Why Bother Understanding Culture?
It is often said that real understanding of a topic only comes once you see how its parts work together. The reality is that trying to understand some complex issue can quickly become confusing. This is especially true if one attempts to understand the relationships between concepts from different disciplines. At times, it even seems impossible to make sense of the different perspectives. There is the reminder in Ecclesiastes that “there is no new thing under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9, KJV). When reflecting on the origin of business ideas it becomes clear that many of the principles were formulated hundreds of years ago. There are numerous similarities between principles in chemistry and physics, so-called laws of nature, and certain business concepts.
Before considering culture and its possible links with ideas from other subjects, it is important to develop a basic framework to assist in creating an overall and integrated understanding.
The animal that could best illustrate, or be “the face” of, culture is probably an octopus. Consider the complexity of multiple tentacles, three hearts, nine brains and a chameleon-like ability to change colour. Add to this the flexibility that allows it to mould itself into almost any shape. Attempting to understand an octopus from the perspective of its complex parts becomes an almost impossible task. Similarly, culture is a complex concept with multiple dimensions, drivers and ‘tentacles’ that affect and influence almost all aspects of business functioning. At times, the cultural tentacles are so well camouflaged and almost invisible, that it requires extensive scrutiny to identify. Just like with the octopus, trying to understand the detail of culture is almost impossible if you do not first understand its “octopus-ness”.
It’s already running the show — whether your strategy deck accounts for it or not.
Jan van Rooyen · 5 min read
Most managers I talk to treat culture the way they treat the office pot plants — nice to have, somebody should probably water it, but nobody’s losing sleep over it. Strategy gets the war room. Culture gets a slide with some values on it and a team-building day.
I think that’s backwards, and I want to try to convince you why.
Culture isn’t the soft stuff. It’s the operating system.
Here’s the thing nobody puts on the poster: culture is just how decisions actually get made around here once the org chart and the strategy document have gone quiet. It’s the unwritten rule that nobody questions the regional director’s numbers in front of others. It’s the fact that the team that delivers fast and breaks things gets promoted, while the team that delivers carefully and asks good questions gets called “slow.” Nobody wrote that down. Everybody knows it.
Edgar Schein had a useful way of putting this decades ago — culture works in layers. On top, the artifacts: the open-plan office, the values statement, the dress code. Underneath, the stated values: what people will tell you matters. And underneath that, the assumptions nobody states at all, because stating them would be like a fish announcing it believes in water. That bottom layer is where the real operating system lives, and it’s almost never visible from where strategy gets written.
- Artifacts — visible: offices, dress codes, the values poster
- Stated values — spoken: what people will tell you matters
- Underlying assumptions — unstated: the water nobody notices is wet
Only the bottom layer is actually running things — and it’s the one furthest from view.
This is why strategy keeps mysteriously failing
You’ve seen this movie. A strategy gets built, beautifully reasoned, properly resourced — and six months later it’s been quietly absorbed back into “how we’ve always done things.” Everyone nods in the meeting. Nothing changes. People aren’t being deliberately obstructive, usually. The strategy is just running into an operating system it was never written for.
Strategy doesn’t fail because people resist change. It fails because culture is the thing doing the interpreting — and it always wins, because it’s the thing deciding what the instruction even means.
If your culture rewards looking busy over making good calls, a strategy built around delegated decision-making will get quietly reinterpreted into something that looks like delegation but isn’t. This is the bit that gets missed most often: culture isn’t resisting the strategy. It’s translating it — and not always faithfully.
So what do you actually do with this?
Not “fix” the culture — that’s usually the wrong verb, and it tends to produce expensive, well-meaning theatre. The better verb is understand. Before redesigning anything, you need an honest read of what’s actually patterning behaviour right now — not what the values poster says, not what the engagement survey’s top-line number says, but the actual assumptions doing the work underneath.
That’s harder than it sounds, mostly because the people inside a culture are the worst-positioned to see it clearly. It’s water, remember — nobody swimming in it experiences it as wet. You need something closer to a proper diagnostic than a gut feel or a generic engagement score, because the gap between what an organisation says it values and what it actually rewards is usually exactly where the next change initiative is going to die.
The practical upshot
If you’re about to launch a strategy, restructure a team, or merge two units that have never had to talk to each other before, the question worth asking first isn’t “what’s the plan?” It’s “what assumptions are currently running this place, and does the plan actually fit inside them?”
Most of the time the honest answer is: nobody’s checked. That’s the gap worth closing before another budget cycle goes by wondering why a perfectly good strategy didn’t survive contact with reality.
Reflection on Business — an ongoing series on organisational theory, complexity, and culture. Read more at vanrooyen.info.