Prior to the 20th Century, millions of people died from diseases that could have been easily cured by an antibiotic like penicillin. For years, the world’s leading bacteriologists had searched for the missing piece to this medical puzzle. Many times they were looking right at it. But they always “saw” the penicillin mold as a pest that contaminated countless bacterial cultures and slowed their progress toward finding a way to save innocent lives. In the late 1920s, a London doctor named Alexander Fleming suddenly began to see this so-called “pest” as exactly the bacterial killer scientists had been searching for. From that moment on, everyone saw penicillin differently. It was instantly transformed from a problem, to a resource. The new challenge then became how to quickly produce it, not to protect ourselves from it. This is one example of the principle, “what you see is what you get.” Something you “see” as a negative can be transformed into something positive by changing how you “see” it.
The See-Do-Get Process® is a meta-model that describes how organizational culture is created, managed, and deconstructed. More specifically, the purpose of culture (any culture) is to teach people how to see the world, and there are active, tacit, and disciplinary teaching processes by which organizational culture is promulgated in groups of people. Using the See-Do-Get Process will reveal underlying patterns-of-interaction and behaviors that happen all around you, but are not well-understood or seen to be what they are.