The question of change is so enormous that it has given rise to an entirely new profession - The Change Agent.

In a world which is growing vastly more complex, where speed is essential and accurate communication even more necessary, these leaders of change have become important people operating at the highest levels of business and government.

Understanding cultural diversity is important as organisations strive to survive in an increasingly competitive global environment:

• What role do individuals play in defining culture?
• How do values and beliefs form pathways in the mind?
• How do individuals interact to form groups, cultures, organisations?
• What are the systems and support processes that enable these social ingredients to work in practice?

Social DNA is the broad term we use to combine the various studies that think about the complex structures within organisations and individuals that cause them to formulate their values and worldviews in the way that they do.

BRIEFLY, what I am proposing is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process, marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as man's existential problems change." -- Clare W. Graves, Union College .

LIKE genes, memes do not operate in solo, but interlock in the mosaics that form Weltanschauungs, worldviews." -- Howard Bloom in The Lucifer Principle

In today's world there is a need for thinking that can handle the complexity of an organisation and the environment in which it operates. If a leadership attribute results in individuals in an organisation becoming less effective then the whole of that natural system comes under threat.

In Tandem's integral approach explores the role of the individual's hidden values and beliefs within an organisation's culture and its subcultures.

An individual brings knowledge and life experiences to an organisation that is often different to those of the organisation. These experiences become hidden and not revealed to the host organisation. This in turn leads to assumptions being made by management based on what they observe, filtered through their cultural values and beliefs.

In first world countries the shortage of skilled workers, coupled with an ageing population, makes it necessary to employ skilled individuals from different and often alien cultures. However they need to be able to take advantage of the current experience and knowledge of existing individuals. For this integration to be effective, Western businesses need to absorb and understand these individual cultures without alienating current employees and clashing with their value and belief systems. This understanding contributes to the effectiveness of the host organisation's culture and performance.

In Tandem offer an integrated approach that uncovers the underlying or hidden filters that reveal the culture of leadership teams, as individuals, and the hidden values and beliefs that shape the organisation. It may also reveal the cultural gaps between employees, customers, suppliers and the wider community. Doing this makes it easier for managers to change and shape organisational culture.