a few thoughts on culture

There’s a tendency to treat culture as an independent element of companies, which infuriates me. Culture is treated like something of a holy grail, a way to increase productivity, drive, and cohesion. Culture is a mixture of spirit, but also of processes and frameworks.

Dictating culture from the top down is like dictating an attitude - anything legislated will end up feeling fake or forced. Culture isn’t a checklist.

Culture also can’t be at odds with process. Process and structure are the purest expressions of culture, because they influence everything that happens in a company. You can’t advocate a culture of creativity and individual agency when every decision is top down. You can’t foster a culture of open and fun collaboration, while demanding that employees keep non-essential interaction to a minimum.

Your process and structure is a skeletal system. By the time you get to culture, you’re looking at developing a circulatory system, musculature, nervous system, and higher order thinking: if you don’t design core structure around a desired culture, you won’t be able to integrate ideals and actions.

Put more simply: when you want to make a major, positive life change, the first step isn’t to go shopping or tell everyone you know that you’re changing.

You need an honest examination of your underlying motivations, principles, and how you make choices. You need to identify the issues that are keeping you from being who you want to be. Then you go to the core causes of whatever the problem is, and start trying to change at that level.

Process is culture. Structure is culture. This is why watching culture driven companies get acquired always makes me uncomfortable - as the new parent company tries to create some synergy between the structures and processes of two disparate companies, there’s bound to be a backlash at a cultural level.

The hard part of an organ transplant isn’t getting the connections and vessels lined up; the difficulty is in fighting the natural urge to violently reject anything that wasn’t part of the system as it developed.