| CCC believes that one of the most significant, if not the most, significant challenges of the 21st Century is to begin the process of seeing ourselves, our organizations and in fact our world as one interdependent, interconnected system. Thinking systemically requires us to recognize that any action on one part of the system ultimately will effect every other element of the system in some way. Many organizations are beginning to understand the need for this kind of thinking as they struggle to address the complex problems of our era.
While the expanded marketplace of our increasingly global economy offers great opportunity, this opportunity is fraught with the challenges of communicating with and meeting the demands of customers whose needs may be very different, not just from those of the traditional domestic market, but also different from one to the other. Public and professional service organizations at every level are increasingly faced with the need to provide services to a citizenry that is becoming more diverse by every dimension of difference.
Today the workforce in many if not most industries is composed of people - sometimes up to 50% or more - who no longer fit the traditional profile. Women, people of color, single parents both female and male, blended families, people with different sexual orientations, older and younger workers with a range of value and lifestyle differences, people with physical and mental challenges, immigrants from around the globe and others comprise today’s typical work environment.
While the human composition of the workplace is changing, the norms, values, expectations and behaviors of many organizations were established during a time when there was much less diversity. The organization culture of the traditional workplace was designed to meet the needs of married, apparently straight white men who constituted the majority of the workforce for the first half of the 20th Century. As we progress in the 21st Century with a vastly different workforce, organizations are faced with the challenge of adjusting their organization cultures to accommodate an ever-changing set of needs and expectations.
CCC’s theoretical and operational framework is based on the following thesis. First, each of us is operating off of very powerful cultural assumptions, which permeate our society and influence how we see and relate to one another.
This cultural assumptions programming is provided by parents, schools, churches, the media - - - via messages which are reinforced until one believes them. Once the cultural assumptions are believed or accepted without examination, they become institutionalized; they become, "the way things are." After which, one accepts them as valid because the cultural assumptions are most of what one has heard about the "other group" (Herring, 1992).
As a consequence of cultural programming, the workplace can be rife with categorizing, stereotyping and generalizing which erodes the fabric of the organization and prevents the development of authentic relationships, trust and credibility between co-workers essential to effective teaming.
Our training is guided by the belief that our clients are not "...consciously and deliberately bigoted, but people who either are not really aware of how they feel, or who think they are more liberal than they really are about people who are different" (Herring, 1992). In other words, people who are unaware of the impact of the cultural assumptions.
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