Our philosophy & Approach
PEOPLE, RELATIONSHIPS AND SUCCESS
We believe that success is about people and their relationships with each other. We think organisational success is achieved when people are empowered. When they feel a sense of belonging and loyalty to the organisation. When there is trust and support, and when they know each other, support each other, and can draw on the strengths and resources of each other to achieve great things – for themselves and for the organisation.
We know that for many people modern work life tends to be something to tolerate rather than enjoy. Their salary is important but for many people the organisational culture in which they work is more important. Most people want to feel a sense of belonging to their organisation. A sense of pride and accomplishment, and they want to feel valued and respected.
COMPLEXITY
Social issues can be very complex and although there is value in creating models that simplify the social world we believe that this can cause problems when the complexity of the local context is oversimplified or ignored. As a result, we approach data collection from a qualitative perspective. We prefer not to distil the complexity of social phenomenon to a single number or even a set of numbers. There is a place for quantitative data but we prefer to maintain complexity and therefore accuracy.
MULTIDISCIPLINARY
We don’t approach social capital and organisational culture from any single perspective but prefer to learn and utilise lessons from every discipline that has something to contribute to this topic. We find wisdom in psychology, sociology, social psychology, economics, business management, political science, and even biology as well as all the other disciplines that have applied social capital theory to their context. We believe the most exciting and innovative work occurs across and between disciplines.
PARTICIPATORY
We believe that people are empowered when they are involved in the creation of change that relates to them. When people contribute to problem solving they have ownership in the process and initiatives are more likely to be successful.
BALANCE
We believe there is a careful balance – more of something is not always better: ownership but not entitlement, socialisation but not time wasting, trust with healthy questioning (distrust). Finding a balance requires careful observations of the organisational ecosystem and requires ongoing monitoring. We don’t believe there is a single right way to do things and that each context requires modification of the strategy to achieve optimal outcomes.
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