How to avoid culture being something that happens to you, and instead purposefully establish the cultural features you need for success in your organisational situation

Why does culture matter?

Countries,  regions,  organisations,  professions,  and  age  groups  or  generations  all  have  identifiable  cultures, as do all groupings of people with something in common. These cultures are distinct from each other to varying degrees, both between these broad categories and between instances of each category.

What happens in organisations is substantially determined by the culture of the organisation. This can go unnoticed by the participants if the culture is uniform throughout – often the case in relatively young  organisations.  More  commonly,  especially  in  more  mature  and  larger  organisations,  sub‐cultures develop with rather different features in, for example, operations and sales. The cultural tension that  arises at the interfaces  can be  debilitating for  the organisation, unless effective, wise  leadership mitigates its effects.

A more extreme form of cultural conflict can arise when more fully distinct groupings are brought together or attempt to work together in organisational contexts. Examples of this are everywhere. Various specific ones are: Two businesses collaborating, the formal establishment of a joint venture, the  transition  of  a  technology  from  initial  research  through  to  product  delivery  and  customer  adoption, engineering and production departments introducing a new product, technology developers working with customers, academic staff and graduate students researching together in a university, and functional specialists meeting in a senior leadership team.

Almost without exception, the participants in these situations endure the difficulties that arise without really  understanding  why  they  are  happening  or  even  realising  that  they  are  caused  by  cultural  mismatches. Without this awareness and insight, unfortunately, they have little or no chance of mitigating them systematically. As Joshua Cooper Ramo wrote: “If you are not seeing things properly, you have no hope of any sort of breakthrough.”

It does not have to be this way!

We can become clear‐sighted about cultural interaction. Even with some understanding though, it can be hard for ordinary participants in these situations to initiate any improvement because they don’t have enough authority. Moreover, many of the people they need to influence will be in a different subculture and, therefore, inherently resistant to changing their point of view. Realistically, wholesale improvement can only be led from the top; from those in positions of authority and influence – or at least, it’s easier that way. Leaving teams to sort things out for themselves might work, but it’s slow and unreliable and there tend to be breakages along the way, especially when substantial cultural mismatches are present.

For a better solution, first we need to understand more fully and in a structured way what we refer to as culture…

What is culture?

Edgar Schein2 provides the following definition in the context of organisations:

“The culture of a group can be defined as the accumulated shared learning of that group as it solves its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, feel and behave in relation to these problems. This accumulated learning is a pattern of beliefs, values, and behavioural norms that come to be taken for granted as basic assumptions and eventually drop out of awareness.”

One of the original authorities on culture in an anthropological sense, Edward T Hall, writing in 19593, wrote: “Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants. Years of study have convinced me that the real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own.”

Hall also wrote: “Most of our difficulties stem from our own ignorance” and “the job of achieving understanding and insight into mental processes of others is much more difficult and the situation more serious than most of us care to admit”.

Why is understanding culture so difficult?

The central and most crucial answer is that when we “do” what we – or more likely, others observing us – refer to as our “culture”, we “do” it unconsciously. As Ed Schein says, culture has dropped “out of  awareness”.  We  act  out  of  a  “world‐view”  or  “mental  model”  (there  are  various  more‐or‐less  equivalent words and phrases for this) that is almost entirely held unconsciously. Both the model, comprising a set of beliefs and values and a sense of identity, and many of our decisions based on it, exist  or  occur  outside  conscious  awareness.  This  relates  closely  to  what  Nobel  Prize‐winning  psychologist and economist, Daniel Kahneman refers to as “System 1” processing, meaning “fast, instinctive and emotional”, in contrast to “System 2″, which is “slower, more deliberative, and more logical”.4 The unconscious nature of culture is also what Edward Hall is pointing at when he says: “The real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own.”

These  unconscious  beliefs  are  also  called  “tacit  assumptions”  –  assumptions  on  which  we  act  or  decide, probably without realising at all and definitely without making them explicit to others involved.

Generally, tacit assumptions are beliefs that were, at one time, held tentatively but were then found to be valid or at least useful in our experience, and they gradually became part of our unconscious “programming” – an aspect of our unconscious competences. Note that whether the assumptions were objectively correct or not isn’t the criterion that was applied. Rather, the test was whether we found we achieved the outcomes we hoped for or expected when we acted out of the assumption, most of the time. In other words, was the assumption a useful generalisation about the world we inhabited? Did it work for us? If so, it became part of our near‐permanent, unconscious programming and forgotten about as far as the conscious mind was concerned, which moved on to freshly pressing matters.