C u l t u r a l D y s func ti ons

& C a t a l y t i c Movements
 Published by nowhere group ltd

Printed in the United Kingdom on FSC certified uncoated paper

© Copyright 2021 nowhere. All material in this book may not be

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 CONTENTS

Cultural dysfunctions 01
1. Time poor cultures 02
2. Unsafe cultures 04
3. Broken meeting cultures 06
4. Power-based cultures 08
5. Confused cultures 10
6. Risk-averse cultures 12
7. Agile-obsessed cultures 14
8. Lost cultures 16

Catalytic movements 19
1. A vertical movement 20
2. A collective movement 22
3. Horizontal leadership 24
4. Being more human 26
5. Riding the creative-rollercoaster 28
6. Thinking is not just thinking 30
7. Meetings are not just meetings 32
8. Nothing moves to a new order without core energy 34
 Cultural

DYSFUNCTIONS

There are a number of organisational dysfunctions that get in the

way of change, innovation and transformation.

Some of them you can energetically feel within minutes of

meeting an organisation. Others are more hidden.

Helping organisations navigate these dysfunctions is the work of

creative-catalysts and evocative leaders. The mistake is trying to
interrupt them one at a time, as this only leads to a plethora of
disconnected initiatives that continue to collude with the
dysfunction and add to the busy-ness.

1
 1
TIME POOR
Cultures

Time poor organisations often confuse busyness with productivity.

It is easy to hide behind busy as it feeds our ego and sense of
importance, provides a great reason for why we can’t do anything
new or different, and encourages us to default to what we know
and are familiar with. A busy culture comes from the top.

2 3
 2
UNSAFE
Cultures

Cultures where it is unsafe to speak up and challenge thinking,

for fear of consequence – perceived or real – make people feel
unable to bring their full selves to work, so they default to doing
just enough. Typically, leaders keep putting in more (command
and control / parent-child) processes in order to minimise conflict
and avoid difficult conversations.

4 5
 3
BROKEN MEETING
Cultures

You can tell so much by how meetings are run. Dysfunctional

meeting cultures are the norm, whether that’s starting late,
leaders over-dominating, everyone and their dog being invited,
or next actions being the main measure of success ... and this is
just the tip of the iceberg.

6 7
 4
POWER-BASED
Cultures

It’s not uncommon for part of an organisation to develop an

inappropriate level of influence. It could be a function, a dominant
business unit, the CEO office etc. Whoever it is, their enthusiasm,
and mostly goodwill, is not the problem – rather it’s how their
need for control blinds them from letting in a different point of
view, often blocking change and draining energy at every turn.
It’s as if the machine is running the show.

8 9
 5
CONFUSED
Cultures

Many organisations need a “stuff” amnesty – because they

have so much stuff weighing them down and holding them back
… a nine-box grid here, my plans there, spot rewards, wellbeing
initiatives, D&I imperatives, this survey, that leadership, agile
coaching, sustainability goals, values, behaviours, purpose,
strategy, vision and ambition … and this is just scratching the
surface. All good. All important. But how does it all join up?

10 11
 6
RISK-AVERSE
Cultures

Change, innovation and transformation are about leading yourself

and others somewhere new. By definition this can’t be known,
yet organisations constantly strive for certainty and limit risk by
seeking to analyse their way to the ‘right answer’ before they act.
The real work is moving beyond what you know and into the
unknown, where you need to experiment and iterate in order to
discover something new.

12 13
 7
AGILE-OBSESSED
Cultures

Agile ways of working are great at increasing clock-speed and

developing end-to-end solutions that are more efficient, and
sometimes much more so. However, they rarely lead to
discontinuous innovation because, by their very nature, they are
all about managing the known better and faster. Used habitually
and blindly, agile can leave you vulnerable to disruptive innovation
because you could just be going faster in the wrong direction.

14 15
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LOST
Cultures

One of the biggest and most troubling dysfunctions is purpose

washing and green washing. When purpose gets hijacked and
becomes ‘messaging’ and ‘wallpaper’, it’s very difficult to discover
and embed a true purpose that animates the organisation,
creates coherence and confidence through times of change
and becomes its wellspring for innovation.

16 17
 Catalytic

MOVEMENTS

The real work is not to try to interrupt or ‘fix’ these dysfunctions,

rather it is to give people lived experiences of something better
to move towards.

You then find many of these dysfunctions begin to lose their

power and drop away, and a more interconnected, efficient
and next generation way of working starts to take their place.

The CAT practice introduces 8 subtle movements to help

re-order the human operating system – tuning a culture to work
at a higher creative frequency, which is way more productive,
creative, innovative and collaborative.

19
 1
A VERTICAL
Movement

Moments of insight, surprise, peak experience and flow literally

rewire the way you think. In these vertical movements you
transcend your existing belief system so that a new belief system
can begin to form. This is very different to ideation which leads
more often than not to extensions within an existing belief system.

20 21
 2
A COLLECTIVE
Movement

When moments of insight become shared experiences of

collective breakthrough, they bind us, leave their mark, and are
forever seared into memory. They then resource us to act upon
the breakthroughs together with shared understanding,
coherence, conviction and movement.

22 23
 3
HORIZONTAL
Leadership

In a creative conversation, leadership moves between people

in any and all directions. Unfortunately, leaders with positional
power typically collapse conversations by over-dominating
them, or by taking up space with their big brains or big egos.
The challenge is to think horizontally with peers and partners
and interrupt the distortions of positional power.

24 25
 4
Being more

HUMAN

As the world becomes more digital, it needs to become more

human. You need to create more spaces that are energetically
charged with purpose and passion, and build relational
containers in which psychological safety is abundant, and
politics, powerplays and fear are scarce – in turn developing
healthier cultures that are also peak performing.

26 27
 5
RIDING
the Creative-Rollercoaster

Courage, humility and confidence are needed to step into the

unknown and stay there long enough for new patterns of thought
and insight to emerge. Most of us have never been taught how
to work in and drive new performance from the unknown. So
instead, we focus on driving high performance, minimising not
only risk but also potential, so we just flat-line back to more of
the same.

28 29
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THINKING
is not just thinking

There are different types of thinking, each with their own

movement and creative-rollercoaster signature – height, depth,
speed and g-force. Leaders, teams and organisations need to
master each of them in order to move into peak-performance
more often and for longer periods of time.

30 31
 !!
7
MEETINGS
are not just meetings

Meetings are a vital part of organisational life, and yet most

organisations are trapped in the collective trance of unproductive
meetings. Transforming the way we meet is the simplest and most
profound way of unlocking the creative potential of organisations.

32 33
 8
Nothing moves to a new order without

CORE ENERGY

You don’t get transformation by talking about it or by setting

bigger goals. Change, innovation and transformation are all
about shifting mindsets and stepping out of your comfort zones
– things we all find hard to do. The work of evocative leaders
and creative-catalysts, therefore, is to take us on transformational
journeys that you don’t fully understand, but where together you
can shape and make the unmade future. This also means staying
centred when the system pushes back – which it will always do.

34 35
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