Culture is invisible infrastructure
Your cultural norms are the foundation, the scaffolding, the hidden protocols
Much ink has been spilled on how to build a productive, innovative culture. A healthy culture is undeniable — it's a magnet for well-fit talent, punches through market noise, and generates a momentum that's hard to replicate.
But there's no silver bullet to fostering a culture like the icons of the industry we admire. The Pixars and Shopifys and Patagonias of the world didn't burst onto the scene with the wholly-formed and distinctive cultures they're known for today.
The keyword here is foster.
Just like a biological culture in a laboratory petri dish — a culture is grown, not made. It's not built brick by brick like a wall. It's cultivated like a garden. We set the environmental conditions (as best we can), we prune and direct, we water and feed. But we don't directly dictate the results we get.
PowerPoint slides full of mantras, maxims, and sayings don't grant you a culture.
I’m totally supportive of articulating a set of principles. In fact, I think the exercise of articulating values in writing is fantastic for the way it crystallizes your beliefs, and forces exclusion. By defining what you believe, you imply what you don't.
But the culture itself sprouts from how you put those principles into practice.
Culture’s built on deeds, not words
Culture is the consequence of a chain of decisions, focuses, choices, actions. It’s not handed down from above, it emerges from below, through what you choose to emphasize, the expectations you set, the examples you provide, how you comport yourself.
It’s the result of what you do, not what you say.
I’ve written before about the durability of bottom-up, evolved systems. When you understand how strong cultures work — where they come from, and respect the patience required to nurture one along — you know what it takes to produce one.
This knowledge doesn't make the process easy. Far from it, in fact. But you know much of what not to do: what things are either pointless in culture-building, or actively harmful. It's like raising children. You can be full of parenting book knowledge about how to raise healthy, honorable, productive kids. But no checklist of "best practices" produces the result. Only the years of presence and hard work create an upstanding citizen.
As with children, culture requires long investment. In either case, after several years you're blessed with this resilient organism that's able to bear weight, weather criticism, meet and overcome challenges, and emerge stronger with each new experience and failure.
Culture as infrastructure
Culture is invisible infrastructure. It’s the mycelial network in the forest weaving your organizational trees together. It lives in the spaces between the physical, formal structures. Like the subterranean fungi between the tree roots, it's an unseen fabric between your systems that supports communication, coordination, decision making. It's the stuff in between your meeting cadences and product roadmaps and SOP documents.
What actions you reinforce gradually calcify into norms of behavior. If they're the right norms, this calcification creates durability: a resource you can rely on, that can take hits without taking damage.
But if they're the wrong ones, they become rigid and hard to erode. In some cases, they have to be painfully dynamited out like rock from a strip mine.
When you reinforce the right behaviors, the organization learns, like an organism. What was enabled, permitted, and works sticks around and gets better.
I'm reminded of something I wrote a while back about habits: how when a behavior is repetitively performed and reinforced, it acts like firmware rather than software:
Firmware is like software embedded directly in hardware — a set of baked-in instructions for routine operations. It's useful where you have repetitive operations to perform. Getting closer to the metal makes operations happen faster, lowers the latency in the system, and increases reliability. In your computer things like bootloaders and peripheral controllers and network interface cards use firmware to execute repeat, rote processes. They embed "habitual" behaviors of the system.
Culture and communication
Culture works like an operational lubricant: it reduces friction and streamlines the inherently messy work of coordination and collaboration. It's like a river gradually carving channels into the landscape, speeding up the flow of information.
Culture influences communication. Team develop shorthands and internal memes for high-signal data transfer. The cultural norms create a language for transmitting ideas. It encodes shared understanding that guides how people act, choose, disagree, and form consensus.
Culture also serves as scaffolding for conflict resolution. Whether its a conflict in ideas or personalities, the evolved norms you’ve nurtured through past actions help resolve ambiguities and generate the conviction to choose one path over another.
Strong cultures don’t just resist entropy; they actually get stronger over time. They absorb new ideas, test them, and either integrate or reject them. Like a wave choosing which surrounding ripples to constructively merge with, a strong culture selectively amplifies what fits and filters out what doesn’t.
Leaders play a critical role here. Not because they define culture by fiat, but because their behavior sets the bounds of what’s acceptable, admirable, and aspirational. Culture follows the taste, discernment, and consistency of its stewards.
We'd do well to remember that the say:do ratio tilts toward action, not words. Resilient cultures come from successful patterns of doing, not from slogans or slide decks.