Culture is a constant topic of discussion on LinkedIn and in organizations in general.
We will critically examine a recent book on Culture (The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle) and use it to see how our current views of culture are wrong and how people talk about cultural change. They are trying to shape the ideology.
The book begins with an overwrought story about a competition to build towers from spaghetti, tape, and a marshmallow. Kindergartners compete against business school students, CEOs, and Lawyers in the competition.
The two approaches could best be described as best practices and complex approaches. The business students assumed there was the best way to build and started off trying to understand what it was before they started building. The kindergartners just tried stuff as a group.
Some could say this problem is complex, which is why the kindergartner’s approach worked, but that is not quite right. The problem is complex because there isn’t anyone with expertise. Building a tower could be a complicated problem, as it is understandable. If you know them, there are best practices that can lead to the best approach. The Business Students’ approach would have been correct if someone had sufficient knowledge of building marshmallow-spaghetti towers. If they had an expert (presumably, that expert could exist), the situation would have been complicated for them, and the approach would have worked.
The most important lesson of this story is that when you ignore context, you can mistake the complex for the simple and vice versa.
The lesson that Coyle takes away is that “We focus on what we can see—individual skills. However, individual skills are not what matters. What matters is the interaction.” 1
He missed that the right skills would have made a difference, but the flaw is his assumption that a set of general management skills would translate into a new situation. What he missed is that the context matters. The Situation was equally complex for the kindergartners and the Business School Students. A better way to frame the takeaway is that “when you lack sufficient skills, interactions matter more.” 2
Coyle takes other lessons away from this experiment, stating that the kindergarteners’ behavior is the root of a good culture: “They are not competing for status. They stand shoulder to shoulder and work energetically together. They move quickly, spotting problems and offering help. They experiment, take risks, and notice outcomes, which guides them toward effective solutions.” 3
Why did I bother taking this deep dive into the spaghetti experiment? To show how context matters. What a good culture looks like is contextual. If the project was to create a business-style PowerPoint on the market conditions, I am not sure Kindergartner’s “great culture” approach would have worked.
Coyle then takes this universalizing idea of culture further and says:
“One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together. This task involves many moments of high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling, when they confront the gap between where the group is, and where it ought to be.” 4
Let’s break this down.
What is a successful culture?
Of course, the question is, what is success? If success is defined as an environment where everyone is happy, then saying that successful cultures are mostly not happy is obviously false. The definition of success is somewhat unclear.
Coyle claims, “A strong culture increases net income 756 percent over eleven years, according to a Harvard study of more than two hundred companies.” 5
This points to the company’s financial success as the definition of a successful culture. With that in mind, it is certainly possible that rather than the “high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling” leading to the business’s success, the business’s success creates an environment that leads to “high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling.”Perhaps it was not that the culture fueled the growth but that the culture improves when a place grows and expands. There is also a tautology here where a company is successful, and a culture being strong is defined as the same thing.
When discussing a successful culture, you may also hear about good vs. bad culture and healthy vs. toxic culture. However, all of these assumptions assume that there is such a thing as an ideal culture—or at least a perfect culture for a given context—but that belies the historicity present in culture.
Perhaps Coyle follows Tolstoy’s belief that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
However, culture is, by definition, something that makes an organization unique. Historically, cultures were created by what Gregory Bateson referred to as schismogenesis. This is the idea that a new culture is formed by a reaction to and against another culture. David Graeber describes it like this:
“cultures are not just conceptions of what the world is like, not just ways of being and acting in the world, but active political projects which often operate by the explicit rejection of other ones.” 6
So, if a culture is defined against other cultures, we must step back further and examine what a culture is.
What is culture?
The first differentiation people usually make is between culture and nature. “what we do to the world and what the world does to us.” 7
It is this separation between what is natural and what we create. We are more than the product of our environment. However, our environment limits what is possible. “The very word ‘culture’ contains a tension between making and being made, rationality and spontaneity.” 8
In tech, people often follow what Ben Horowitz wrote in his book: “Who you are [(culture)] is what you do,” but it is not that simple. Not everything you do results from culture; some are just natural human things. Culture is the unique things that you do and the unique way that you do things. However, culture relates to the constraints on what is possible to do.
”Rule-following is a matter neither of anarchy nor autocracy. Rules, like cultures, are neither sheerly random nor rigidly determined – which is to say that both involve the idea of freedom. Someone who was entirely absolved from cultural conventions would be no more free than someone who was their slave.” 9
Culture is the relinquishing of freedom to fit into a given group. Every culture is (to some extent) alienating to those within it, as no one is ever a perfect fit. People must always give up some of themselves to fit in. Some will need to give up more than others, and some may not be able to at all.
”The idea of culture, then, signifies a double refusal: of organic determinism on the one hand, and of the autonomy of spirit on the other.” 10
There is also a tendency to assume everything is part of culture, which is untrue. A unique perspective is critical.
The culture of a corporation includes its policy on sick leave but not its plumbing, its hierarchical parking arrangements but not the fact that it uses computers. It covers those aspects of it which embody a distinctive way of seeing the world, but not necessarily a unique way of seeing. 11
So, culture is not universal; it is always contextual, and that context is tied to what a successful outcome looks like.
