In business, they say you can't manage what you can't measure. And that has been the age old challenge with corporate culture, identifying the specific things that you want to look at and identify and understand in order to advance your culture and to optimize it for competitive advantage. Through my research, I've been able to identify 30 cultural traits that appear in companies of all sizes. Let's talk a little bit about why we call these traits artifacts. It was a prominent MIT social psychologist Edgar Schein, who introduced the notion of artifacts. Shine said this about artifacts as cultural traits.

Shine wrote that artifacts are all the phenomena that one sees, hears or feels when one encounters an unfamiliar culture. Sean goes on to say that our artifacts also include the visible behaviors of the group and the organizational processes into which behaviors are made routine. The key point that shine makes is that artifacts are just the starting point in analyzing culture. That means we have to identify the cultural traits that appear in your company, and then subject them to rigorous analysis to understand what they mean, shine said that you could look at an artifact, but you really can't understand it until you truly grasp the values, the assumptions and the beliefs that underlie a given artifact. We've talked about the definition of culture, it's how we do things around here. But when you're looking at a given artifact, you're asking the question, why do we do that particular activity the way we do it?

Importantly, we have to look at artifacts from the standpoint of whether or not they are supporting or lessening the power of your culture. So artifacts are the variables we look at when we use organizational archaeology. As a research based approach to understanding corporate culture. Let's look at the organizational archaeology methodology and the key steps involved. As a research methodology, organizational archaeology involves these activities. First, identifying the cultural traits that are prevalent in your organization.

Secondly, prioritizing those traits in terms of their strategic significance. Next, investigating the meaning and the rationale underlying each artifact. And then determining which artifacts require active management in order to optimize your culture. Conducting cultural research using organizational archaeology requires that you be an explorer or an archaeologist, because you're going to be identifying specific cultural traits or artifacts as they appear in your organization. And then you're going to be digging below the surface to understand their meaning. Let's come up with three key takeaways.

Artifacts are the variables or the units of analysis that are studied in organizational archaeology. Culture research using this methodology is based on understanding the significance of key artifacts in your company. And ultimately, your goal is to actively manage the most important artifacts that determine whether or not your culture is optimized and truly functioning as a competitive advantage for your organization. Again, if culture is how we do things around here, you're trying to identify the why of why we do things around here the way we do. And that in essence is the focus of organizational archaeology.