Every organisation has a culture – but is it the culture they really want? The question is: Is it accidental or intentional? We have chosen to make ours fully intentional.

At the JSE, we firmly believe that our people are our greatest asset. And for us to truly claim this to be so, we need to ensure that everyone has a voice in determining the ideal culture which everyone can relate to. This is the journey of how the fully inclusive, co-creation of the JSE Formula came to life:

We chose a particular context in which to codify the JSE’s Formula for Success – that being to Grow Shared Prosperity. This objective (the WHAT) – to serve our shareholders, people and communities – was defined on the ‘right-hand-side’ of the equal sign of a Formula and all employees were invited to express their views on (the HOW) to best achieve this objective on the ‘left-hand-side’ of the equal sign.

To drill down to that core essence and find out the exact critical-success factors to be embedded in our Formula, we asked every member of the organisation to tell us what they believed the JSE needs to do more of, and what it needs do less of to fulfil its objective of truly Growing Shared Prosperity. We surfaced over 2,700 opinions in the interview process, which were then thematically grouped into 29 discrete enabling factors (those which should be pursued) and 27 discrete disabling factors (those which should be eliminated) over time.

These themes were then relayed back to the organisation, so that everyone could vote in an election on which they considered to be the most important factors. Thereafter, the results of the vote were distilled into a mathematical Formula, with the Top Line (numerator) elements of the equation representing those most crucial enabling factors, and the Bottom Line (denominator)elements of the equation representing those most crucial disabling factors.

A total of 84% of employees participated in one or both exercises to decipher the JSE Formula for Success.

To help everyone internalise our winning culture, we then brought the Formula’s elements alive as visual icons, so they could serve as constant symbolic reminders of what the JSE Formula is all about. We asked employees to express creative ideas of how best to depict each of the Formula’s components as art forms. Over 1,000 ideas were expressed, and the best ideas were then converted into three-dimensional sculptures.

The Formula was weighted to show which factors are the most vital in terms of achieving our business objectives. These were ranked according to first, second and third place to determine the Formula’s exponents and multiples – and cubed, squared or multiplied to indicate their relative importance. We also compiled a dictionary, to remove ambiguity and assist in the understanding of the icons as detailed descriptors.

Now that the Formula has been revealed, the next step is to ensure that it is lived daily. To do this -amongst other things – we will be conducting periodic measurements and innovation cycles to find out how the icons are being lived, identify the high-priority focus areas and determine what actions are required to ensure that we become progressively more aligned to the JSE Formula over time. This will not only ensure self-educating understanding of the Formula for everyone at each iteration, but it will also provide greater clarity on what we could to be doing differently to maximise our business objectives.

The JSE Formula for Success – our very DNA – is our unique way of ensuring that we continuously grow from strength to strength – for all our stakeholders