Make observation your first intervention.

One of the key skills of culture leadership is the ability to accurately assess and understand culture. This can be surprisingly difficult when you’re a part of it yourself and if there’s one thing we learned from running our first ever Culture Architects Programme last year, it’s that there is a huge appetite for gaining these skills.  As we gear up to welcome more organisational game changers to the 2026 programme in May – we wanted to share some new insights, strategies and practical tips for anyone intent on supporting cultural transformation. And, a great place to start is to observe. It’s not enough to merely experience the culture with your own eyes or ears. Purposeful, planned inquiry – relentless observation – is what allows us to grasp both the culture and the forces acting upon it.

We’ll focus on purposeful looking, skilled listening, and a determination to tune-in to the culture around us. This Lab will go beyond the ‘what’ to embrace the ‘how’.

Strategies and tips we’ll look at will include:

• Powerful questions for opening up fresh insights, such as:
  
  • How closely aligned is your articulated and experienced culture
  • To what extent are our day to day behaviours equal to the ambitions of the organisation
  • What tests this culture?
• Observations from a second pair of eyes
• Appreciative enquiry and critical incident analysis

Throughout, we’ll be introducing you to a series of levers that cultural leaders can pull in order to shape culture. You’ll leave the session with a better sense of how to find out which levers are being pulled already, and which aren’t being pulled enough.

Our Facilitator:

Shona Crooks is MF’s Head of Culture & Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. She has remarkable knowledge and skills in how to go from talk into tangible action and behavioural change. Working globally since 2010, she values the importance of equity to achieve equality and firmly believes in the power of role modelling, which she positively adopts herself. Shona’s authentic, warm and engaging facilitation style enables her to create a safe space for people to have honest and courageous conversations.