Company Culture is what happens when you’re making other plans
There’s only a very few things I get angry about. One of them is when I hear/read C-levels execs say things like:
No.
No, no, no, no…
No
That’s not how culture works. Yeah, OK, who am I to disagree with Jeff Bazos about company culture based on the size and success of Amazon and the size and success of all the businesses I have built.
Well I would argue that it’s not anyone at senior leadership level who really decides on Culture. While I have not built a multi-billion dollar octopus of companies that dominate retail and cloud provision, I have built a teams, teams of teams and nurtured cultures in my time and have been told I’ve had some success. None of my teams have ever tried to unionise anyway.
Where culture comes from
Culture in a group of people is the prevailing mood and emotional direction that the group exhibits overall. This culture comes from a totality of the individuals actions and thoughts. This means that culture is:
Emergent
Every thought or action of the individuals in the group contributes to the ‘cloud’ of culture regardless of size. This is a pattern that is provably seen to be replicated in so many different places from the very big to the very small: The ‘mood’ of a city or country, the behaviour of crowds at sporting events, the behaviour of creatures like slime mold, made of multiple independent ‘nodes’ but that look like one unified creature. There’s a strong theory of consciousness that postulates that our conscious mind exists as the generated state of the neurons in our brain, that it exists ‘outside’ of our physical body rather than sitting in a specific bit of the brain. If you’d like to learn more on emergence then please read the excellent Emergence by Steven Johnson.
Dynamic
Because it’s derived from the involved people, and those people exist in their own complex patterns of existence and interaction, then the outgrowth of that is always altering and changing. Culture as an emergent measure will be different as the composition of the underlying group changes. New hires, leavers and external factors like conflict, economic change and even weather will have an effect on it.
Instantaneous
The measurement of culture, the slice in time you capture with that measure, is not culture. It’s just a picture of the past. The dynamic culture is morphing above you. If you’d like some analogies, it’s like measuring how deep the sea is; it depends on how big the waves are. To put it another way it’s like the classic quantum state analogy of Schrödinger’s cat; While the cat is in the box and unobserved you have a quantum state of catness, the moment you measure it you have a cat. Either alive and purring or not.
So culture is the emergent outgrowth of all your people whoever they are in the organisation. It’s the macro-state composed of countless micro-actions those people make. It’s fluid and changing. Measuring it statically is a lagging indicator, the past in a picture. The best we can do to understand it is look at it’s tides and trends, look for patterns and consider external forces.
You can’t define it and apply it to your company. You can’t change it directly. What you can do is help your people see that everything they do, however small, influences it. To understand it you have to be within it, contributing like everyone else.
The role of Values
Every company has their values, either gathered from consensus or generated by leadership. The amount that people in your organisation act in accordance with those values will effect the emerging culture that they generate. It’s the closest we have to a lever for cultural change.
Therefore Values are extremely powerful. If they are not carefully considered then using them as the measure of people’s actions might lead to a culture you don’t like. Like so many things it’s an indirect, abstracted influence. You make a change, you influence your people to act in accordance with the change and you wait and watch for the cultural change to manifest.
To summarise…
Culture is emergent, dynamic and instantaneous.
Culture is never created and applied directly.
Culture is an outgrowth of values applied to actions.
Don’t let anyone tell you what your culture is, or what it should be. Act in accordance with your values and what will be, will be.
