A new visual metaphor to understand organizational culture

You might be a lot like me on this one.

During undergrad and grad school I learned to think about organizational culture as an iceberg. Culture was frozen, ridged, even a little scary. Culture had things above the water line that people talked about. Culture had things below the water line that people did NOT talk about.

I’ve seen icebergs on television and in the movies but have never personally experienced one up close and in real life.

We’ve learned a lot since then and need a new way of visualizing and describing organizational culture. Something that is more dynamic, approachable, and applicable.

Thanks to Ed and Peter Schein, we have one…the beach.

Shown above right, the Schein Beach Metaphor[1] for understanding organizational culture is dynamic, easily understood, and holds helpful context for everyone. Many of us have experienced a beach, which makes this metaphor even more useful and real.

I (Lon) grew up about an hour and a half from the Jersey Shore (more precisely for this article, the Atlantic Ocean.) My family had many wonderful vacations along the eastern shoreline, and I spent countless hours swimming in the ocean.

As a part of that experience, I often stood on the beach letting the ocean waves wash over my feet. Perhaps like you, I was fascinated with a waves ability to move sand (culture) around my feet.

Not only did the wave (i.e. a leadership initiative) subtlety move the sand around my toes, my feet were slightly repositioned because of the waves impact (change).

Something had changed.

The Schein Beach Metaphor honors that culture has nuance, texture, and complexity. While no analogy is perfect, the beach metaphor provides a better and more helpful way of understanding organizational culture.

I’ve always appreciated Ed and Peter’s ability to make the complex simple. Time and time again they have created imagery and frameworks that are helpful in understanding complex human and organizational development dynamics.

As you consider and seek to understand the beach metaphor, here are some helpful definitions:

1.    Leadership - visualized as the wave or a set of waves. Wave energy traverses the deeper water as a swell, a gentle movement propelled by some existing or historical force.
2.    Change - is the outcome of the swash of the crested wave on the beach, the impact of the leader's drive for change impacting the organization, and the backwash that then feeds the energy of subsequent cresting waves.
3.    Culture - is the beach, and the sedimentary layers beneath the loose sand, which created the conditions for the wave to crest (created the conditions for leadership) and is how we will visualize culture. Leadership and change impact the culture (contours of the sand or shore) gradually, perhaps not immediately visible-seeing the change may require observing a few breaking waves.
4.    Tailwinds – blowing from the ocean to the shore as the forces toward change. These forces can be intentional, as in a leadership initiative, or unexpected as in an advancement in technology or science.
5.    Headwinds – blowing away from the shore toward the ocean, perhaps “resisting” the pressure to change, and their various effects are the natural and technological forces that compel and constrain human action.

Our intention with the beach metaphor is that it must capture the process of culture, change, and leadership, continually interacting as a historical process, which is also an intentional human-made process.

A few years ago, I was asked to help an organization transition from being a regional presence, primarily located in the mid-west, into an international organization with multiple hubs across the US, Europe, Australia, and Africa. The process that developed began to consider multiple scenarios on how being an international presence was possible. As we continued to develop strategy to employ with the organization’s leadership, we kept bumping into something they called "our history."

Our history came up in conversation so often that I began getting curious as to what they meant by the term. In fact, we held a special lunch gathering in one of the owner’s homes to talk about all this with the full leadership team.

During lunch I began to recognize that what they referenced as our history actually meant our culture. The team felt a little helpless as to what they could do about their culture. One owner even said, “you can’t change an organization’s culture…it is what it is, you just gotta live with it and work around it."

How many times have you heard a response like this one?

Over the course of the lunch, we were able to utilize the beach metaphor and help the owners and their leadership team begin to see and unpack the components of their culture. Their big Ah Ha was that culture was malleable and not frozen, that culture can adapt and evolve through leadership and vision.

At the end of the day, leadership (the wave) has significant impact on the culture of an organization (the beach.)

By the end of the lunch, we broad stroked several next steps for the leadership team to take, including further developing their learning on how culture is structured and practiced within their company.

Every member of the team was excited and enthusiastic for their future.

A real WIN WIN WIN.

Best,

Sincerely,      

Peter A. Schein and Lon L. Swartzentruber

Design Group International

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[1] Culture Change Leadership: The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, 3rd Edition. Edgar H. and Peter A. Schein, page 5, 2019.

Join Peter Schein and Lon Swartzentruber in their new on-line learning opportunity Culture Change Leadership that launches on 3 April 2025. This six-week course, through the Society for Process Consulting, provides a humble inquiry and Process Consulting approach to understanding organizational culture.

Participants will come away with a deep and nuanced understanding of how to lead culture change initiatives in their organizations or how to walk with leaders as a Process Consultant in developing a Client's culture change initiative.