizational culture could be enhanced in such a way that it becomes more purpose-oriented; and by doing so, further embedding purpose into the organization. Look at it like adding Lego blocks to what's already there.



According to one paper (Warrick, 2017), when we look at an organizational culture, we look at two things: cultural attributes and influencing drivers (as I called them):


Unfortunately, I was not able to find much academic literature related to purpose and organizational culture. That being said, based on what I did find and on the interviews (qualitative research), I proposed the list below. Initially the list was much longer, but I tried to bring it back to just a number of attributes and drivers.


But do these really help create a purpose-driven culture? I tested these internally (quantitative research) and was pleased to see that the results were very positive. That being said, this was a small research, and further investigation would be required to determine whether these actually create a purpose-driven organizational culture (or not).


Could design thinking help?

As a strategic designer, I could not help at think whether I could use design thinking to (1) develop these cultural attributes and (2) create purpose-driven initiatives and develop the influencing drivers. I created two model workshops (one for a cultural attribute and one for an influencing driver) to test it out, and also discussed & improved the setup of these workshops with a Subject-Matter-Expert. Unfortunately, I cannot say much more about the matter as I wasn't able to test these workshops. But I will say that flexibility in this approach is key. That being said, through the development process I did notice two things:

  1. There seems to be a relationship between cultural attributes and influencing drivers. For example, when addressing ‘Long-term thinking’ we could also address ‘Altruism’ (multi-stakeholder perspectives). This would enable you to address two (or more) items in one workshop.

  2. Some cultural attributes serve as basis for another; and the same is valid for influencing drivers. For example, one would for instance think that you need to have a clear purpose 'Definition' before moving onto 'KPIs'.



To conclude

During this research I created my own definition of purpose and found 7 cultural attributes and 5 influencing drivers which could help create a purpose-driven organizational culture. Moreover, I believe design thinking could be a potential approach to creating a purpose-driven culture. Further research is however required to validate these findings.



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