OIT Culture Journey
The culture transformation journey was intended to create fundamental and sustainable changes at the individual, team and enterprise levels of the Office of Information Technology (OIT), relative to mission alignment, collaboration across organizational silos, communication, interpersonal and organizational trust by focusing on human behavioral drivers.
The CIO’s vision was a technology organization that would be better positioned to partner with business units to deliver on the agency mission. This required deconstructing organizational silos, fostering a more customer-first approach, and shifting security and governance to the left in the organizational value stream.
“Our intended outcome was to help our staff to change but we soon realized that we’re the ones that needed to change most,” said George Hoffmann, acting CIO for CMS. “And we did.”
The OIT Mindset
This is an example of creating visual communication for shared understanding of key concepts. OIT identified Human-Centered Design (HCD), lean systems thinking, and agile ways of working as foundational to drive meaningful change.
HCD places people at the heart of every decision, ensuring solutions resonate with those who matter most. Lean systems thinking helps you see the broader landscape, focusing on what adds real value and creating simplicity where it counts. Agility brings flexibility, allowing leaders and organizations to adapt swiftly and keep moving toward their goals.
Kaleidoscope
The Kaleidoscope is a technique for visualizing not just objectives but all of the things that need to happen to achieve those objectives. It consists of concentric circles representing different time frames, like weeks or months, and is divided into sectors, which can represent different work types or projects. By breaking down work into these segments, the Kaleidoscope helps identify gaps, overlaps, or areas for collaboration. It’s not just about seeing what needs to be done—it allows teams and leaders to understand the full scope of their current and future efforts in one place. The Kaleidoscope helps highlight real-time issues, allowing organizations to spot potential problems early and make adjustments before they escalate.
Cultural Cartography
FACET, Skyline, Cityscapes, PLACES, Co-Lab, Spextrics
The Cultural Cartography™Suite revolutionizes organizational development by integrating FACET, Skyline, Cityscapes, PLACES, Co-Lab, and Spextrics into a cohesive framework. It addresses organizational challenges by fostering a shared understanding of culture through the Skyline metaphor, exploring micro-cultures with Cityscapes, and actualizing cultural blueprints via PLACES. Co-Lab ensures the sustainability of cultural shifts, while Spextrics focuses on aligning individual talents with organizational needs. This suite empowers organizations to navigate and shape their cultural landscape, promoting innovation, inclusivity, and a sense of shared purpose, thus enhancing overall effectiveness and adaptability.
Engagement
Culture Co-Lab
Culture Co-Lab sessions offer a space where people can openly share what they know with their peers, making learning a natural part of the workday. These sessions create an environment where people can try out new approaches, exchange ideas, and experiment without the pressure of needing everything to be perfect. It’s a chance to practice, get feedback, and learn together in a way that feels both safe and fun. When people share and learn in this kind of space, it strengthens connections across teams and allows new ideas to grow—boosting confidence and encouraging continuous improvement throughout the organization.
Virtual Meetings
Virtual meetings are a reality in achieving any strategic objective but they can be challenging in delivering impact for the time spent. We facilitate so that leaders can tap into unspoken challenges, surface critical insights, and align on what really matters. Our facilitation ensures these meetings go beyond surface-level discussions, helping our clients achieve clarity on complex issues and setting the stage for action.
With events like town halls, we cultivate environments where employees feel heard and connected, ensuring genuine engagement and sustainable change. This approach fosters trust, transparency, and a sense of shared purpose.
Stages of Collaboration
Deconstructing and visualizing the stages of collaboration changes how people work together. Instead of hoping everyone figures it out as they go, you give them a way to understand what’s expected and how to move forward. It helps teams know when they need to step up their interaction, share ideas, or work together more closely. This kind of visibility takes the guesswork out of collaboration and makes it something everyone can get better at. It also builds trust, because people see that there’s a plan, and they know how their efforts connect to the bigger picture. It’s a simple way to make working together feel more natural and effective.
Facilitation Spinner
Having tough conversations is key to building trust and resilience in an organization. When people feel comfortable discussing difficult topics, it helps prevent small issues from turning into bigger problems. The "Intentional Conversation Spinner" makes this easier by offering a simple guide to approach these conversations. It encourages openness and honesty, so everyone can feel heard and respected, even when the subject is hard to talk about. By making these kinds of conversations a regular part of your culture, you build stronger connections and create an environment where challenges are faced together, rather than avoided.
Enabling agility in an organization isn't a simple checklist or a one-time process—it's a complex, interconnected challenge known as a "wicked problem."
The Wicked Agility technique offers big solutions to these big challenges, driving sustainable cultural change and product development. Instead of focusing on checklists, Wicked Agility builds momentum by amplifying existing change. It helps navigate the difficult trade-offs and decisions inherent in solving wicked problems.
Grounded in Agile practices, DEIA, and organizational reframing, Wicked Agility offers people-centric, respectful solutions for creating impactful, lasting change.
Its two core principles are:
Healthy ecosystem: A win-win outcome for all stakeholders, fostering collaboration and equity for system sustainability.
Balancing polarities: Acknowledging that no solution is perfect, but aiming to minimize negative impacts while benefiting all stakeholders.
Culture Drivers
Trust Workshops
Our trust workshop facilitates this exact competency in a pragmatic and interactive approach that prioritizes changing behavior to align intent to outcome. We focus on helping individuals, especially leaders, consider their actions through this lens – does this behavior help my people to trust me? Does this behavior show my people that I trust them? And if not, how to align behavior for these key outcomes. Ultimately, building trust with your people creates a high-trust organization that is essential to delivering business results such as innovation and resilience.
Empathy
Empathy is fundamentally an individual behavior choice. And in order to act with empathy, we need to feel “charged”. In any group of individuals, there can be a coefficient of empathy (COE).
This is a cumulative measure of the following five sequential attributes of a team: Shared goal/purpose, Psychological safety, Constructive conflict, Sense of agency and Reflect & Adapt
Just as smaller units such as teams or groups have coefficient of empathy (COE), so do larger organizations. How would your people rate your organization?
Prism of Lost Trust
Being real about how mistrust happens matters because it helps cut through the stuff that’s quietly messing things up. If no one talks about it, mistrust spreads, and suddenly people aren’t being open, ideas aren’t flowing, and progress stalls. By actually naming where mistrust comes from—like broken promises or poor communication—you can start to deal with it. These conversations give people a chance to rebuild trust and get back on track. It’s not about fixing everything overnight, but about making sure people feel comfortable enough to share and work together again.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
DEI at OIT CMS
The DEI ebooks focus on the journey of integrating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) into the organizational fabric of OIT. They share insights and experiences from members within the organization, providing strategies and tools for fostering allyship and promoting an inclusive culture. They emphasize the importance of accessible technology and inclusive design, while envisioning a future where DEI principles are central to the organization's identity and operations
DEI Bookhouse
The animated video series on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) emphasizes the importance of allyship and actionable consideration in the workplace. The installments focus on the concept of intent, urging individuals to reflect on the impact of their actions and words, highlighting how these can affect others beyond surface-level interactions. Additionally, the videos delve into consideration, advocating for concrete steps towards listening, understanding, and incorporating diverse perspectives into collaborative efforts. Together, these videos serve as vital resources for organizational development, promoting a culture of inclusivity, empathy, and effective communication, essential for meeting client needs and fostering a supportive work environment.