Desired and undesired behavior

Cultural values only gain meaning when you further elaborate on the behavior that fits and the behavior that doesn’t. Or in other words, desired and undesired behavior. How do we want to interact with each other? What behavior is needed to become more adaptive ourselves?

Exercise:

• Pick one of your cultural values and work with a group to describe the associated behavior. By doing this together, the values gain meaning. Do this for each cultural value. This clarifies how we want to interact with each other, what we do, and what we don’t do.

• Write the behavior on a card. Pay attention to how the behavior is described. Behavior is what we consciously or unconsciously do and don’t do that is observable. Try to describe the behavior as concretely as possible. For example, for the cultural value “togetherness, us instead of me,” you can make a card with undesired behavior “shouting instructions from the sidelines” and a card with desired behavior “getting up and making it happen together.”

• Discuss these cards with other teams. By repeating the exercise with other teams, you continuously expand the set of behavior cards.

• Provide the set that emerges with appropriate illustrations and have the cards printed.

• You can also use our standard set of behavior cards. These cards are part of the behavior game: “Improve together” that you can download or buy here. There you will also find several practices you can perform with the cards, such as the retrospective:

• • Let everyone take a card from the stack and discuss with the team whether this behavior occurs or is desired. If it does occur but is undesired, you can delve into it.

• • Answer together the following questions: “Why is this behavior undesired but still occurs?” “What function does this behavior have, and why is it maintained?” “What is needed to stop this behavior?”