Use it to identify how you and your staff feel about the organisation’s culture.
Morgan suggests that organisational cultures can be represented as a series of metaphors.
Machine: Based upon efficient, standardised and controlled procedures with each unit operating like a cog in a wheel.
Organism: A living system with a life cycle of birth, maturity, death – a matter of survival of the fittest.
Brains: A learning environment involved with information processing with an emphasis on knowledge, intelligence and feedback.
Values: A value-based organisation with an emphasis on tradition, beliefs, history and a shared vision.
Political systems: A culture built on preservation of interests and rights with hidden agendas and alliances.
Psychic prisons: Represents the culture in terms of conscious and unconscious feelings of repression and regression.
Flux and transformation: Sees the culture as a whirlpool of change; sometimes beneficial but sometimes chaotic and paradoxical.
Instruments of domination: Represents a culture that is underpinned by aggression, compliance, exploitation and the imposition of values.
Morgan argues that metaphors create windows into the soul of the organisation and allow us to see, understand and imagine the organisation in different ways.