UNOBTRUSIVELY MEASURING CULTURE

To be resilient, organisations must assess their cultures and evaluate the workplace norms and behaviours that strengthen or undermine effective risk management. Yet, this process can be paradoxical, because the cultural phenomena that cause problems in managing risk (e.g., normalisation of poor standards, being silenced) often make traditional methods for measuring culture (e.g., surveys) unreliable and even misleading. To resolve this, we developed and tested the idea of “unobtrusive indicators of culture”: measures of culture drawn from everyday behaviours in organisations that provide both quantitative and qualitative insight on the values that guide people.