How Cultures Accumulate
How Cultures Accumulate
Res Extensa #70 :: The gradual process of building and changing culture
Companies talk about their culture as if it's defined from the top, stated from above in a slide deck and boom: new and improved culture. But culture isn't a bunch of abstractions.
Culture is the consequence of a chain of events, not determined by fiat by a company's Culture Committee. Yes, it's possible that a company makes the sorts of decisions that align with what their mission statement asserts. But we've all been in organizations that speak about their cultures in ways that don't reflect reality. Culture as signaling versus culture as organizational DNA.
Changing the culture means changing the types of decisions made, the activities reinforced, or the people encouraged or congratulated. It takes time. Yes, gradual change is slow. But gradual change is powerful.
Want to be known for speed? For shipping things fast and iterating? Don't burden your team with layers of approvals and processes and machinery to get things out there.
Want to be known for customer service? You'll have to bend pretty hard in favor of customers in many cases where they were patently wrong, and you made no mistake.
Want to be known for high performance? Your hiring methodology will become a gauntlet, and you'll be firing more people.
Each of these examples requires uncomfortable trade-offs. But the only way to be great at one thing is to make sacrifices on others.
The problem with culture decks and mission statements and core values is that the real cultural tenets are implicit. They don't need to be printed in a document for your committed people to articulate them accurately.
Culture accrues bottom-up, not top-down. If leadership wants to enshrine the doctrine in a poster, it doesn't need a committee to develop the mission statement and values. Your actual culture and values would be easy to write down: just print out the types of things you do and the decisions you make right now.
Culture is the accumulation of events, decisions, and actions an organization takes over a period of time. It's like a stack of sedimentary layers that gets averaged together. If you aren't proud of the previous 15 layers that you've deposited, you can't form a committee to pour a neat-and-clean new layer on top, washing away what came before. All you can do is change direction. From that point forward, the sorts of decisions you make will tilt the average in favor of the kind of culture you want to have. As each new deposit layers on, gradually turning the culture.
No one wants to hear that "it takes time", but it's the reality. When there's a track record of 100 decisions averaging you toward "bad", one good move doesn't tilt the scale very far. The exercise of defining values doesn't have to be fruitless, as long as you recognize it as the start of a new trail of different kinds of decisions.
You see similar effects in the culture of places. So many cities in America have designs on being the "next Silicon Valley", with aspirations to get in on the booming economic output that Northern California has enjoyed for 7 decades. But you'll see them make superficial stabs at setting the culture. A city wants to build a scene around technology, and acts as if an update to the corporate tax code and a marketing campaign will spawn the next great American nexus of innovation.
But if you look at the focal points of different industries, you find a long and messy trail of circumstances that led them to the cultures they have today.
Silicon Valley began with military and academic origins. Moffett Airfield and Stanford University attracted technical folks to the region. Bill Shockley moved his semiconductor startup to Mountain View to be closer to his mom, and planted the seeds of Fairchild Semi, Intel, and AMD. An ARPANET node was installed on the Stanford campus, connecting it to the proto-internet. These cultural touchstone events of the Valley go decades back and cross multiple phase shifts in technology. The Mayors of Mountain View or Palo Alto didn't decide "we need to be a tech hub". The regional culture is an accumulation of events — the result of an undirected mixing of activities. The culture isn't defined by the tech companies, not primarily. The culture produced those companies. Layer upon layer of events led to a scene that mints billionaires and shapes the rest of the world through the internet.
Same goes for the latest happenings in "The ‘Gundo", the hub for hard-tech that's home to a hundred new startups working on space factories, fusion power, weather control, and robotics. That culture didn’t come from nowhere. El Segundo has been a home to aerospace since World War II, from Douglas to Lockheed to Raytheon to Boeing. All of them and their ecosystems of suppliers and contractors have been gravitating there for decades. So the hard-tech culture of El Segundo doesn't spring forth from the ground; it's the result of a hundred years of gradual formation.
Ditto Florida's Space Coast, Detroit's auto industry, and Hollywood's entertainment nucleus. Geography, happenstance, network effects, and the course of small decisions coalesce different scenes in different places. They don't pop up through government directive.
The major difference between these physical cultures and the one within your company is the level of individual agency at work. Both types of cultures evolve gradually with hundreds of individual moments. But in your company, you and your team have the ability to direct this evolutionary process.
Cultures are hard to influence, but they're also durable because of this gradual accumulative process. This durability presents a tough nut to crack when you're trying to force your organization to evolve. But the good news is, organic cultures have staying power.
Thanks for reading. If you found this interesting, please share with your friends, connections, and colleagues. What are your experiences with organizational culture, and especially, attempting to shape it? Leave me a comment below and let me know your thoughts.