PHASES in The ROC Process
Phase 1: Prepare. In this phase, you gain a basic understanding of the organization and its context and identify management’s interests in organizational culture.

Phase 2: Gather Culture Stories and Interpret Meaning. In this phase, you define the what the group working to describe the organizational culture wants to achieve (its objective),  you gather information in the form of stories and other discussions about the organization’s behavior, and then you then develop a short description of (at least part of) the organization’s culture.

Phase 3: Assess Implications for the Objective. In this phase, you consider how your organization’s culture (now ‘revealed’ by your organizational culture description) can help or hinder the organization in addressing the stated objective; then you create a plan for building on the existing culture, adding new elements to the culture, or possibly shifting existing elements.

Phase 4: Define Intentional Action and Implementation Plan. In this phase, you focus on how change happens and emphasize the support and intention needed to implement your plans.

The creation story is a “thick” description of who formed the organization and why. (Thick is anthropologists’ jargon for “richly described and full of meaning.”) The creation story should include information about why the organization was created, what it was intendedwanted to accomplish, who founded it, how they founded it, and information about the broader environment at the time of the creation.   In this story is evidenceare some of the most important solutions to problems and of behaviors that dealt with uncertainties; and these solutions become the organization’s core beliefs and assumptions at the heart of the organization’s its culture. 

Survival stories are also thick narratives, but this type focuses on extreme life-threatening challenges that an organization has successfully faced. Survival stories are meant to be about those times when people within the organization really thought it might close or might not survive in its current form. These stories are not supposed to be rudimentary sketches of how the organization succeeded in getting a new grant or in integrating a new program (the kind of normal upgrades and changes in processes that every organization must undergo). When you have heard a survival story, you should be able to articulate what the threat to the organization was, why it was so serious, and what the organization did to successfully navigate this threat.

Hero or heroine stories are stories about the typical super successful staff person.   Stories around this individual often have magical or mythical qualities. In these stories, the person becomes larger than life. Remember that your goal is to capture the story that is told and retold about this staff person, not necessarily just the facts. In this case you are looking for stories that are told about a super‐successful staff person. Sometimes these stories will be told as “the way things used to be,” and they often represent a norm about the way the organization operates (or operated). These stories can be tricky to find. They don’t have to be about something that the organization is particularly proud of or that the organization would publicize to others; these are often internal stories.