We were then joined by Phil Lewis, Managing Director of Corporate Punk, an author, strategist, speaker, mentor, and expert in organisational performance practice, whose killer questions had started the event. Corporate Punk have invested significant time into the creation of impact cultures, and how organisations can build and sustain these. We spent the evening looking at this through the lens of the education sector.

There is a common view that positive culture is hard to achieve. Phil really challenged this notion, emphasising that aligned agendas alongside creative capabilities are key to fostering a climate of innovation. High creative capabilities without aligned agendas will create impulsive work and wasted potential. Aligned agendas with low creative capabilities will result in slow and marginal progress. The last component to Corporate Punk’s Impact Culture Formula is to ask yourself – how are your leaders behaving when trying to achieve alignment and creativity?

With this in mind, our guests began to explore where their school or organisation fell onto Corporate Punk’s Cultural Archetype and the root causes of this. This organisational audit proved to be a powerful tool for individuals to reflect on their own contexts, as well as their own behaviour and tendencies within that. These questions included;

• Can people in your school go where it’s needed to solve problems?
• How good are staff at questioning the status quo?
• Are we confronting conflict and managing it appropriately?
• Do staff feel able to make decisions?
• To what extent are people engaged in what the organisation is trying to achieve every day?
• How do we create the space and time to think?