A Cultural Ideology
Coyle’s book goes on to be a traditional consultant-type solution to a good culture by focusing on three skills a leader has to master to create a culture:
“Skill 1—Build Safety—explores how signals of connection generate bonds of belonging and identity. Skill 2—Share Vulnerability—explains how habits of mutual risk drive trusting cooperation. Skill 3—Establish Purpose—tells how narratives create shared goals and values. 12
Elsewhere, I have argued that you can’t create a culture. It is an emergent phenomenon. However, you can help make the conditions for what you want to emerge, and in some ways, that is what Coyle is advocating here. I would describe this as trying to instill an ideology.
Let’s look at each of these skills in more detail.
Skill 1 Build Safety
The idea of safety is tied to the feeling of belonging. Belonging is created through the feeling of an in-group; to have an in-group, there must be an out-group. This ties back into the concept of schismogenesis. The sense of belonging in a group that creates a sense of safety is the recognition of differentiation by being in the group.
For culture… is not a “substance” or a phenomenon in its own right; it is an objective mirage that arises out of the relationship between at least two groups. This is to say that no group “has” a culture all by itself: culture is the nimbus perceived by one group when it comes into contact with and observes another one. It is the objectification of everything alien and strange about the contact group. 13
This is why you are most aware of an organization’s culture in the first 90 days at a company, and those who have worked at multiple companies are more likely to see and understand it. Culture is only visible in the differentiation between one culture and another.
Interestingly, many organizations talk about having a culture of belonging. However, as we have seen, that is an oxymoron. Most of us can think of friends who would love it where we work and those who would hate it. That is a boundary around who the culture can make comfortable.
Now, inclusivity based on traditionally underrepresented criteria is important. Diversity around race, gender, age, and other aspects is essential. It is critical to recognize that our culture often makes that sort of inclusivity difficult.
The idea of safety functions ideologically in that 1. The environment isn’t safe. Nothing prevents anyone from being let go and creating an “us vs. them” positioning to create belonging alienates.
Skill 2 Share Vulnerability
Vulnerability and safety are deeply interrelated. Vulnerability is only possible when people feel safe, yet vulnerability can also help promote safety.
The primary skill is for leaders to show their vulnerability within the organization to help others follow suit. While there is reason to believe that it will work, it is important to note that different people are vulnerable at work. The more senior the leader is, the less risk they have by being vulnerable. It is essential to recognize how power can allow people to be vulnerable because that power creates safety, but those without power vulnerability can mean real risk.
The real risk here is that this is used manipulatively. By being vulnerable, leaders can create the conditions for employees to express themselves, which can be used against them. It would be great to say I have never seen this, but I have, and all too frequently.
Skill 3 Establish Purpose
The notion of purpose is ideology, pure and simple. Simon Sink most famously gave this voice in his TED Talk, which was turned into a book called Start with Why.14
You can get someone else to sacrifice for the cause by giving someone a sense of purpose. This is a mode of control, and ultimately, this is where companies spend most of their time.
“Culture is not only what we live by. It is also, in great measure, what we live for. Affection, relationship, memory, kinship, place, community, emotional fulfilment, intellectual enjoyment, a sense of ultimate meaning: these are closer to most of us than charters of human rights or trade treaties.” 15
However, most of us don’t live for our company’s missions. The real purpose of most for-profit companies is profit, which, by its nature, is an exploitative activity. The push for employees to take up the mission tries to get employees to forget the nature of wage relations.
Ideology
In each of these skills, we see ideas that, on the surface, are positive but underneath reinforce an ideology. They shape how people see their relationship with the organization, manipulate through vulnerability, and attempt to align people to a purpose to accept the company’s mission as their own.
Each of these mechanisms is ideological because it intends to change employees’ perceptions of their relationships with those in power.
They are trying to create unity, which is the purpose of ideology.
“Ideology means more than just, say, the signifying practices associated by a society with food; it involves the relations between these signs and processes of political power. It is not coextensive with the general field of ‘culture’, but lights up this field from a particular angle.” 16
In the end, when organizations try to engineer culture, what they really create is ideology. Understanding this allows you to step back and see how your actions influence how people relate to their work. In future newsletters, I will look at different perspectives on ideology and how they may be applicable to the workplace.
- Coyle, Daniel. The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups (p. xvii). ↩
- It is fair to say that there are some situations where it is impossible to have sufficient skills and all that will matter is interaction, but the example is poor for that. ↩
- Coyle, Daniel. The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups (p. xvii) ↩
- Ibid (p. 55) ↩
- Ibid (p. xviii) ↩
- Graeber, David. Culture as Creative Refusal ↩
- Eagleton, Terry. The Idea of Culture ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Coyle, Daniel. The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups (p. xviii). ↩
- Jameson, Fredric. The Ideologies of Theory ↩
- I have gone after Sinek quite a bit and won’t waste the pixels here, but this great post by Nick Asbury https://nickasbury.substack.com/p/the-story-of-why debunks most of Simon’s position. ↩
- Eagleton, Terry. The Idea of Culture ↩
- Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction ↩