What is Cultural Healing

Culture provides people, families, groups, communities, and organizations with a "design for life"--and for work, learning, and being healthy. Culture involves a "system of informal rules about how people should behave most of the time." Each person, group, or organization has a "mental map" of "their world" that is shaped by a set of unique experiences and outlooks. The meaning of the word "heal" involves repairing, re-newing, or making whole. Healing often involves a system with many parts that work together as a whole. Healing can involve a body with systems to breathe, digest food, and circulate blood. Or, healing can involve an organization with systems to manage human resources, respond to customer needs, account for debts and payments, and do planning.

Rapid changes in the culture-at-large call upon organizations to continually update expectations, develop skills, and modify the organizational culture to support on-going success. Examples of changing conditions include advances in technology, increasing shifts from industry to information and customer service, changing economic and environmental pressures, changes in the roles of women and minority groups, and on-going challenges to balance work, family and community life.
Cultural healing can reveal how a group can repair, re-new, and continually "make whole" its "mental map," identify and support "best practices," and reach planned results. Organizations can continually re-align goals, experiences, beliefs, and other cultural influences in ways that prevent or reduce risks of disruption-or restore function in systems that have been broken down by efforts to respond to rapid change and stress. Learning how to continually learn as a group to respond to change can become a foundation of on-going organizational effectiveness over time.