 It might be tempting to believe you can understand an organization's culture simply by using your senses. But the items you perceive on the surface are only one level of the culture puzzle. Organizational culture expert Edgar Schein says that there are really three levels of culture, artifacts or the tangible surface level products, espoused beliefs and values or an organization's ideologies, goals and rationalizations and basic underlying assumptions, things so ingrained that they're taken for granted by the group. Schein believes to understand a group's culture, you must attempt to get at its shared basic assumptions and understand the learning process by which such basic assumptions evolve. So when you're trying to understand an organization's culture, its artifacts may be a good place to start. But keep digging, it isn't until you reach the underlying assumptions that you'll have a more complete picture. Lead well this week.