If you are interested in understanding how your organisation should perform in the climate emergency then you should be interested in organisational culture. An emergency is a state in which we require people to behave differently to normal and take urgent action.
We can understand organisational culture as the way a group of people get things done. If we want people to behave differently in the climate emergency then we need to change our organisational culture to one that is more appropriate to the urgency of the situation.
As part of the ‘Training on what to do after declaring a climate emergency‘ course I am co-leading at Constructivist, we are using organisational culture as an approach for analysing an organisation’s response to the climate emergency. The model we are using is the Johnson Scholes culture web, which seeks to characterise culture from six different lenses: rituals and routines; stories; symbols; control systems; organisational structures and power structures.
The task we have gave participants is to imagine that their organisation is responding well to the climate emergency and to think about how it would look through each of these lenses. Then, participants consider the difference between that imaginary world and reality. The aim is to identify possible ways that the organisational culture can be improved to bring about a more effective response to the climate emergency.
Audio journaling
The way we give this task to participants is through audio journaling exercises. Each exercise is a short investigation into a different aspect of the culture web. The idea is that you listen to them, hear the questions, and then press pause and take the time to write the thoughts that each question prompts.
The audio files are freely available below. If you them useful, please leave a comment below and feel free to share more widely.
Download Climate Emergency Audio Journaling Exercises.
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