Where does organizational culture come from?
Where does organizational culture come from?
Once upon a time, a Vice President of business transformation said to me: “our organization doesn’t have a culture.”
An HR leader once said, “we need a culture.”
And another executive said, “oh, organizational culture. We all know that’s a thing, but yeah, that doesn’t really matter.”
Let’s address a few things here:
- Where there are humans, there is “a culture.” What kind of culture emerges is different story.
- Humans have evolved to develop cultural norms, ways of behaving and doing things “the right way,” so much so that even 3-year-olds are wired to regulate others’ behavior. *(see note below)
- Culture is basically “the way we do things around here” from soup to nuts, including values, practices, behaviors, norms, policies, and attitudes.
- Organizational culture matters. It matters a lot. But it often feels like a vague and fuzzy concept, and so leaders don’t always know what to do about it.
Organizational cultures are emergent.
Though we often think of emergence as a bottom-up mechanism, let’s examine it more closely together -
Philosopher and writer adrienne maree brown defines emergence as “the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” Scientist George Ellis writes, “it is the interaction of bottom-up and top-down effects that enable the emergence of true complexity.”
So, simple, top-down and bottom-up interactions enable the emergence of a complex system.
Imagine the process of a tree growing in the forest. One one hand, soil contains nutrients that will ostensibly nourish a growing root system. If the soil is depleted and dry, the tree system may shrivel and die.
Additionally, the sun’s rays enable a vital chemical process called photosynthesis, which is how the tree creates the energy it needs to grow. The tree transforms the light energy into chemical energy.
Imagine an aspen grove. Aspen have interconnected root systems. A “grove” of aspen are actually one large tree system. Amazing, right?
In such a system, the health of one cell reflects the health of the whole tree. The health of one tree mirrors the health of the whole aspen grove, which is really all one organism. Emergence is fractal. One cell reflects the whole organism.
When I think about grass-roots movements, energy is generated from both “bottom up” (people coming together with a shared purpose) and from “top down” (leadership, politics, legislation). A combination of influences at all levels enables the emergence of a movement in a given time and place.
It’s the same with organizational culture. Organizational leaders can co-create espoused values and policies, which serve as cultural artifacts. But those leaders also have to walk the walk and talk the talk. What ends up really mattering is what tacit norms, practices, and explicit behaviors emerge. All three are set in motion by top-down and bottom-up mechanisms.
In considering your own organizational culture, you can start by asking some thoughtful questions:
- What conditions will generate energy, growth, learning, cooperation, and connection throughout the organization — all of which lead to positive outcomes?
- What conditions are generated by the leadership behaviors, policies and practices currently in place?
- What culture has emerged thus far, and what kind of culture would you prefer to emerge?
If you find that your organizational culture is wildly off-course, you might be able to shift towards desired norms and behaviors by amending policies, explicit practices, and nudging behaviors. But this must be a whole ecosystem endeavor.
Make no mistake about it, what’s coming from the top really, really matters. But keep in mind that the emergence of culture is multi-directional and fractal. The parts will reflect the whole. While you might be surviving in your own little silo, in order to really thrive, the whole organization needs to be operating in the same positive ecosystem.
Do you really have the culture you want?
SJP
_______________________________________________________________
*Note: We humans arguably possess what’s called “norm psychology,” and we’re hard wired to create and adhere to norms. Some norms are known and obvious (explicit) and some are known and not at all obvious (tacit), and people in a given environment “just know” how they should behave. That said, there is enormous variability in what norms actually emerge in a given culture. So what’s “right” in one culture can be terribly “wrong” in another.
Resources:
Tom Geraghty’s excellent Psychological Safety newsletter here with a great story about a Sales Team with a problematic culture
adrienne maree brown: “emergence (speech from opening for allied media conference 2013)”
Alice Katter’s booklet: Reimagining the Nature of Work
Drew Jones’ 2023 book The Open Culture Handbook: Five Questions to Drive Engagement and Innovation
George Ellis’ 2012 paper, “Top-down causation and emergence: some comments on mechanisms.”
