Culture Shock

Every time I start to build something, it's always to solve my own problems:)

Culture Shock is no different

I've had a contract to manage a resort property in Malaysia since 2019 - and, if it wasn't for Covid, I'd have been in and out within 2 years.

But it's now been 3 years and enough's enough:)

Anyway the client asked me to give them 2 things before I disappear.

1. Feedback on my own performance over the 3 years

and

2. Feedback on the Company culture

Now that sounds simple enough if you just give a bit of verbal blah blah blah.

But if you want to give them (and myself) some actionable feedback, you have to build a proper feedback system.

So that's where Culture Shock started (we're only talking 2 days since the originating conversation by the way:)

I started laying out the process:

• What are the areas of both personal attributes and company attributes that are important to get feedback on

• How is the feedback to be generated?

• From who?

• How do we avoid bias or non-truthful information being provided (whether it's positive bullshit from people who want to keep their heads down or negative crap from people who just want to take potshots)?

• And, if I'm going to build it, then "show me the money":)

So yesterday and today:

• Created the questions and the format (there's way to many questions atm, anybody would die before they could answer all of them:)

But I can toggle them on and off as I review them again

• Designed it using Google forms for the feedback questions (finishing those tomorrow for testing, should be ready for beta tomorrow night) and Sheets for the data manipulation (cos I'm way better at Sheets than Python right now!)

• Have a working model for both a Personal Self-Awareness module and the Corporate Culture module

• Tomorrow will do basic landing page (Weebly free site for speed, will go back and recode in Python, CSS and HTML once I've got the flow right)

• Basic premise for both modules is:

** The Control person firstly answers the questions about themselves (Personal) or about the Company culture (should be CEO of Board Chairman level)

This geverates a "Score" as a % of their Total against a "Best Outcome Score" and places them in a self-evaluation percentile rank

** These answers are to give the perception of the person of themselves or the perception of the Company's culture by the "insider".

It also gives a baseline to then compare the answers given by the external responders (friends, family, contacts for the Personal module and staff, vendors and customers for the Corporate module)

That comparison will show their level of "Self-Awareness", for good or for bad:)

** Then get the person (eg me or a Company CEO) to share the Form links to their audiences

For Personal, that would be friends, family, work colleagues, social media networks etc

For Corporate, they would be staff, vendors, partners, customers

** The contact list clicks through and answers the questions relevant to them

NB: Each subgroup has its own set of questions and feedback destinations, so we get discrete feedback from each subgroup - easier to comprehend the feedback messaging if the subgroups are distinct

The data goes into the system and is aggregated (ie feedback from individuals is provided anonymously as part of the group data)

The aggregated answers are then available to the Originator (Personal or Company rep) as:

• Comparisons of raw score data for each question

• Comparisons for overall scores for all questions

• Comparison of their self -evaluated Score to their subgroup feedback Score

If the Scores are close, their "Self-Awareness" level will be high

If they aren't close, then obviously their "Self-Awareness" is low

• Show me the Money!

The 2 original Culture Shock modules will be free to use

But if the feedback comparisons show there is a large Self- Awareness gap (or the Control recognises all by themselves, just by going through the Culture Shock process, that there are critical areas to improve), then we have just the right Consultants to refer them to:)

Who will, if course, pay us a commission or referall fee or whatever deal we strike, so that's where one of our revenue streams will come from

We will, once we get some momentum, also have advertising revenues on the platform and will probably create Workshops, Programmes, Master Classes etc to help address the specific issues that have been raised and / or recognised (again, just by going through the Culture Shock free process)

There are also extensions of the modules that we can charge for (I'm thinking political candidates and other public figures who need to have a platform to get external feedback on how they are perceived by their constituencies for example)

Why do I think this has legs?

Well, the corporate culture problems and the Great Resignation is ongoing and probably always will be

And you can't manage something if you can't measure it, so by offering Corporates a free tool to do that, and then having senior management promoting the use of the tool to their staff (along with the opportunity for the staff to finally get their gripes off their chest anonymously), I think provided a great platform for Culture Shock

And of course, we build a hugely qualified database:)

*** Just for reassurance, we will be automatically de-linking the database contacts from the answers provided once the data has been aggregated, so not even I can share "who said what"

But I still get to keep the database!

So if anyone would like to beta test either or both of the modules, please let me know here

Will send links once ready