The word “culture” is bandied about in business, politics, the sporting teams and even the family. We know culture is important, even essential for an organization of any size to thrive, or even to survive.
Yes, we acknowledge the importance, but often talk as though culture is an object, a thing, and we are somehow the victim of it. It is a rare individual, team or organization that takes responsibility for creating a culture that makes work meaningful within the context of producing desired results. Part of the reason is, we don’t know how. Until now!
Enter Karen Jaw-Madson, author of an inspiring and practical book, Culture YOUR Culture.
This timely book flows out of Karen’s personal journey through many cultures and disciplines: Child of immigrants, women’s college, nonprofit, affirmative action, diversity, university relations, HR executive. International work experience including Ireland, Asia, Europe and more. She draws from Appreciative Inquiry, Design Theory, Values Based Leadership and more.
In the interview, Karen refers to a “long light bulb moment” and it occurred to her that design thinking is the missing piece, because it is by nature human centric and multi-disciplinary, creating a thread to pull everything together and make a huge difference in how we bring these diverse visions to life.
Karen developed a process to help us apply design thinking to innovative experiences at work. It’s called DOWE and will help us all become DOWE-R’s. Its highly accessible, strengths based, appreciative and generative.
Would you prefer I tell you more? Or, would it be better to have the author herself inspire us? Let’s see what we can do together, beginning right where we are, with what we have, to begin to create more meaningful work experiences as we take responsibility for OUR culture.
Please join us next Tuesday as we publish this interesting conversation with Karen Jaw-Madson. I am confident you will benefit as much as I have!
As always, we’d love to hear from you.
Diamond Mind Thomas
Tom@Rosenak.com
