Turning Organizational Culture into Organizational Understanding

Photo by Cherrydeck on Unsplash

TL:DR

You can’t “manage” culture into alignment — you have to understand it.

Edgar Schein saw culture as something you could diagnose and shape.

Linda Smircich saw it as the ongoing meaning-making that is the organization itself. The smartest leaders use both lenses when guiding teams through change.

When two companies merge, the real challenge isn’t systems — it’s sensemaking.

As a coach, I’m always looking for ways to help leaders make sense of the challenges they face in today’s unpredictable landscape.

A cultural lens can be one of the most powerful tools available — especially during mergers and acquisitions, when teams are suddenly asked to blend their ways of thinking, working, and communicating.

While there’s usually a clear business case for a merger, the human side of it often gets less attention. Yet that’s where most integrations stumble. What really determines success is how people adapt to new norms, new expectations, and new definitions of “how we do things around here.”

Two Ways of Seeing Culture

Organizational culture has been interpreted in many ways, but two perspectives stand out — from Edgar Schein and Linda Smircich.

Schein’s model sees culture as something an organization has. It’s a system that can be observed, measured, and influenced — like structure or strategy. He describes three levels:

• Artifacts – visible things like rituals, communication norms, or who leads meetings.

• Espoused Values – the stated ideals: mission, vision, strategy, and ethics.

• Basic Assumptions – the invisible beliefs about how success happens, what’s valued, and how people should behave.

This model helps leaders diagnose and align culture to drive effectiveness. It’s practical, structured, and useful when you need clarity.

Smircich’s view is very different — and just as valuable. She argues that an organization doesn’t have a culture. It is culture.

Culture isn’t a tool to be managed but a living process of meaning-making among members. It’s how people collectively interpret what’s happening — through stories, rituals, jokes, and shared experiences.

In this view, leaders can’t “build” culture; they can only participate in it. They help shape meaning through the way they listen, frame decisions, and respond to uncertainty.

Applying Both During a Merger

When two organizations merge, both lenses have something to offer.

Using Schein’s framework, a coach might start by mapping the two cultures:

• How does each team communicate and make decisions?

• What values do they claim — and which ones do they actually reward?

• What invisible rules or assumptions shape daily behavior?

By documenting these patterns, the coach can help leaders spot where the two cultures will align or collide — and design strategies that carry forward the best of each.

From Smircich’s perspective, the work looks more emergent. It’s about helping people notice how they’re making sense of what’s happening.

How are stories about the merger being told? Who feels heard? Who doesn’t? Where are people creating new shared meanings — and where are they clinging to the old ones?

I recently worked with a CEO who was confused about why the team formed from the best of the best of the two merged companies were not communicating out to senior leaders in ways that they had historically  done. They seemed to be doing their work, but they were reluctant to engage with those outside of the group. After doing some digging into this question with members of the team, it became clear that the stories the senior leaders were telling about how and why the merger took place did not match the stories this high performing team had understood. The result was a lack of trust and work needed to be done to build that trust again.

The coach’s job here is to foster understanding, not control — to help people see that they’re co-creating the new culture together.

At CultureCamp: Bridging Both Worlds

At CultureCamp, we’ve built tools that draw from both Schein and Smircich.

Our onboarding process uses Schein’s structured lens — collecting information about a team’s values, systems, and goals — while our individual culture assessments reflect Smircich’s interpretive lens, showing how people actually experience collaboration, communication, and purpose.

When combined, these perspectives reveal where teams share common ground — and where deeper dialogue is needed. This integrated approach helps leaders and coaches move beyond managing culture to actually understanding it.

When teams can see how their personal styles and collective patterns interact, they gain the clarity to make better choices — and to build a culture that’s not inherited, but intentionally created.

In your own work, where have you seen the “culture as a variable” mindset play out — and where have you witnessed culture as something people co-create?Which approach feels most relevant for the challenges you’re facing now?

For Coaches - if you want to explore how CultureCamp supports your practice or to find out about our Coach Collective, click here for an intro meeting.

For Leaders: Try the assessment to see your team's values in action.

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