Now let's go on our archeological dig to apply organizational archaeology for culture management and culture analysis purposes. When I work with companies to apply this methodology, I typically recommend four interrelated activities. Let's look at the first one. The first activity involves establishing your culture management team. And this would include representatives from key functions or departments, as well as employees at different levels of the organization and at different levels of their tenure. It's important to note that organizational archaeology requires a team approach.

That's because you need objective input and different perspectives to analyze culture effectively. This course in the accompanying workbook, were designed for the leader or the facilitator of that process, but it was also designed for the participants of the culture management team. Now let's look at the next tactical activity in implementing organization. archaeology for cultural management purposes. The next phase is identifying the artifacts that appear in your organization, the social material and ideological artifacts that are identified in organizational archaeology, as well as the artifacts that are unique to your organization. Clearly, the majority of this course has been about the process of identifying artifacts.

But again, it's necessary to take a team approach to identify and gain agreement on the artifacts that appear in your organization, and the strategic significance. At this point, let's discuss the key exploratory process involved in apply organizational archaeology. The next activity involves formally analyzing your artifacts. And this means studying the values, the assumptions and the beliefs that underlie each artifact. Here we're trying to understand the reasons why your company performs a particular business activity in a particular way. And it's key to examine the company's past when you're analyzing your artifacts, and this includes how the founders of the company established key business systems and key business processes and cultural ideals.

Here, your goal is to determine whether old ways of doing business or outdated ideas on business success are working for or against the company in terms of developing a high performance culture. Lastly, let's discuss the development of your formal culture management action plan. Developing your culture management action plan, again involves working as a team to specify the most important artifacts that define your culture, ranking them in terms of their relevance and strategic significance, and then developing company wide initiatives to bolster cultural strengths and to mitigate cultural weaknesses. These programs typically involve formal internal employee communication programs, as well as in instituting new management policies and procedures to address specific cultural development objectives. The diagnostic tools included in the course workbook will help you in a variety of ways. First, they will help you to identify and prioritize cultural artifacts that appear in your organization.

The diagnostic tools will also help you to develop your formal CULTURAL MANAGEMENT action plan. And lastly, they will help you to compare cultures and special business situations like mergers and acquisitions and joint ventures, where we hope to bring two companies together two cultures together, while avoiding culture clash. Let's come up with three key takeaways. Applying organizational archaeology involves four interrelated activities that require a team approach. In organizational archaeology, the goal is to examine your cultures past in order to understand how key cultural traits came into existence. Importantly, Many of those traits will go back to the company's founders, and many of the beliefs and ideals that those people instituted at the company's formation.

Lastly, using the diagnostic tools in the course workbook, will help from the standpoint of cultural analysis and management, but also in cultural comparisons situations. In the next and final lesson, I'll sum up all the guidance I've provided in this course. And we'll discuss a class project that you can undertake to better understand organizational archaeology as a precursor to actually applying it in your organization.