Culture-Building to Culture-Competing : How opposing mental-models impact organizational change

The culture-building graph (CBG) provides a visualization to understand and approach cultural change within an organization. The foundation of this cultural change is the changing of mental models to a shared mental model rooted in the organization’s Vision, Mission, Capacity, and Learning (VMCL). However, what happens when there are opposing VMCL mental models competing for the same group of “fence sitters”? This competition may be characterized by political conflict during elections, cultural conflict between social groups, or even kinetic conflict (warfare) such as the U.S. attempting to win hearts and minds in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are situations where the culture-building model may be utilized for cultural change even when two organizations are in competition. This paper will present a modified version of the CBG, the culture-competition graph, for applications to conflict and propose additional organizational change strategies for cultural change.