Culture

What determines how people in your organisation behave? It’s not leadership, it’s not training, it’s not strategy or policy or process. It’s culture.

Of course all of the above contribute to culture – and certainly they are significant factors – but it’s a mistake to think they together they add up to culture. Culture is much bigger than all of them put together.

So what is culture? I have noticed the word is cropping up more regularly, but that there is a worrying lack of clarity and research on the topic. Ed Schein’s book ‘Organisational Culture and Leadership’ is a good read, but makes a basic mistake – beginning with the assumption that it is leaders that define culture. The mistake arises because it is easy ascribe significance to the things that are most visible: at times of uncertainty, when there are no norms for behaviour or when an organisation is first forming those people prepared to step into the light and set a direction are most visible. But for the most part organisations do not function like this – they are not ‘gardens of Eden’ instead they are complex, evolving ecosystems, so the simple fable of leadership and culture is just that.

It is also a telling mistake: for many years psychologists assumed that a big part of the answer to the question ‘why do children behave as they do?’ was ‘parents’ – the other part of the answer being ‘genetics’, leaving only an argument about the relative significance of each. But, as Judith Harris argues in ‘The Nurture Assumption’, we have overestimated the significance of parents. Parents don’t determine behaviour, peers do. Leaders don’t determine behaviour, peers do. The same mechanisms in play as we learn and develop stay with us into adulthood: the greatest influence on our behaviour and attitudes is our peers.

 

So how important is culture? I’m guessing about 80%. About 80% of our behaviour is attributable to culture (as opposed to, say, policy, strategy, process, leadership etc.). I haven’t been able to find any research which addresses this directly (please let me know if you have) – but there’s plenty that addresses it indirectly: informal learning accounts for around 85% of learning within a typical organisation – a research finding which has been widely replicated. 

Since informal learning is the process by which people acquire culture (by observing, copying, and receiving feedback from peers) it’s fair to assume that informal learning takes care of culture, and formal learning takes care of policy, process and the rest.

One curious phenomenon is the degree to which these often seem to be misaligned: culture proscribing one set of behaviours and formal learning another. Most learning professionals frequently aware that they are somehow working against culture.

I think that we – learning people - need to talk more about culture, and to understand it better. The bridge to this conversation has been informal learning: as we have begun to appreciate the extent to which learning already goes on all around us, we have become dimly aware of the ‘dark matter’ which is transmitted thereby: culture is water and informal learning the plumbing, if you like. Once you notice the pipes, you begin to wonder what they are carrying.

The most striking thing about culture is the extent to which it is a peer-to-peer phenomenon. Small groups of people – sometimes big groups or people – create their own subcultures in a way which is ultimately non-linear and emergent, but with some familiar mechanics: social referencing, for example. Standing on a train station in Bracknell I notice that despite the yellow line painted a metre behind the edge of the platform and automated safety announcement, around 75% of commuters are ahead of the line. But would the same be true in Germany? If one wants to change employee behaviour, one needs to change culture – but how does one set about changing culture?

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” (P. Drucker) Much of what I am saying will seem vaguely familiar and agreeable – as someone merely stating the obvious. There is a tacit acceptance that culture is important, influential. And yet to be overlooked. Perhaps because it is an inherently ‘grass roots’ or ‘bottom-up’ phenomenon, and in a cultural paradigm used to tackling things ‘top-down’ the answer can only be: leadership, strategy, policy. We know it’s there but we don’t know how to tackle it directly.

 

The world is changing, though: technological change is enabling cultural change. Traditional top-down, one-to-many command & control structures are yielding to varying degrees to many-to-many, peer-to-peer networks – and in this environment there is an opportunity to access culture directly.

There are many ways in which access to culture is being opened up by technocultural change. I would like to give one example: story-telling. Throughout human history stories have been shared amongst small groups as ways of preserving, shaping and transmitting culture. Today, stories are still the vehicles for cultural transmission – stories of leadership behaviour, stories of critical incidents, stories of lessons hard learned. ‘I remember this one time…’ says the old hand to the new hire. Today a story can be shared to an unprecedented extent, and at a rate which approaches the immediacy of the small group – among a group of people who, although widely dispersed, still identify themselves as peers. Those of us who are party to some of these extended networks are now buffeted by cultural change on a regular basis: the shift from blogging to microblogging, from firewalled to cloud-based working, for example. Today people are talking about the ‘flipped classroom’ – ten years ago all we talked about was Kolb, Kirkpatrick and learning styles. In truth the culture of learning itself is changing faster than the learning profession.

In summary, the conversations I am hoping to have are around culture and the role that we can play in culture change. That way we might actually start to influence behaviour.