Models of culture | IMPAC health and safety

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Dan Davis, an IMPAC Health and Safety Specialist, will be presenting at the 2018 HASANZ conference.

His presentation is called ‘Maturity, strategic levers and behaviour: integrating three models to build a culture development plan’ and explores how the three models of culture can be combined to create a strategy for culture change in an organisation.  

Figure: Hudson's Culture Maturity Model (diagram sourced from IMPAC H&S Leadership for Executives).

Dan’s case study is centred around the work he’s done with Mr Apple NZ Ltd. The study involved facilitated workshops involving participants from the orchards and post-harvest business units of the organisation. 

Case study methods

Dan explained that the facilitated workshops were chosen as the preferred engagement method primarily because he believes that as culture is a product of groups rather than individuals, a group setting would be more effective in bringing out useful insights than a survey or questionnaire.

He wanted to bring together a diverse selection of roles and provide the time and space for discussion, collaboration, and trust-building. He explained that the disadvantages of this approach were that only qualitative data is produced, and there is a risk of some individual perspectives being overshadowed by the group view.

Dan’s study used Hudson’s Culture Maturity Model as a starting point for the workshop participants’ understanding of ‘safety culture’. The model was presented to participants in the form of a team-based board game. The game involved matching indicative statements to the culture maturity levels. The goal of this game was for participants to learn about the five levels of culture maturity, and to then estimate their business unit’s maturity level, and the average level for the organisation.

The game allowed participants to see the whole journey, to estimate their current maturity level, to celebrate how far they have come, and to become motivated to act to move to the next maturity level. For example, a team that identified mostly with the ‘calculative’ culture maturity level celebrated moving out of a past ‘reactive’ culture and looked forward to becoming more ‘proactive’.

To discover the rest of Dan’s methods and his case study conclusion, be sure to catch his HASANZ presentation at 2.30pm on Thursday 6 September.