In an earlier post I have upset some HR managers who are spending fortunes on culture audits and climate indexes. First of all I underscored these initiatives either scare the hell out of people, confuse them, or bore them to death.
In his 1994 book ‘The Unwritten Rules of the Game’, Peter Scott-Morgan gives us an interesting insight on why these cause-and-effect relationships resulting from cultural surveys are untrustworthy. Although I’m not a fan of this book, there is a hilarious passage on ‘Culture Vultures’ as he calls them. Here are some quotes from that part of the book:
‘I remember in the mid 1980s getting really excited by culture audits and climate indexes. But the trouble was that after you had conducted such an audit, and described (sometimes in excruciating detail) just what was there, you tended to find that you were not very much further. You might gather unimpeachable evidence that teamwork was a problem, or that innovation was not highly regarded. But then, what did you do?’
‘The anthropologically-based models for conducting audits […] are derived from academic models that were never intended to do more than describe – so never needed to build in cause-and-effect.’
‘It’s as if we went into a company and took a photocopy of the balance sheet and the profit and loss account, noted the color of the leather binding on a ledger, recorded the pattern on the carpet in the Accounts department, and wrote a memo documenting the age, make, color and weight of one of the doors of the car driven by chief financial officer and claimed that we had just conducted a financial audit. Of course we haven’t. All we have done is record a large number of facts that are loosely related to finance. Do they all have links to finance? Yes, but just as when we conduct a culture audit we have no idea when to stop, where to draw the line. Should we expect all these facts to guide us in improving the process of financial bookkeeping? No. Should we expect them to serve any practical purpose at all – other than act as an interesting record of what the finance department is like? Probably not.’
